A New Home for La Pulga?

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I’m Ericka Cruz Guevarra and welcome to the Bay. Local news to keep you rooted. The nearly 500 small business owners who make up San Jose’s iconic Berryessa flea market are trying to find a new home. They’re making way for the new Berryessa BART urban village, the kind of thing that everyone says the Bay Area needs more of if we want to address our region’s housing crisis. And now, the city of San jose says it has an idea for where to put the market; an abandoned landfill.

Guy Marzorati: It might also present really the best chance to keep this landmark alive. So what kind of emphasis is this for the city moving forward?

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Today, the struggle to find a new home for La Pulga and why a landfill has risen to the top.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Guy, can you just remind us, where are we at right now in the sort of long saga of La Pulga? Like, where do things stand right now?

Guy Marzorati: Right now, vendors at the San Jose Berryessa flea market are dealing with kind of an unknown closure date.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Guy Marzorati is a political correspondent for KQED. He also produces the Political Breakdown podcast. He’s based in San Jose.

Guy Marzorati: It could come as soon as 2025. So what’s happening right now is kind of this scramble to find a new site. The flea market is still operating, but it does have this uncertain future. This goes back a number of years. The owners of the flea market have had a desire to redevelop the current site housing, retail around transit because BART is now in North San Jose at various and big picture like this is kind of what the city is pushing for. They want that kind of dense housing development near transit. But the flip side of that is that development, if it happens, would mean the end of the flea market as we know it.

Guy Marzorati: And this would be a huge blow to San Jose, both culturally but also economically. I mean, this if you take the flea market kind of as a whole, it would be a top 50 employer in the city. It is the densest concentration of small businesses that we have in the South Bay. So it’s an incredibly stressful time for a lot of vendors. For most of them, this is a primary source of income. So are, you know, trying to find this new site with the city. I will say the city was able to extract some concessions from the owner of the flea market, most notably putting money in a pot that will be used for finding a new site.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And how much money was put in that pot to help them find a new site?

Guy Marzorati: The owners, the flea market and the city are putting a $7.5 million into this fund that’s aimed at helping vendors, both when the market closes just financially, but also putting staff time and hiring consultants to identify a new site potentially.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean Guy, La Pulga is this like very unique, sprawling market. We’re talking about 460 vendors. What are some of the things that the city needs to consider as it looks for a new location for the market? I mean, it sounds really hard to do that.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, it’s really hard. I mean, look, in the Bay Area, land is incredibly expensive. And for a flea market of this size, you’re going to need a large piece of land. Most of the prime real estate, you know, conveniently located parcels were grabbed up years ago, let alone one of the size the, you know, dozens and dozens of acres you need for a site like this. And that’s how you get to a situation where the city of San Jose is saying the best place that we have for this landmark is a landfill. So there were five ideas brought forward by the consultant as like most viable for a future site.

Guy Marzorati: There was the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds. There was the former Sears Department store at the Eastridge Mall, which would be an indoor site. There was a small piece of land that could potentially exist at various in a future development. Then there was this idea of like just having vendors set up shop in vacant storefronts throughout the city. And then there was the former landfill on Singleton Road, and that has really risen to the top of the list in the mind of city officials.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Okay. So tell us about this landfill. Where is it? Exactly.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah. So it’s pretty centrally located right in the middle of San Jose is right off of Capital Expressway. It’s not far from Highway one, two, one, and it’s 90 acres, so there’s plenty of room there for vendors, plenty of room there for parking. And so it really fits a lot of the criteria that the city would be looking for in a potential new site.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And what is there or I guess what used to be there?

Guy Marzorati: Yeah. So it’s still right in the Seven Trees neighborhood. So there’s folks who are living all around this landfill back in the sixties and seventies. It was home to private and municipal dumps, those largely closed by the late seventies. And since then, this huge piece of land has just been sitting vacant smack in the middle of San Jose.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, what does the landfill look like now, and what has the city tried to do with it in the past?

Guy Marzorati: Right now, the landfill just looks like a massive abandoned field. It’s really just these flare stacks, which kind of look like big pipes that let you know that this used to be a landfill. They’re still standing. They’re burning off methane, But there’s not much going on there now. I mean, some city inspectors actually found roosters at the landfill last year being raised for cockfighting. But there’s fences all around it. So public access is pretty limited. And their security there now, pretty much ever since the landfill closed in the late seventies, there have been ideas on what to do with it, to turn it into a golf course, to use the methane releases to create a power plant. There was even a local ballot measure in San Jose back in 2000 to fund the sports complex here, but none of those ideas came to fruition.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Why has this landfill kind of risen to the top of the list?

