Golden Gate Park is a San Francisco jewel, a lush oasis in a busy urban center that should be there for all San Franciscans to visit and enjoy. Mayor Daniel Lurie has decided it is a money maker, accelerating the scheme begun by longtime Recreation & Parks director Phil Ginsberg. 

It is also part of Mayor Lurie’s ongoing project to enlist his wealthy supporters to take an active role in local government which is looking increasingly like a kind of creeping privatization of much of the city. This movement, disguised as philanthropy, has seen Lurie hand over critical governmental functions to nonprofits backed by billionaires. Programs like these create notoriously unstable funding streams for necessary city services and often operate without the oversight that are a part of government-run  programs. 

In May, Lurie said that Avenue Greenlight, founded by crypto king Chris Larsen, and Crankstart, the foundation bankrolled by tech investor Michael Moritz, would spend $3 million in the next year on power washing to serve high-traffic corridors throughout the city. Street cleanups are the domain of the Department of Public Works. At the same time, the Mayor announced that the city would accept $37.5 million from wealthy donors and foundations — including Moritz’s Crankstart and Lurie’s own foundation, Tipping Point — on a public-private initiative to address homelessness and behavioral health problems.

More recently, the Mayor all but handed off a critical function of the San Francisco Police Department to Chris Larsen. For a nearly $10 million “donation” toward the SFPD’s new Real Time Investigation Center, Larsen has created a quasi-governmental agency. The center will be run in collaboration with Larsen’s company, SafeCity Connect, which gathers information from both their surveillance cameras across the city, along with those of Flock Safety and LiveView Technologies. The RTIC-SafeCity Connect partnership will be housed in office space leased by Larsen’s crypto firm Ripple Labs from President Donald Trump, who is a co-owner of 315 Montgomery/555 California Street.

The deal, among other things, allows the purchase of technologies through a non-competitive bid process. It is made possible through the passing of March 2024’s Prop E, which allowed the police to acquire new surveillance technologies and drones without the approval of the Police Commission. Larsen was Prop E’s biggest donor, contributing $250,000 to the effort. 

Now, Lurie has set his sights on Golden Gate Park. Last month, the park, which draws families from across the city as well out-of-town tourists, hosted a month of outdoor concerts. Among them were three days of music to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Grateful Dead. Tickets for the event ranged from $245 for a single day to $635 for three days, out-of-reach for all, but the wealthiest music lovers. It was an irony not lost on many aging Deadheads that a band once famous for playing free concerts in Golden Gate Park was now only accessible to the very wealthy.

Lurie called the Dead & Co. concert a “benefit” for the whole city. As it turns out, the biggest winner was Another Planet Entertainment, a donor to Lurie’s lavish $3 million inauguration, as well as the city’s downtown hotels. Mom-and-pop businesses on the city’s west side, in fact, suffered. Increased traffic congestion deterred many from visiting their usual haunts. Some small business owners expressed frustration at being left out of the concert venues while large corporate vendors were allowed inside and reaped the profits. 

Despite this, or maybe because of it, the city’s Recreation & Parks Department called Golden Gate Park the “heart” of the city’s music scene, indicating that more paid concerts were planned. Public spaces like Golden Gate Park are rare and wonderful in any American city. Lurie’s decision to use the park this way, without meaningful dialogue with San Franciscans, especially those in the neighborhoods most affected, is yet another example of his privileging corporate interests over that of his constituents. 

Gross receipts for the concert were estimated at $131.4 million. According to the Mayor’s office, the concert generated as much as $150 million in economic activity for the city, a sum that has yet to be confirmed by independent sources. That money fails to factor in the expenses associated with closing the park, in this case for nearly a month, to accommodate paid concerts like Outside Lands, Dead & Co., and country music star Zach Bryan.

Missing from that assessment was the costs of staging three concerts, two of them multi-day events like Outside Lands and Dead & Co. drew as many as 450,000 people, closed off sections of the park for weeks and eliminated critical street access, creating traffic congestion in the Sunset and Richmond Districts. Concert fencing, heavy foot traffic, and the construction of large-scale infrastructure to accommodate the concerts resulted in damaged open space, turf, and tree roots that will require costly repairs.

Turning one of the city’s most cherished public spaces into a venue for paid concerts with ticket prices far beyond the means of most working San Franciscans, bears a remarkable similarity to Lurie’s SFPD deal. In both cases, a critical public service or space has been relinquished to a political donor, in the case of the SFPD, Larsen, and in the case of Golden Gate Park, Another Planet Entertainment. 

Longtime political observer Tim Redmond called it part of “an overall move to rely on voluntary gifts from the very rich instead of taxes and democratic budgeting by elected officials.” Local naturalist Jake Sigg said city parks “have always been free and open — our public dollars maintain these spaces and they should remain accessible to everyone. Fencing them off for private use undermines their purpose and our shared public life.”

It continues a disturbing trend on the part of a mayor who promised to represent all San Franciscans, not just those who can buy their way into political favor and reap the benefits. A newly formed group, Save SF Parks is lobbying Mayor Lurie, the Board of Supervisors and the Parks Commission to place greater restrictions on the for-profit use of the city’s precious public spaces.