A small entertainment zone — just one block long — is changing attitudes and drawing crowds to San Francisco’s Front Street.
In 2024, the Front Street District became one of the first locations in California to allow outdoor consumption of alcohol on public streets.
The early results have been entirely positive, says Robbie Silver, president and chief executive officer of the Downtown San Francisco Partnership. In some corners of the country, skeptics have questioned the public health downsides and public safety risks of relaxing alcohol rules.
But for Downtown San Francisco, the loosening of alcohol consumption rules has created no problems. In fact, it has offered a welcome counterbalance to many news stories about the death of downtown, which has indeed suffered from lower office occupancy rates and less foot traffic since the pandemic.
“We’ve had no issues whatsoever,” Silver says. “And the media has just been eating this up — which has been great for us.”
More on public consumption zones appears regularly in the pages of Downtown Idea Exchange newsletter.
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