The United States will be holding its 50th Super Bowl next year in Levi’s Stadium, a brand-new, multi-million dollar facility sitting at the base of the Bay Area’s Peninsula region. While the game might be played in Santa Clara, San Francisco is where all the action will be, despite the fact that it’s an hour away without traffic, and there’s bound to be considerable traffic on and around Super Bowl Sunday, given that it’s the biggest sporting event of the year for many people in the United States.
Even in a Summer Olympics year, the Super Bowl — particularly the 50th — is a key event in the US cultural landscape. It’s not just the game itself, but the parties leading up to it, the oceans of guacamole surrounding it, and, of course, the world-famous ads that debut during the game costing millions of dollars to reach viewers at home. Landing a contract to host the event in any year is considered a major victory, but to take on the golden anniversary is a catch for the ages — at least, until Super Bowl 50.
But being a host city comes with considerable costs. Taxpayers have already spent millions on the construction of Levi’s Stadium itself, and that’s just the beginning. They’re also expected to foot the bill for the ‘Fan Village’ to be set up on historic Justin Herman Plaza, hosting an assortment of free events for sports fans descending upon the city in the week prior to the Super Bowl. The Super Bowl Committee and authorities have been cagey about exactly how much money they plan to spend, and where it will come from, but it’s certainly going to be a lot, and with an economy already stretched, the city will likely be looking at taking money away from needed public services.
Of course, thanks to the Super Bowl, these services will be more critically needed than usual. The city plans, as many host cities do, to sweep its homeless community under the carpet, and it will be aggressively pursuing those who live downtown, including the hundreds who call Justin Herman Plaza and surrounding environs home. Mayor Ed Lee famously said that homeless people should go ‘somewhere else’ for the duration of the event to avoid offending delicate sensibilities.
The Fan Village is located in the heart of San Francisco’s downtown and financial district, and also at the key intersection of major transit hubs. BART, MUNI, Caltrain, ferries, and the Metra light trail system all run through the area, connecting various parts of the city for transfers as well as hooking up the East Bay and the Peninsula. That might sound convenient for sports fans, who will have an incentive to take public transit, but for the fact that the region’s public transit is already too strained to accommodate existing passengers, all of whom will need to continue going to work even through the crush of fans who will make it nearly impossible to arrive on time.
And, in some cases, impossible to arrive on public transit, which is the preferred and sometimes only way to get around for many residents, particularly low-income people like those who make up the backbone of the city’s economy. In a city where parking is limited and streets are clogged, many don’t own cars, or leave them at home for their daily commutes, but during Super Bowl week, they may not have a choice. The crowds will shut down or severely delay public transit, causing ripples throughout the system as BART trains clog and MUNI fights its way up crowded streets.
Earlier this year, the prospect of even worse delays came up when the committee insisted that the city should take down MUNI’s overhead electric wires. These wires provide power for electric trolleys widely used downtown, making them more environmentally friendly and efficient. These trolleys are also a critical hub of MUNI operations — but many people find them aesthetically unappealing, as they crisscross Market Street to accommodate a slew of bus lines veering off into the city’s web of streets. For residents, the lines disappear into the background noise, an everpresent part of the landscape, but newcomers are sometimes surprised by them, and the Super Bowl Committee, claiming ‘safety,’ clearly wanted them taken down because they disrupted the view down Market to the Embarcadero, itself a carefully groomed tourist attraction.
Taking the lines down would have required disrupting transit for weeks, as the city would have had to shut down power, carefully remove and store the wires, and then put them back up again after the event. That projection was probably optimistic, as projects like these always take longer than expected — as for example if portions of the system were damaged during takedown, or if workers uncovered problems putting them back up. In addition to effectively shutting down transit for at least three weeks for the convenience of sports fans, it also would have cost millions — and the citizens of the city were furious when they found out that they’d probably be paying for it.
The controversy over the MUNI wires, which at last report will be remaining firmly in place, in a way encapsulates the problems encountered by host cities when they deal with major sporting events. They’re expected to spend millions — or billions — of dollars on ‘improvements,’ many of which are temporary and purely aesthetic, with taxpayers absorbing the costs. Meanwhile, the actual residents of the host city are horrifically inconvenienced by crowds and events that make it difficult to perform tasks of daily living, and those most vulnerable are in particular danger. Homeless people are displaced, but more than that, developers swoop in on low-income neighbourhoods to build hotels and other complexes catering to the freshly-minted and fleeting market, pushing people out of their own communities, sometimes forever thanks to the escalating housing market in many cities, like San Francisco, that host major sporting events.
In exchange for these high stakes, host cities are promised billions in revenue — up to half a billion, promise projections for the Super Bowl — but that’s not always how it works out. First, cities need to recoup the considerable outlay of funds involved not just in preparations but dealing with disruptions to their activities. Then, they need to confront the lingering financial expenses associated with handling displaced citizens and other social issues. Finally, those profits tend to go into the hands of a few — like owners of sports franchises — and not into the hands of the people.
The janitor who adds an hour of work to her commute to get to a brokerage on time to do her job sees none of that money. The line cook crushed under the workload of hungry, careless, and often stingy sports fans sees none of that money. The displaced residents of low-income neighborhoods see none of that money, suffering a net loss as they desperately seek new housing. Even the tech workers, not exactly figures of sympathy on a regular basis, won’t be seeing that money, though many of them will struggle to get to work in the days and weeks leading up to the big event. Even the much-hated (and rightfully so) Google Buses are going to be having a hard time on Super Bowl week, but it is their drivers, many of whom already commute an hour or more to work grueling split shifts, who will pay the price for that.
Being a host city may sound glamorous, and it’s pitched as such, but looking at cities like Athens, Beijing, and London, where purpose-built stadiums sit empty and overrun with weeds, or Rio, where thousands of homeless people have been displaced and their communities razed, tells a very different story.
Photo by Travis Wise, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license