Crime, Unrest and Your Next Meeting Location: The Worry Post Covid

by Robert McGarvey

If Covid concerns don’t keep you away from that meeting that is on your calendar, will worries about crime and safety? That’s exactly the issue raised in a recent Hotel News Now piece that posited the moving of events, conferences and similar away from cities with crime problems.

Word of advice: if a city scares you, stay away. No need to explain. Just stay away.

But what we seem now to have is an emergent ghosting of mainstream cities, over stated worries about safety. Mind you, we are not talking about Camden NJ, East St. Louis, or Monroe LA, cities with crime rates that are stratospheric., Nope. This is cities that traditionally make the mix of candidate locations for many events.

Such as?

Reported HNN: “[Ben] Seidel [CEO of Real Hospitality Group] pointed to specific markets such as Chicago, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, as places that struggle with high crime rates that could ultimately deter meeting planners.”

Seidel has a case: crime and fear of becoming a victim is a factor in location selection for events – but it has always been so. When I lived in Washington DC a half century ago it was definitely a no go zone for most meeting planners. So was New York in the 1980s.

So it is fact: too much crime will send planners looking elsewhere.

But then Seidel said this: “Portland is a beautiful [city], but if you’re a meeting planner now, holding a conference there with their crime rates is not going to appear on the radar screen.”

Uh, Portland? Portland, Oregon’s crime rate is moderate by any measure. Yes, it is 124% of the national average crime rate but that is small potatoes compared to, say, Birmingham AL where the crime rate is 251% of the national rate.

I really cannot see event planners – at least none that don’t guzzle the antifa koolaid – thinking Portland is a crime hotspot.

San Francisco? Sad to say Baghdad by the Bay has been sliding down the safety chart and now, according to Lee Ohanian, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, it is “nearly the most crime ridden city in the US.”

He writes: “San Franciscans face about a 1-in-16 chance each year of being a victim of property or violent crime, which makes the city more dangerous than 98 percent of US cities, both small and large. To put this in perspective, Compton, California, the infamous home of drug gang turf wars, and which today remains more dangerous than 90 percent of all US cities, is almost twice as safe as San Francisco.”

So, yep, some event planners definitely have crossed San Francisco off their list.

What about Chicago? I’ll give Seidel that one too. It is more dangerous than 91% of US cities – and that’s a top 10 list a meeting planner doesn’t want to put an event in. Its central location means it still scores high in attractiveness to planners but they also are eyeing the headline murders that frequently rock the city.

But there are many more cities that will get a pass from many event planners today. Other must avoids according to the stats are Detroit, St. Louis, Baltimore, and New Orleans. But not so fast. I have to say I have been to New Orleans perhaps 10 times in this century, never was a crime victim, never saw a crime., will happily return. It’s a city with a great and unique vibe.

Which pinpoints an issue with any blanket statement that such and such a town is “too dangerous” – it depends upon “for whom,” that is, what group is involved and what’s its appetite for risk.

Of the cities so far mentioned in this article I have been to Baltimore once this century – no problems; Chicago five times and liked it a lot, also did a lot of walking, no problems; and San Francisco, dozens of times, no issues and often I stayed on the margin of the Tenderloin, San Francisco’s high crime mecca. The Tenderloin is cheap and conveniently located and that’s why I like it.

Would I recommend you stay in the Tenderloin? That would be up to you.

Would I recommend a group meet in San Francisco? It depends upon the group. There are some groups that would be repelled by San Francisco and for them there is Las Vegas or Orlando (and I am a fan of Las Vegas, even though I have neither gambled or seen a show in many trips there this century).

But there are other groups that will love how urban San Francisco is.

Know your group and you will know what towns work it it and what don’t.

And do remember, more than crime shapes a city’s suitability for an event. Personally I cannot imagine going to an event in Palm Beach, say, and that has little to do with the city’s iffy safety rating. You can guess why.

No, I don’t envy event planners their work. There just are lots of issues they need to weigh. And safety/crime is just one of them.