Is S.F.'s too-cool attitude a turnoff?

The 49ers' new stadium in Santa Clara is shown on June 17, 2014. The 49ers' new stadium in Santa Clara is shown on June 17, 2014. Photo: Peter Hartlaub, The Chronicle Photo: Peter Hartlaub, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 13 Caption Close Is S.F.'s too-cool attitude a turnoff? 1 / 13 Back to Gallery

It's been a rough couple of weeks for San Francisco.

Earlier this month, organizers of the America's Cup sailing races announced they wouldn't be dropping anchor again in San Francisco and were looking to San Diego, Chicago or Bermuda instead. Last week, movie mogul George Lucas announced he will take his art collection and hundreds of million of dollars to Chicago to build his new museum.

And photos are splashed all over the media of the San Francisco 49ers new stadium in Santa Clara which is almost ready for its first big game. (A succulent garden on the roof of the luxury boxes? That is so San Francisco. Except it's 45 miles from here.)

San Francisco is like the most beautiful girl in high school who finds herself without a date for the prom, spurned by the big men on campus who favor nice girls with great personalities. (At least the tech geeks still love us, so there's that.)

When it comes to wooing big projects and events, is San Francisco's too-cool-for-school attitude a turnoff? And can the city project a friendlier attitude the next time around - such as if it vies against Boston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., for a potential 2024 Olympic bid?

"We can't be arrogant as a city and assume that we're better than everywhere else and that we will never have to be proactive to attract cultural institutions or businesses," said San Francisco political consultant Mark Mosher. "But by the same token, it can be a race to the bottom to try to depend on tax breaks and subsidies to do that."

It's a balancing act, sure, especially in a city where so many residents object so vociferously to anything new - and where legitimate worries about the increasingly obscene cost of living here make catering to billionaires not high on the agenda.

But when City Hall sets its mind to it, it can be a regular Don Juan. Witness the tax break to lure Twitter and other tech companies to the beleaguered Mid-Market stretch. That's helped bolster the city's tech industry, which in turn has helped lower the city's unemployment rate to a tiny 4.4 percent.

But like the guy who texts to see if you're free for a beer in an hour, some other efforts on behalf of City Hall to attract potential suitors have been less than impressive.

The 49ers will play their first Santa Clara game later this summer after former Mayor Gavin Newsom famously fumbled the ball when it came to maintaining any sort of relationship with the team's owners, the York family. City Hall officials assumed the Yorks would agree to play at a new Hunters Point stadium instead of moving down south. Wrong.

The America's Cup certainly wasn't as beloved as the 49ers, but it did make for an exciting event last summer. Russell Coutts, CEO of the defending champion Oracle Team USA, told The Chronicle he wanted to ink a deal quickly with San Francisco to host the 2017 races. Mayor Ed Lee said he definitely wanted to host the event again, but refused to spend city general fund money on it. Lee then learned through a media report San Francisco was the fourth choice and had dropped from contention.

But perhaps the most confounding loss of all is Lucas' museum of Americana art and Hollywood memorabilia. Most cities would jump if a famous movie maker asked to build a museum there and dangled a $700 million check to get it done. Not San Francisco.

The Presidio Trust took four years to tell Lucas he couldn't build at his preferred site near Crissy Field and seemed to assume he would accept a last-minute offer of another site in the Presidio in February. He didn't.

Lee then waited until May, when it was clear Chicago was a very determined front-runner, to come up with any sort of backup plan. When the Golden State Warriors' plan for a basketball arena at Piers 30-32 fell through in favor of a Mission Bay site, Lee offered Lucas the piers or a parking lot across the street.

In the dating world, that's called sloppy seconds, but with the piers' history, it's more like sloppy seventeenths. Lee's proposal required Lucas to buy or lease the bayfront site at market value, whereas Chicago offered its much larger lakefront site for $1 a year.

But apparently in Lee's world, that's ardent love.

"The mayor pulled out all the stops," said his spokeswoman, Christine Falvey. "Nothing's taken for granted. ... There are always cities waiting in the wings to swoop in if we hesitate."

Nathan Ballard, a Democratic strategist, said it's hard to imagine another city failing to take advantage of Lucas' offer.

"I'm sure (Chicago) Mayor Rahm Emanuel was giggling when he learned we rejected the museum the first time around," Ballard said. "Most big cities are not going to look a gift horse in the mouth like San Francisco."

"There's a powerful undercurrent of Nimby-ism in San Francisco," he continued. "There's a resistance to change that's almost pathological."

And even when we profess to want something - like the Lucas museum - we take our sweet time.

"Sometimes in San Francisco we engage in rigorous analysis that leads to paralysis," said political consultant Alex Tourk.

To be fair, San Francisco is hosting the 2016 Super Bowl. Well, Santa Clara is hosting the football game and San Francisco is hosting a bunch of parties.

Ballard, who is working on the Super Bowl, said he thinks if the region pulls that off, it can make a great case for hosting the Olympics.

"The Olympics have much broader appeal than either the Lucas museum or the America's Cup," he said.

And, as Falvey pointed out, there are always big conventions in town, and Fleet Week and the Blue Angels are returning this fall after being canceled last year because of federal budget cuts.

But meanwhile, Piers 30-32 sit empty - still. Candlestick Park is slated for demolition. And we had to scramble just to get Paul McCartney to play one last concert there instead of at the 49ers new stadium down south. Damn you, Santa Clara!

Quote of the week

"I thought to myself, 'Why not?' I'm already here, might as well buy one."

Eurico Chin, whose lottery ticket purchased at a Safeway in the Sunset was worth $70 million