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, I think it breaks down to me for three reasons. Number one, the city owns this land. Like, that’s a huge piece of this because land is so expensive in the area. Finding a site where the city already owns clears out a huge amount of costs and just time that it would take to acquire a site. The second thing is the size. You’re talking about a 65 acre flea market as it exists currently. The Singleton landfills 90 acres. So it has room to basically house all the vendors that are at the flea market today, plus parking. And then the third is location.

Nancy Klein: Which carries a lot of traffic. It’s near a lot of other things.

Guy Marzorati: I talked to Nancy Klein, who’s the city’s director of economic development, cultural affairs. She pointed to the location piece of this as, look, we know a lot of people that go to LA, although currently are coming from all over the Bay Area.

Nancy Klein: It has a similar profile in terms of several different transportation ways. So that makes it positive. It’s not as in some of the other sites which are quite a distance away on a road that makes would be terrible traffic.

Guy Marzorati: She points to Singleton Road Landfill as having that advantage because it’s right off of 101. It’s near Capital Expressway. You have those major arteries that wouldn’t exist if you’d like, you know, stuck this in some open land in Morgan Hill or something.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: I mean, that makes sense to me. It’s city owned land. It’s big enough. It’s near some really important roadways. What do vendors think of this idea?

Guy Marzorati: All along really the top priority I’ve heard from vendors both on this advisory group that’s kind of leading this process. And also folks who aren’t is keeping the market together. They know that there’s just this natural cross-pollination of businesses at La Pulga. You know, maybe you go to the market, you’re looking for like home goods or something. But while you’re there, your kids are with you. You buy them some candy, you buy them Agua Fresca. Like, there’s just this natural cross-currents that happens between businesses that is so important to keeping the market thriving.

Guy Marzorati: And then if you split up the vendors into smaller locations all over the city, you might not get that Singleton would accomplish that. There’d be this opportunity like, we can keep the market together, but vendors have a lot of questions left to be answered about the site and also just about the process and timeline going forward. And so that’s really been at play in these meetings of the flea market vendor advisory group. They’ve met three times so far.

Nancy Klein: Around because we are a big community. We are…

Guy Marzorati: So I talked to Erika Barajas. She’s been a vendor at the market for years selling clothing. And her real feeling was like, yes, maybe, you know, Singleton has a lot of promise, but she really wants the city to commit to stepping up its support during this time.

Erika Barajas: So I want to hear from the city on our next meeting that if we decide to go with them, whether are going to be committed to us and guarantee timely free meals and also moving expenses and make sure that that relocation, it’s good for all the vendors and also the sellers do.

Guy Marzorati: Even if the Singleton Road landfill works out, there is going to be a lot of cost for preparing the site, but also a lot of costs on the vendors. You know, they will have to relocate after years and in various to this new market, there might be like a transitional time where they’re not able to sell at either place, kind of like a, you know, in-between time. And Erika’s real emphasis was like, we want commitments from the city to support us during that time because there’s just so much uncertainty ahead with this potential transition.

Erika Barajas: At the end of the day, City makes a lot of money on revenue from the sales, from the expenses that we pay from for income taxes. It will be helpful for all of us because we need each other. We are community and we need each other. Detainees is to help us and we will help the city.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Okay, So this landfill has really risen to the top as it sounds like the most viable option so far. But is this a good idea? I’m curious what residents nearby the landfill think.

Guy Marzorati: They mostly were just like, we have a lot of questions about this. And again, there was this thinking of like, we’ve heard it all before. We’ve heard they’re going to develop Singleton Road Landfill. We’ll believe it when we see it.

Lilia Gaspar: For the longest time, there was a proposal, but again, nothing has passed because this landfill is full of, you know, topics.

Guy Marzorati: I talked to Lillia Gasper. She’s actually lived right next to the landfill almost her entire life.

Lilia Gaspar: Cherry Orchard We’re over here on land where a lunch on waste that used to be all cherry orchards.

Guy Marzorati: She just kind of painted this a picture of someone who’s lived there for a long time. And I think, you know, her concerns and concerns of other residents I talked to largely had to do with, like traffic. Right. How is this all going to work if you have thousands of people coming in to shop in their neighborhood at the potential future flea market?

