San Jose: Flea Market will see big change after deal is reached.
Vendors will get $5M fund during site’s transition to office, housing, retail shopping
San Jose’s storied flea market — where thousands of Bay Area residents have become entrepreneurs and many families found a second home — is headed for a dramatic change.
After failing to reach a consensus, the San Jose City Council last week unanimously approved a longtime plan to transform the 61.5-acre site of the current flea market, which is known as La Pulga to Spanish-speaking residents, into a bustling urban neighborhood next to the Berryessa BART station with new office complexes, apartment buildings and retails shops.
“This had not been a simple or easy process or project,” councilmember Magdalena Carrasco said during the meeting. “Development and progress is not an easy journey and it’s not easy to grow. There are a lot of growing pains.”
The June 29 vote allows the flea market’s property owner and its developer to increase the total number of new residential units to be built on the site from 2,468 to 3,450 and expand the amount of permitted commercial space from 315,022 square feet to as much as 3.4 million square feet.
It also provides current market vendors who feared their displacement and loss of livelihood with some long-sought security and financial assistance for the first time since the owners unveiled plans to redevelop the site more than a decade ago. Still, those protections fell short of what many vendors and their supporters were seeking.
Roberto Gonzalez, president of the Berryessa Flea Market Vendors Association, said June 29 that he will keep fighting to ensure the property owners hold up their end of the bargain and will work to provide more security for vendors over the coming months and years.
“We definitely didn’t get everything that we wanted, but looking at it from where we started in December, this is a whole hell of a lot more than they were offering then,” Gonzalez said. “Through our organizing effort, our collaboration with the community and them standing in solidarity with us, we basically started a whole movement to save La Pulga and that’s what I’m most proud of.”
Along with rezoning the property, the council’s decision locks in a deal with the property owners guaranteeing that the market will remain open for at least three years before construction forces it to shut down and that current vendors will not be evicted before it closes. It also reserves 5 acres within the development for a smaller version of the flea market and provides vendors with a $5 million fund to weather economic losses when the current market closes.
The Bumb family, who owns the property, within the past week doubled their originally proposed financial assistance package for vendors from $2.5 million to $5 million. The fund will be controlled by an advisory group made up of city staff, vendors and flea market representatives.
Erik Schoennauer, a landuse lobbyist who represents the property owners, commended the council’s unanimous support.
“This is the best possible outcome, with a plan to support the vendors and a plan for major job and housing development at our city’s first BART station,” he said in a statement.
The council’s decision comes after months of a significant organizing and protesting, including a two-day hunger strike last week, by vendors who felt that they were shut out of negotiations. It also follows months of mediating between the vendors and the Bumb family by councilmember David Cohen, who represents the district where the market is located.
“I think councilmember Cohen has done an admirable job of negotiating millions of dollars of benefits and most importantly, a means for vendors to continue to be part of an urban market for many years to come,” Mayor Sam Liccardo said in an interview.
Although the deal was seen as a major improvement from the single assurance the Bumb family was offering vendors just three months ago, it still fell short of what the vendors association was advocating for. Prior to May, the Bumbs had only vowed to give vendors a one-year notice before closing the market. They made no promises regarding financial aid nor had plans for a new market on the site. The vendors association last week had asked the Bumb family for $15 million and a 10-acre market within the new development.
The San Jose flea market, which was founded in 1960 by George Bumb Sr., has flourished over the years, becoming one of the nation’s largest outdoor markets. The historic swap meet has attracted upwards of 4 million visitors a year, providing them with a fun place to bargain for goods. Although the market has shrunk over the years, about 430 vendors currently occupy approximately 750 stalls, according to the market owners.
Plans to redevelop the flea market have been in the works since 2007, when extending BART to San Jose was still in its early stages. At that time, the city council approved the site’s rezoning on the condition that the market remain open for the next five years but officials made no further efforts to protect vendors from displacement. Tuesday’s decision was the result of a request in 2016 by city leaders, who wanted the Bumb family to build a denser development on the site, given its close proximity to the new public transit line.
The new development will serve as a cornerstone of the city’s Berryessa BART Urban Village, a blueprint for the project that aims to transform the area around San Jose’s first BART station into a dense, transitcentered district with up to 4.2 million square feet of new office space and 5,100 new housing units.
San Jose leaders agree that the new 5-acre market slated to be created on the site — roughly onethird of the size of the current market — will not be big enough to accommodate all of the current vendors, and are not confidant that the $5 million will provide enough financial aid as vendors transition out of their current stalls.
So, at the request of Liccardo, city leaders on Tuesday also agreed to try and negotiate a deal with the Valley Transportation Authority allowing the city to use areas in and around the BART station, such as parking lots, to expand the footprint of the new market on its most popular days — Saturdays and Sundays. They also plan to identify public funding sources, including federal relief aid, taxes and fees associated with the project and economic development grants, to further assist vendors during the transition.
Councilmember Maya Esparza called the mayor’s ideas “great solutions.”
“I think hopefully we could be as well known as Barcelona and Las Ramblas,” she said. “We could be a Las Ramblas here in San Jose.
“This is the beginning not the end.”