The Daily Commuter

“That is not the way it works with land use in this city or any other cities,” he said after the November 2021 vote. “We make land use decisions all the time that diminish the value of land and we do so within the law and within the constitution.”

In January 2020, the families who are suing the city entered a contract to sell their land for more than $44 million to Texas-based real estate developer Crow Holdings Industrial.

Under a preliminary plan submitted to the city, Crow Holdings Industrial has proposed building two warehouses that were designed to span the length of more than six football fields. The project, which would have been located at 8820 Santa Teresa Boulevard, was expected to replace 126 acres of mostly vacant farmland, as well as Spina Farms Pumpkin Patch and fruit stand — a beloved South Bay destination for families, cyclists and visitors.

That plan, however, tanked in late 2021 after the consequential vote by the San Jose City Council in November 2021.

Within days of the rezoning of their properties,

by Jacqueline E. Mathews

Crow Holdings Industrial terminated its contract with the property owners, squashing hopes of their anticipated multimilliondollar payout, according to the suit. In addition, the new land use designation precludes their properties for seasonal pumpkin patch uses because such seasonal uses are not permitted under the new agricultural zoning, the lawsuit states.

The property owners and their attorneys argue that using the land for farming is no longer economically feasible, leaving the property owners with minimal options to make use of their land now. They are requesting a trial before a jury.

Megan Fluke, executive director of the environmental organization Green Foothills, said that the land- owners were “grasping at straws.”

“This is an expensive distraction they are inflicting on the public,” Fluke said in a statement Friday. “The City Council vote was the culmination of many years of work, millions of dollars of public and private investment, and overwhelming community support.”

Development battles coming out of Coyote Valley have been waged for more than six decades.

Although city officials currently are focused on preserving the valley’s undeveloped land, that wasn’t always the case.

For decades, the Coyote Valley was seen as a promising area of the city for thousands of new jobs and homes. In the early 2000s, the city’s plan for the area envisioned the development of more than 50,000 new jobs and up to 25,000 new homes in the valley. cial occasion.”

But over the years, environmental advocates have lobbied for city o cials to concentrate development in the urban core and instead use the undeveloped land in the valley to support small farmers and provide recreational opportunities for the community.

The valley, which encompasses a total of 7,400 acres, is celebrated by environmentalists for its vital natural functions, including reducing flood risks, maintaining good water quality and supporting wildlife. It’s the last remaining open valley floor in the Bay Area for wildlife to migrate between the Santa Cruz Mountains and the Diablo Range.

From April to October 1942, the former Tanforan Racetrack — now home to the soon-to-be-redeveloped Tanforan Shopping Center — was the site of an internment camp where thousands of Japanese Americans were detained and processed for forced relocation and internment in places like the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah.

The relocation center would be home to people like Jean Mitoma, a 100-year-old Palo Alto woman who spoke with The Mercury News before her death and who described the grueling, humiliating, dehumanizing and traumatic events of her forced internment.

For families like Mitoma’s — and many of the other Japanese Americans who attended Friday’s groundbreaking — the forced relocation meant giving up homes, furniture, family heirlooms, pets and history without knowing whether any of it would be returned. Many times, families returned in the postwar period to vandalize valuables they’d stored in warehouses or downright nothing at all, forcing many to start over from scratch.

In a speech to the crowd Friday, Congresswoman Jackie Speier said the memorial should serve as a reminder for all people that prejudice is real, its consequences are severe and that something like this should never happen again.

“People were stripped of their liberty and property at a time when bigotry prevailed and the Constitution was scrapped and Americans lost their way,” Speier said. “This memorial should remind us how important it is for all of us to enjoy the freedoms of this country. Something like this should never happen again.”

Speier — who is retiring this year — compared the internment of Japanese Americans with the cruel treatment of Mexican immigrants at the border,

“I was like ‘No, why would I?” San-Chez said.

“And they’re like ‘Because, they’re not closing Westlake.’ ” which she witnessed while on a congressional trip to Department of Homeland Security camps where asylum-seekers were kept in deplorable, freezing conditions.

“I looked into a cell filled with children and looked at a little girl who was balling,” Speier said. “People were imprisoned here in a racetrack, in stables. Many of our friends and colleagues are descendants of people who were interned here.

“This memorial should serve as a daily reminder we will not tolerate this in

Keith Brown, Oakland Education Association president.

America.” The new memorial is the first installation of its size dedicated to internment victims. The committee that organized it began its work 10 years ago with the installation of a photography exhibit featuring the work of Lange and Paul Kitagaki Jr. Inside BART station

Located inside the San Bruno BART Station, once the site of the detention center, the exhibit showcases Lange’s historical photos of the mass incarceration of Japanese Amer- members have visited the teachers. icans on the West Coast alongside Kitagaki’s contemporary images that include some of Lange’s original subjects from 1942. tation.

Standing beside two pictures of her mother at the BART station Friday — one of her as a young child at Tanforan and another depicting her at an old age — former South San Francisco Mayor Karyl Matsumoto remembered her time at Manzanar, one of the 10 American concentration camps where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated from March 1942 to November 1945.

Like about 100 other chil- dren at Manzanar, Matsumoto was orphaned and adopted by Lillian and Harry Matsumoto after the war’s end. She said internment “broke” her adoptive father, and many of her other family members also su ered from the post-traumatic stress of internment.

“I was imprisoned at Manzanar, but my grandparents, aunts and uncles were here at Tanforan,” Matsumoto said. “I’ve been in this committee since the get-go, and it’s been a hard sell from the beginning. It was little notice and BART finally in their infinite wisdom came and gave us the green light. It means so much.”

