Trump Hotels wants to expand to San Francisco

City leaders guffawed after catching wind that Trump Hotels, one of the many private business entities conceived by our current Commander-in-Chief, wants to expand to San Francisco.

“There are 26 major metropolitan areas in the U.S., and we’re in five,” Eric Danziger, CEO of Trump Hotels, tells Bloomberg. This could prove a problem for many reasons.

As SFist reports, “Trump's failure to divest from his hotels and other business holdings have drawn sustained criticism and assertions of conflicts of interest.”

In addition to the aesthetic shortcomings of Trump Hotels—you can see a tour of the company’s new 2016 D.C. property over at Curbed D.C.—such conflicts in approval process-heavy San Francisco would not go unchecked.

Here’s what D2 supervisor had to say when news broke yesterday that Trump wanted to open a hotel in Baghdad by the Bay.

"You know on the same day that Donald Trump is on the national media on television talking about penalizing and taking money away from cities such as San Francisco — actually highlighting San Francisco — is the same day that his company comes out and says they want to build a hotel here? Good luck with that."

Quite fabulously, Supervisor Farrell goes on to note, “His hotels are incredibly ugly and gaudy. Why would we want that in the city of San Francisco?”

And seeing as how city projects are chronically killed due to the most benign of infractions (e.g., too colorful, too bold, too tall, too anything), Trump Hotels, no matter how tenuous a business connection to POTUS, would barely make it through our city’s impenetrable approval process.

When asked for comment about Trump Inc. dropping a hotel in San Francisco, London Breed, the President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, issues this statement to KPIX: “Maybe we can set him up with a nice room in Alcatraz.”

Tough crowd.

President Trump already has a stake in part of 555 California, formerly known as the Bank of America Center, which is owned in part by the Trump Organization, a corporation controlled and managed by Donald Trump and three of his offspring—Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump.

• Inside D.C.’s Trump Hotel [Curbed D.C.]
• Trump Hotels Threaten SF Expansion, Local Leaders Say 'Good Luck' [SFist]
• Trump Hotels Considering Expansion Into San Francisco [KPIX]
• Trump Hotels, Amid Calls to Divest, Instead Plans U.S. Expansion [Bloomberg]