Filipino group to lobby for preservation, fair processBy Emil Guillermo
The Record - June 3, 2003
Magdalena Remolana, 74, and her roommates may be forced to find a new home. Jim Soares’ Chapel of the Palms funeral home will not. The difference is that Remolana’s home is in the Gleason Commercial Master Development Area, and Soares’ nearby business isn’t.
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| FEARFUL: Stockton’s Gleason project map, which encompasses the historic Little Manila district, threatens many with displacement, such as Iloilo Circle residents Magdalena Remolana, 74, left, Linda Johnson, 53, and Estrella Sobreguel, 40. |
Tonight, the Stockton City Council is expected to approve the map of the area, eight blocks south of the Crosstown Freeway, which includes the Little Manila Historical District. Most of it will be razed to make way for development.
Soares’ business will be spared.
That wasn’t always the case.
Soares remembered when his family’s property was first on a redevelopment map: Aug. 13, 1971. That was the day the city’s Crosstown Freeway project took over the building that housed the family’s funeral home and wiped out the neighborhood. The family was forced to rebuild one block south, at California and Lafayette streets.
This year, the lightning bolt of redevelopment almost struck him a second time.
Soares’ funeral home was on the new map for the Gleason project in March and would have been subject to the redevelopment plans of the city and a designated master developer. For many of the buildings and tenants, it means almost certain demolition and eviction.
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| MASTER PLAN: Jim Soares won an exemption for his Chapel of the Palms, but neighboring residences and businesses may be razed to make way for the Gleason Commercial Master Development Area. |
“I heard about it like gossip almost,” Soares said. “Nobody told me nothing. I felt that everything was happening behind my back.”
He went to the city and complained.
“I said, ‘Why me?’ I have a nice building,’ ” he said. “They came down here and looked at us and decided we weren’t a blight, and they took us off the map.”
The Filipino Community Building shares the block that was removed from the map.
“He came in to see me, and the council made the decision,” said James Rinehart, formerly with housing and redevelopment for the city and now in economic development.
Dawn Mabalon is chairwoman of the Little Manila Foundation. She says others weren’t given the consideration Soares received.
“You think the Filipino community can go down to City Hall like Soares?” Mabalon said.
Mabalon’s group will be at the meeting tonight to lobby the council to save the three historical buildings of Little Manila: the Emerald restaurant, the Rizal Social Club and the Mariposa Hotel. The buildings were recently named by the National Trust for Historical Preservation as one of the most endangered historical resources in the nation.
“We’ll be protesting the redevelopment zone boundaries and the way the community is going to be destroyed and displaced by this development,” Mabalon said.
She also was concerned that the city keep the process fair. Tonight, the city will call for bids to be the area’s master developer.
Last week, Vice Mayor Gloria Nomura said that both she and the mayor have already held meetings with potential developers Bob Hong and Manny Fernandez, whose idea calls for an Asian mall.
“They have an unfair advantage,” said Mabalon, who said her group will file a competing proposal that includes a national Filipino American museum. “I just want a fair process that’s open to everybody’s input and not one that seems to be conducted behind closed doors.”
Displacement will be an issue for people who live in dwellings included on the Gleason project map, like Iloilo Circle on Sonora Street.
Six people live in the one-story building’s four rooms owned by the Iloilo Association, a Filipino community group from Iloilo province in the Philippines.
Magdalena Remolana has lived there since 1986. She had no idea what was happening at City Hall.
“I have no place to go,” she said. “Will we be relocated?”
Until a master developer is chosen and plans approved, that’s unclear.
California Rural Legal Assistance obtained an injunction that keeps Little Manila’s Hotel Mariposa standing. CRLA is contemplating what to do on behalf of other tenants in the area.
“We’re studying the Gleason plan,” said Stephanie Haffner, a CRLA attorney. “But low-income housing needs to be part of the planning.”
CRLA has filed suits in the past against the city to get relocation money for people evicted from occupancy hotels acquired by the city.
Estrella Sobreguel has lived at Iloilo Circle for three years. She wondered aloud: “If they demolish this building, will we be put on the street?”
The making of Little Manila
* Filipino immigrants began arriving in California after the Spanish-American War, which ended in 1898 when the Philippines passed from Spanish to United States rule.
* Immigrants from Asia who came to work in the Central Valley’s agricultural fields in the late 19th and early 20th centuries built their own communities in downtown Stockton after being banned from other parts of the city.
* There were 10,000 residents living in Little Manila at the height of the asparagus-picking season in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s, and Filipinos also claimed about a third of Stockton’s population.
* Construction of the Crosstown Freeway in 1972 cut a swath through Little Manila and Chinatown, displacing residents forced to leave when buildings were demolished.
