JPMorgan health care conference will return
Despite hotel room prices shooting past $2,000 a night and persistent complaints over homelessness and openair drug use, JPMorgan’s annual health care conference will return to San Francisco in 2021.
A JPMorgan spokeswoman confirmed to The Chronicle that the 9,000person conference, which ran from Monday to Thursday this week, will remain in the city next year.
The invitationonly conference for bank clients brings them together with health care and biotech entrepreneurs, company executives and investment bankers. Created by San Francisco investment bank Hambrecht & Quist in 1983, it has grown to become the industry’s biggest annual event, a key place for networking and dealmaking. A predecessor of JPMorgan Chase bought Hambrecht & Quist in 1999, and the larger New York bank took over the conference.
There are signs that JPMorgan plans to stay even longer than 2021. The San Francisco Travel Association, which helps connect conference planners to hotels, has heard from several hotels in the city that JPMorgan intends to keep the conference in San Francisco through 2025, said Tom David, the association’s executive vice president and chief sales officer. But David said he doesn’t know if JPMorgan has made a firm commitment to the hotels or signed any written agreements or contracts.
JPMorgan declined to comment on plans beyond 2021.
The conference, which sprawls across several sites, is centered in the Westin St. Francis on Union Square. The hotel didn’t respond to a request for comment. Unlike larger conferences, such as Salesforce’s weeklong Dreamforce software confab, the JPMorgan event doesn’t book the Moscone Center.
Union Square’s proximity to the Tenderloin and MidMarket, areas with high homelessness, means besuited attendees can find themselves walking past tents and witnessing drug use.
“Indoors people are making deals, talking about health care and networking. Meanwhile I witnessed homeless people injecting cocaine in the streets of downtown (San Francisco) today,” Kistein Monkhouse, founder of health care company Patient Orator, wrote on Twitter Monday. Other Twitter users hastened to point out that they were more likely injecting heroin.
High costs and street conditions pushed another major conference, Oracle’s OpenWorld, to leave San Francisco this year for cheaper Las
Vegas.
But JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon told Fox Business that San Francisco is “not quite that bad” and attendees know what they’re getting into.
“They know where they’re going. They plan for it,” he said.
Dimon told Fox Business that the bank plans to increase its philanthropy in San Francisco.
Last year, JPMorgan invested $5 million to help local nonprofit Mission Economic Development Agency buy and preserve affordable housing. It is also the main sponsor of Chase Center, the Golden State Warriors’ new arena, where Dimon said events were held this week.
“We’re going to get deeply involved in San Francisco across the board. We’re a big bank here now and ... we want to help lift up the city, too,” Dimon said.