A campaign for San Francisco Recreation & Parks
San Francisco has 21 padel courts.
Not one of them is public.
Every court in the city is privately operated — including the ones on public park land at Embarcadero Plaza, where a peak hour is $40, open play is $30 a person, and free community access is capped at one hour a week on weekday afternoons. Fifty feet away, the public tennis court is free, unlimited, and open to anyone.
We're asking Rec & Park to build public padel courts. Two courts. About $150,000. Half a percent of what the city is spending to renovate one plaza.
The problem
A tale of two courts
Walk into a San Francisco park with racquet courts and you'll find a strange asymmetry. The tennis court is free. You book it online through Rec & Park, or you walk up. Nobody asks for a credit card.
Now walk to Embarcadero Plaza. Same city, same parks department, same public land. Three padel courts — and a price list. As published in July 2026: $40 for a peak hour, $25 off-peak, $30 per person for open play if you haven't brought three friends, $120 a month for the membership that makes it affordable. Free community access exists — Monday to Thursday, 1–3pm — but it's capped at one hour per person per week and can only be booked a day ahead.
To be clear about who's responsible: the operator is a small local business doing what private operators do, and offering free hours it isn't obliged to offer. The decision worth questioning is the City's — it chose to lease the ground rather than build a public court on it.
Nothing about the sport explains the difference. A padel court is smaller than a tennis court. The equipment is cheaper. It holds twice as many players. It needs less maintenance — artificial turf and tempered glass instead of an acrylic surface and a sagging net. The only thing that explains the difference is that San Francisco decided to build tennis courts, and decided to rent out the ground under padel courts.
Nobody would accept this arrangement for tennis. Imagine the city announcing that the courts in Golden Gate Park were fine, but you'd need a $120 monthly membership to use them more than an hour a week. That is, precisely, the padel status quo — and it exists only because padel arrived after the era when San Francisco built public courts as a matter of course.
That decision probably wasn't made deliberately. Padel arrived fast, a private operator offered to handle it, and the city said yes. That's a reasonable way to pilot something. It's a bad way to end up.
The evidence
Padel stopped being a trend a while ago
The "wait and see" argument depends on padel being a fad. Two independent bodies count the world's courts. They disagree on the number. They agree on the direction.
58,334– 77,000+
Courts worldwide
Roughly six times the 2016 count. Playtomic counts courts on booking platforms; the International Padel Federation counts municipal courts too. The gap between them is, broadly, the world's public padel infrastructure.
19.4M– 30M+
Players worldwide
Up 15% in 2025 alone, with 7,898 new courts built that year. Industry projection: 91,000 courts globally by 2028.
1 in 8
Spaniards play padel
17,300 courts, ~6 million players. It passed tennis years ago — and the fastest-growing segment is municipal courts in public parks and city sports centres.
What one hour on a court costs
Sweden tried letting the market handle it
Between 2019 and 2022 Sweden built more padel courts than any country outside Spain — from a few hundred to over 4,200 in thirty-six months. Uppsala went from 14 courts to nearly 100 in a single year. Sweden ended up with the best court-to-population ratio in Europe: one court per 2,400 people.
Then it collapsed. Ninety padel companies went bankrupt. More than a hundred facilities closed. One private-equity-backed operator shut 50 of its 63 clubs. Roughly €500 million evaporated.
Demand never fell. 600,000 Swedes were still playing. The sport is durable — the private club is not.
Public tennis courts survived 2008. Public basketball courts survived COVID. That is what "public" means. A city that outsources all of its padel access to venture-funded operators has built its recreation on someone else's balance sheet.
What the city gets back
- 47% lower risk of dying
- Racquet-sport players have a 47% lower all-cause mortality risk and 56% lower cardiovascular mortality than non-players. It's one of the best-evidenced longevity interventions in sport.
- There is no singles padel
- Every hour on court is four people in a small glass box, talking between points. A 2025 systematic review found consistent gains in life satisfaction, happiness and social integration — strongest in older adults, where loneliness carries ~40% higher four-year mortality risk.
- Beginners rally on day one
- Underhand serve, walls that keep the ball alive, a short solid racquet. A novice and a veteran can share a court and both enjoy it. Tennis cannot do that.
- Twice the recreation per square foot
- 20m × 10m versus tennis's 23.77m × 10.97m — it fits inside one tennis court's footprint and serves four players instead of two. In a 49-square-mile city, that matters.
Have your say
Where should San Francisco's first public padel courts go?
Every site below is a real Rec & Park property that already has racquet courts — so this is a conversion, not a construction project. Pick one. We take the results to the Commission.
Click a marker to read about a site and vote.
One vote per person. Results update live.
Sign
The petition
To the San Francisco Recreation & Park Commission, General Manager, and Board of Supervisors:
San Francisco has roughly 21 padel courts and not one of them is publicly operated. On city park land at Embarcadero Plaza, a peak court hour is listed at $40, open play at $30 per person, and a membership at $120 per month; free community access is capped at one hour per person per week on weekday afternoons. Madrid, Barcelona and Mexico City all have private clubs at comparable prices — and a municipal tier underneath them, starting around €5 a court. San Francisco has no such tier.
