The San Francisco Business Times reports that a technology company has decided not to host two of its conferences in San Francisco, California.  

Per the outlet:

IBM-owned open-source software giant Red Hat Inc. has canceled plans to host its annual technology summit at San Francisco's Moscone Center in 2024 and 2025.

The other canceled event is the Meta Business Group Summit 2024.

The Times reports:

A planned Moscone Center event in March 2024 from Facebook parent Meta, dubbed Meta Business Group Summit 2024, has also been canceled, according to the SF Travel Association, which books Moscone events.

It's not just the event that SF has lost

The Times reports that San Francisco, here, is not only losing the events but is also losing all of the business that would normally come from these events.

The Times, for example, reports that the Red Hat event "was expected to generate about 20,000 hotel room nights in May 2024 and return with a similar room count in June 2025."

Similarly, the outlet reports that the Meta Business Group Summit 2024 "was expected to generate about 16,254 hotel room nights."

The Times describes the cancellations as "a blow to the city's largest conference venue as it tries to stay competitive with venues around the country that are less expensive and not in the crosshairs of negative headlines about downtown street conditions."

One wonders if those "negative headlines about downtown street conditions" had anything to do with the cancellations.

"We generally prefer . . ."

A Red Hat spokesperson has released a statement on the cancellations. But, the statement is not particularly informative.

The spokesperson said:

We have hosted several successful Red Hat Summits at the Moscone Center. We generally prefer to alter between east- and west-coast-friendly locations for Red Hat Summit to best accommodate our customers and partners. Sometimes, even when we make plans far in advance to host an event in a given city, we have to change plans based on date conflicts on our end or other circumstances. This is the case for Red Hat Summit 2024, which will be hosted in Denver.

The spokesperson carefully navigated around that which everyone wants to know, namely, why the events were canceled.

This all comes as San Francisco has been witnessing surges in homelessness, drug use, and crime. People and businesses have, in response, been fleeing the area.

The Times article claims that - in terms of conventions - things are looking good for the future even though 2024 is shaping up to be particularly bad - a drop of about 40%.