Panel describes New Yorkers' participation in World Cup events

Thank you.

A lot of the conversation and the analysis has focused on bringing visitors to New York and the economic impact of bringing people to the city.

How did New Yorkers respond?

Do we have a sense of that and their participation in these events?

I can go first.

So from an EDC perspective, we were very intentional in using our real estate assets to bring the joy of the World Cup to communities across the city.

And so, as I mentioned before, we organized 26 events, or sorry, 28 events across the city.

As an example, we worked with our public markets.

Our public markets are nearly 100% small businesses that are based in New York City of that group.

Roughly 77% are minority-owned businesses and around 46% are women-owned businesses.

And so we directly...

Contracted with a number of them to provide programming during the events, but also to have some knock-on effects where more visitors would be going to the spaces and shop there.

And in total, across our portfolio, we saw close to 7,000 New Yorkers attend those events in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

I also want to add that a lot of the initiatives that we did were also designed to target New Yorkers.

And I think certainly anecdotally, also in kind of social listening, you could kind of tell that a lot of New Yorkers were exploring the city, some for the first time and some just newly.

So that was super exciting.

And I think in particular, streaming matches on Link NYC kiosks throughout the city, that was designed not for like tourists who are here to visit, but for folks who are just around the city.

And so we actually had amazing scenes of New Yorkers gathering in front of these link kiosks to watch games.

We transformed over 50 blocks across the city into these soccer streets for New York City public schools.

So that was a huge benefit to public school students.

And then.

Our 24-7 soccer fields, I think, was a really exciting success where, you know, we did this pilot and we were unsure whether people would want to play soccer at four in the morning.

And it turns out that, you know, hundreds of people want to play soccer at four in the morning.

And so I think it was a really exciting pilot for, and, you know, and that's something that was majority taken advantage of by residents.

And so, again, an example of an initiative where we sort of were using the World Cup to expand access to the beautiful game, both watching and playing.

And anecdotally, I'll just add that we know that half of our following, both for our website and our social channel, are locals.

And I think some of that was through the pandemic and creating resources for that.

And then the programs that we do, like Restaurant Week and Broadway Week.

So we know we reach locals as well.