Every August, the fences go up and my heart sinks. Yup, it’s Outside Lands again.
Absurd as it may sound, the annual fencing off of some of my favorite parts of the park feels like a personal affront – as if someone had parked across my driveway or built a wall through my back yard. The fences make me cranky every year. “Fuuck!!!! I hate Outside Lands,” I yelled rudely at the young staffer in the fluorescent vest who turned me back from my usual walk up to the Polo Fields. I instantly felt bad. It wasn’t her fault that twenty-five primo acres of the park are roped off, like some VIP section at a nightclub. While the event itself is only three days, the setting up and taking down of massive amounts of equipment renders a big swath of park surrounding the Polo Fields and meadows effectively inaccessible for a nearly three weeks.
I don’t really care about the traffic or the crowds or the noise. (It can be fun to hear the music from my house; I’m hearing the drums of someone’s sound check as I type.) Hardly Strictly Bluegrass never ticks me off, though it too brings traffic and crowds and noise. (And music that I can hear onsite for free.) What riles me is the seizure of the commons. Why do we have to cede our public space to a private, pricy for-profit venture? (Which incidentally pulled in nearly $44 million in 2021-22.)
In an ideal world we shouldn’t have to. But in this world, Outside Lands may just be a necessary evil.
The sad fact is parks are never at the top of municipal priorities. Throughout its history, Rec and Park has been chronically under-funded. The department gets less than 2 percent of city dollars to manage about 15 percent of city land, general manager Phil Ginsburg told me last summer. That’s a smaller share of the city budget than Los Angeles, Chicago or Minneapolis devote to their parks.
Public dollars supply about two-thirds to three-quarters of the department’s annual budget. (That’s money from the city’s general fund and a set-aside of property tax revenues called the Open Space Fund.) As for the rest, increasingly it’s been coming from private sources: philanthropy, programs and “earned revenues” like leases, fees, garages, and special events such as OutsideLands.
You can argue about whether that’s a good direction nor not -- and certainly people have. Rec and Park’s push for “earned revenue” has inevitably stirred controversy—from the kerflulffle over a short-lived proposal to allow people to reserve patches of grass at Dolores Park to the tortured debate over charging admission to the Botanical Garden, the Conservatory of Flowers and the Japanese Tea Garden.
But as I looked into OutsideLands, I realized that it’s actually a pretty good deal. The concert’s promoter, Another Planet Entertainment, pays Rec and Park more than $3 million in rental fees every year. That’s enough to cover the salaries of about 20 gardeners, Ginsburg told me last year. Additionally, Another Planet pays the salary of a gardener for the meadows and Polo Fields, a sum now totaling $170,000 to include benefits, and it pays $15,000 for post-festival regeneration of the Fields and meadows. The lease agreement also requires Another Planet to provide $15,000 community grants to benefit the two supervisorial districts affected by the three-day affair, District 1 and District 4.[1]
And of course, having 90,000 or so concert-goers spending on buying food, drink, places to stay, MUNI or Uber/Lyft rides and so on has all sorts of ripple benefits. According to one Rec and Park official in 2018, “the event has drawn over 2 million visitors to Golden Gate Park and contributes an estimated $66 million annually to the City’s economy.“
The math is persuasive. Especially when you consider that the city’s economy is in the pits and the city government is a two-year budget shortfall of $768 million.
So it’s no surprise that this spring the Park Commission Board and the Board of Supervisors agreed to let Another Planet extend its permit to a second weekend. Starting next year, it will hold another set of smaller concerts on the weekend after Outside Lands, taking advantage of all the gear and fencing and stages and cell phone towers that are already in place. The added days of festivities are expected to bring another $1.4 to $2.1 million into Rec and Park coffers.
Sigh: an additional week of fences. I’m working on making my peace with it. Or maybe next year, I’ll plan an extended trip out of town.
[1] Details on the lease can be found in the following:A 2018 report on extending the Outside Lands permit; a 2023 FAQ on extending Outside Lands concerts; a May 18, 2023 memo on proposed concerts
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Outside Lands has become so popular. I can imagine it's a bummer for those who live in the area and those who like to access the park on a regular basis. Hopefully, the additional week won't delay the time they take down the fences, but just incorporated in to what's already their timeline. With SF struggling to repurpose its downtown, it is nice to see something in the city that has been a success.
What an excellent post. I'm with you: Outside Lands is financially good for the city, but the temporary land grab for a company that will make tens of millions is maddening. So, too, is the elitism of rewarding those who can afford the 3-day pass that, when I just looked it up, costs $852 before fees. That's another reason that Hardly, Strictly Bluegrass is such a gorgeous event ; it is for everyone, not only for the rich. In this City that has such shameful inequities of wealth, Outside Lands stands as a shining example of capitalism trumping all.