The executive director of the non-profit Yerba Buena Community Benefit District, which helped organize the event, attributed some of the reason for it to the ways San Francisco’s downtown has changed since the start of the Pandemic.
“As we all know, downtown changed throughout the last few years. And the Pandemic has impacted everyone in different ways, and we wanted to create an event that is on-going, repetitive, and really creates the opportunity for energy in the downtown core,” said Executive Director Scott Rowtiz San Francisco’s downtown has struggled with workers and companies changing how and where they work, meaning office vacancies and a drop in traffic. So the event is one small piece in an effort to bring people back downtown and invest in a different vision for the area.
“All of this, collectively, is really meant to create a future for our downtown that is much more mixed use 24/7, as opposed to only about work,” said Kate Sofis, the executive director of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development. Anastasia Podvysogska, a resident who stopped by the event, told NBC Bay Area: “I think it helps city - and people like me, I imagine, [be] more social.”