Lilia Gaspar: We already have a big issue right now of the jungle of the homeless encampment. It will just create more problems on top of it to poorer neighborhoods.

Guy Marzorati: And I think they also expressed just feeling like they had needs already in their neighborhood, that they felt that the city hadn’t done a great job of addressing, namely, in their minds, homeless encampments and blight and a feeling like, oh, there’s going to be focus on the flea market. What about the existing problems that we have in our neighborhoods? So we’ve talked a lot about like all that the city has to address on the vendor side of things to make this potential move happen. There’s a whole nother piece of this about talking to the neighbors who currently live around the Singleton Road Landfill and making them feel like this is a good idea, a good addition for their neighborhood as well.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And I mean, also, this is an abandoned landfill, which makes me wonder, is it safe? I mean, if people are going to be working there all day and walking around and I don’t know, what do experts say about that?

Guy Marzorati: You know, the landfill has been closed for decades, but there’s still actively methane being released from this site.

Gabriel Filippelli: In general, this kind of reuse using the surface of the landfill for another activity is valuable. And it’s done in a lot of other places and it can can be safe.

Guy Marzorati: I talked to Gabriel Filippelli. He’s executive director of the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute. He’s also a landfill expert. This is the kind of stuff he studies often. And he said, look like, you know, it can happen. This kind of reuse for former landfills is viable. But he says there’s still questions that will have to be answered and work that will have to be done in advance of this potential transformation.

Gabriel Filippelli: You always have to remember that you are sitting on a pile of material that has the potential to release toxins. So if you keep monitoring it, you have to keep checking it. And of course, if there’s any seismic disruption or digging or trenching, you have to pay extra special care.

Guy Marzorati: We live in an area with earthquakes. Bad things could happen to the landfill if there’s an earthquake and it’s not there’s not structural integrity. So there’s a lot of boxes that would have to be checked. But generally, Philip Kelley said this is the kind of thing, this kind of reuse that can be done.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, looking ahead, guy, how long do people have to find this site? What’s the timeline here?

Guy Marzorati: Yeah. So under the agreement that the city reached with the owners of the current flea market, they have to give a one year notice for when they want to close the market and evict the vendors. So the earliest date when those evictions could happen is January 1st of 2025. But it could close a lot later than that. Right. The owners of the market right now haven’t found someone to do this massive development at the burial site. That could go on for years. Who knows? Given the current state of commercial real estate. So it’s kind of a mix of like, okay, this is far in the future. But also we don’t want to be complacent.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Wherever it is, La Pulga ends up. What’s at stake with this decision to find a new site? I mean, like it seems really important that the city finds a space to like both build housing near transit, which we all know needs to happen in the Bay Area, but also find a new place for these vendors who’ve been there for many, many years.

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, I mean, think about all the attention that the Westfield Mall closure got in San Francisco, right? That was like 50 stores. This is almost 500. You know, this is a would be a massive displacement of small businesses, many of whom are immigrants. There’s the economic component to this. There’s like this is a landmark within the city. I think right now we see where is the commitment of the city government. We know budget times are tight in San Jose. We just had this big fight over city employee pay that we talked about recently on the bay. So this move to Singleton landfill, potentially, it’s not going to be cheap. There’s going to have to be the mitigation and preparing the site for this. So it’s going to take more money from the city government to make this happen. But it might also present really the best chance to keep this landmark alive. So what kind of emphasis is this for the city moving forward?

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Yeah, that’s an interesting way to think about it. And I guess it’s like, who is the future of San Jose for? Like who do we make room for?

Guy Marzorati: Yeah, and this is, you know, I think there can be, like, a thinking of the flea market as like, oh, this is kind of just like a side hustle thing that people do. For about 75% of the vendors, this is their primary source of income. So this is just like this is like an economic cliff that’s staring in the face of hundreds of vendors here. So San Jose has these goals of building, you know, dense housing near transit. Can you accomplish that while also maintaining your goal of supporting small businesses, supporting like the cultural vitality that makes San Jose a dope place to live and be like those two goals? I’m sure the city has both of those. This is a real test of can they achieve both at the same time?

Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Thank you so much, Guy.

Guy Marzorati: Absolutely. My pleasure.

A New Home for La Pulga?

Episode Transcript

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