We, the undersigned, call on San Francisco Recreation & Parks to build and operate publicly owned padel courts in San Francisco's parks — beginning with a two-court pilot converting an underused tennis court in a neighbourhood chosen with residents, with priority for the southeast of the city.
These courts should be operated like every other Rec & Park court: free or low-cost, and bookable through the department's existing free online reservation system.
A two-court pilot costs an estimated $150,000–$250,000 — about half a percent of the Embarcadero Plaza renovation. Residents organised and delivered the $27M Goldman Tennis Center. We are asking for one percent of that, for the fastest-growing sport in the world.
Recent signatures
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Email a decision-maker
Signatures show scale. Individual emails from constituents are what actually move a commission. Pick a recipient, edit the draft to sound like you, and send it from your own mail app — we never send anything on your behalf.
How we win
The plan
This isn't a wish. San Francisco has a funded, resident-facing mechanism for exactly this kind of project, and a precedent that already worked. Here's the route.
The $40M Embarcadero Plaza renovation breaks ground late 2026 — and the city's only downtown padel courts are inside that footprint. What comes back, and at what price, is being decided this year by people who have not heard from padel players.
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Phase 1
Prove the demand now → late 2026
2,500 signatures, a clear winning site from the public vote, and a steady flow of constituent emails into Rec & Park and the Board. Build a mailing list that can turn out thirty people to a hearing on two weeks' notice.
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Phase 2
Get it on the record autumn 2026 → January 2027
Speak during public comment at the monthly Rec & Park Commission meeting. Meet the district supervisor for the winning site. File a public records request for utilisation data on single-court tennis sites — the single most persuasive exhibit available. Get a firm quote from a court supplier so the cost stops being a range.
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Phase 3
Apply to the Community Opportunity Fund ~February 2027
Rec & Park's $6M fund exists to let residents propose capital improvements, with priority for Environmental Justice communities. Attend the mandatory pre-application workshop, then submit for the winning site. Panel review follows; the Commission decides.
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Phase 4
Close the gap with partners 2027
Tennis Coalition SF raised private money alongside public funds and delivered a $27M public tennis centre. Same model: a fiscally sponsored nonprofit, a court manufacturer willing to discount a first US municipal install, and local sponsors.
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Phase 5
Build it, then do it again 2027 → 2028
Two courts on an existing tennis pad is closer to a resurfacing job than a construction project. Open them free, publish the usage numbers, and use them to argue for the next four.
Objections
The hard questions, answered honestly
Isn't padel a rich person's sport?
It behaves like one here, because the only way to play is to pay — and the entry price without an existing group of four is $30 an hour. In Spain, with six million players, padel is an ordinary working-class sport, because cities built municipal courts alongside the private clubs. Price isn't a property of the sport. It's a property of whether a public option exists.
Why not just let the private market build them?
Sweden did. €500 million and 90 bankruptcies later, participation is still among the highest in Europe and the clubs are gone. Private operators serve the top of the market and disappear in a downturn. Public courts don't.
Won't this take courts away from tennis players?
No. The targets are single-court tennis sites — the least usable racquet assets in any park system. You can't run a lesson, a ladder or a doubles rotation on one court; one match occupies it for ninety minutes and two people play. Convert that same slab and four people play all day in rotation. At large complexes like McLaren or Balboa, we're proposing to add, not convert.
Isn't it noisy? Pickleball has caused real problems.
Padel is meaningfully quieter. Pickleball's complaints come from a hard plastic ball striking a rigid paddle — a sharp ~70dB impact. Padel uses a depressurised ball and a solid but damped racquet; the sound profile is closer to tennis. Standard court siting away from bedroom windows handles the rest, and glass walls contain rather than project sound.
Can the city really afford it right now?
A two-court pilot is $150,000–$250,000. The Embarcadero Plaza renovation is $40 million. The Community Opportunity Fund alone holds $6 million and exists specifically for resident-proposed park projects. This is a rounding error that produces a new public amenity.
What about ongoing maintenance?
Artificial turf and tempered glass on an existing slab — lower maintenance than a tennis court's acrylic surface and net, and far lower than grass. Booking runs through the free online reservation system Rec & Park already operates for tennis and pickleball, so there's no new administrative overhead.
Does anyone in San Francisco actually play padel?
Rec & Park's own Embarcadero pop-up was popular enough that a third court was added. The city's ~21 courts are booked. The demand question was settled in 2023 — what's left is the access question.
Are you against the private clubs?
No — and we want to be unambiguous about it. The operators brought padel to San Francisco at their own risk and expense, they run good facilities, and the Embarcadero operator offers free community hours it has no obligation to offer. None of them has done anything wrong. Every city we admire for public padel — Madrid, Barcelona, Mexico City — has thriving private clubs and a municipal tier. We want the second one. We expect public courts would grow the private clubs too, the way public tennis courts feed private tennis.
Who is behind this campaign?
Residents who want to play padel and can't justify the cost. We are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or funded by any padel club, court operator, equipment maker or facility builder — including Park Padel / Golden City Padel, the operator at Embarcadero Plaza — and we are not affiliated with SF Recreation & Parks. We accept no money from anyone with a commercial interest in padel, and if that ever changes we'll say so here first.
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