SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — The annual Salesforce event in San Francisco, Dreamforce, was held from Sept. 12-14 at the Moscone Center. Although CEO Marc Benioff threatened to pull the event out of San Francisco because of the city’s safety and homelessness crisis, this year’s Dreamforce seemed like a success.
San Francisco was “incredibly clean, beautiful, and safe” for the three-day convention, according to Benioff. The software company’s founder asked the following.
Why can’t San Francisco be clean and safe every day?
“It is important to ask why the city cannot be this clean and safe every single day?” Benioff posted to his X account Thursday morning. “San Francisco has been incredibly clean, beautiful, and safe for the last 3 days of Dreamforce, and it is great that the city is able to put its best foot forward for this major event that brings in 40K people from around the world, and $80M to the economy.”
Moscone Center is located in the city’s SoMa neighborhood — an area that especially faces issues of homelessness, crime and an open-air drug market. However, the event venue and its surrounding area seemed to have been a pleasant visit for the 40,000-plus conference attendees from around the world.
The Harlequin, a cocktail bar blocks away from Moscone Center, had a huge boom in business because of Dreamforce. The event “uplifts all the neighborhood businesses surrounding downtown.”
“We appreciate the extra police presences and the city making a serious effort to make sure this conference is safe for attendees,” The Harlequin owner Phil Chen said in a statement sent to KRON4. “This goes to show that the city has the ability to turn things around and they can put these actions into practice not just during Dreamforce week, but at all times.”
One Market Restaurant also saw a boom in business. Dreamforce attendees were placing reservations all week at the restaurant.
“It feels like pre-pandemic almost in terms of the amount of business that we’ve seen and return as a result of Dreamforce being here,” said Lorenzo Bouchard of One Market Restaurant.
It remains to be seen if Dreamforce 2024 will be back in San Francisco. With millions of dollars pouring into the local economy, the city would love to host the event again.