Matsumoto, painting a picture of her family’s struggles during the ’40s, said that it’s unimaginable to sit at home with less than a month to pack all your things or sell them for pennies on the dollar without knowing where you’re going or whether you’d ever return to your home.

“To come here and see that you’d be kept in horse tables, it was just heartbreaking,” Matsumoto said.

With Asian hate crimes increasing across the country and particularly in the Bay Area, Matsumoto said she hopes that people will learn from the past and keep atrocities from being committed again toward minority groups.

“Thirty years, ago people didn’t know about this or didn’t want to hear it. It’s unconscionable,” Matsumoto said. “History tends to repeat itself, but I hope it won’t.” lives in the line for all of us.” in the community who have stopped by to visit over the past week and a half.

“This kind of stu means the world to me,” San-Chez said, adding that they are a liaison for LGBTQ+ students at the school, and students often come to them to share their new pronouns or open up to them about their own struggles.

The night before, in a heated, hourslong meeting, the Oakland Unified school board voted to close seven schools, merge two others and remove sixth-eighth grade levels from another two schools. The board cut down the list of affected schools from 16 to 11 — leaving Westlake Middle School o the list for closure. But it didn’t appease the two teachers.

San-Chez said a group of students asked him after the vote, “Are you eating yet? You’re not going to stop?”

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The four buildings total a combined 231,700 square feet, according to information provided by commercial property listing services.

“Yeah, that’s a small win for sure,” San-Chez told the students. But he added, “Say that we were in slave times and we were slaves here at Westlake and then we got free, but we knew that there will still other slaves in other places. Are we just going to let them live the life because we already knew it? Is that fair to them?”

The momentum against the closures shows no signs of slowing down. Oakland Tech students staged a walkout protesting the school closures Friday. The Oakland Education Association already is taking legal action against Oakland Unified “to prevent the rushed and unnecessary closure of schools serving majority Black students” and hinted at a possible teachers strike.

“We respect their decision to use the tactic of a hunger strike to be able to keep our schools open,” said

San Jose-based Synaptics and Campbell-based South Bay Development also struck a deal whereby the tech company would be able to continue to occupy space at the just-purchased property. The Synaptics world headquarters are located at 1251 McKay.

During the 12 months

During the first 10 days of their strike, San-Chez and Omolade said they wouldn’t eat until the school board relents and saves all Oakland schools from closure.

Now they say they’ll end their strike if Gov. Gavin Newsom, Superintendent Kyla Johnson-Trammell and the entire school board meet with them, according to a news release they sent Thursday.

Earlier in the week, Joshua Daniels, a chief governance o cer for the district, sent the teachers a letter on the district’s behalf urging them to end the strike. The teachers burned the letter, adding that it doesn’t equate to a face-to-face meeting.

John Sasaki, a spokesman for the district, said in an email that JohnsonTrammell plans to meet with the teachers “soon.” He said that the superintendent previously tried to call them by phone but did not reach them. Some school board that ended in December 2021, Synaptics earned $142.5 million on revenue of $1.45 billion, according to the Yahoo Finance site. During the company’s 12-month fiscal year that ended in June 2021, it earned $79.6 million on revenue of $1.34 billion.

The tech company

Newsom’s o ce on Friday did not respond to a question about whether he planned to meet with the teachers.

“We have no update to share at this time,” said Alex Stack, a spokesman for the governor’s o ce.

In addition to the meeting, the teachers calling for Newsom to put an immediate stop to school closures in OUSD by putting a line item in his budget to repay the remainder of OUSD’s outstanding $100 million state loan or cancel the remainder of the loan, among many other demands.

Dr. Rupa Marya, an associate professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and faculty director of the Do No Harm Coalition, has been providing the teachers with medical services since their first day of the hunger strike.

She’s worried about their condition, she said in a video on Instagram on Friday, and urged the governor to respond to the teachers’ invi- agreed to lease o ces in the property for 12 years, according to a document filed with the county. Synaptics intends to occupy about 115,000 square feet, the property records show. Synaptics also obtained an option to extend the term of the lease.

San Jose and Silicon Val-

“We’re on day 11 now. And André and Moses, their health condition is getting worse every day,” she said. Newsom was in Oakland on Wednesday, but he did not meet with them.

“We know you were here the other day. We know you’ve heard of us. We ask you to join us and break bread with us,” Omolade, who has 4-year-old and 6-year-old children, said in the same video. “We actually desire to eat but are putting ourselves through this because the system has consistently shown us that you all don’t care about us.”

Earlier in the week, Omolade’s medical team sent him to the hospital for one night.

When he found out had to go to the hospital, he said: “I understood the risk. I accept the death in this.”

Board Director Mike Hutchinson, who voted against the school closures, said Wednesday that he’s worried for the teachers’ health and safety.

“They decided to put their ley overall have become hotbeds for property purchases by investors who see a big upside in the region’s tech hubs. Some of those deals led to big new development projects.

A few blocks away from the just-bought buildings, Bridge Development Partners has proposed con -

Oakland City Council Pro Tem Sheng Thao called them “heroes,” adding, “but I want them to be safe.” struction of a vast industrial and business park totaling 719,400 square feet on sites that are along Qume Drive and Commerce Drive in San Jose.

Some people have questioned why the teachers think a hunger strike is the best option to fight back and ask what they expect district o cials to do about the budget deficit and financial woes if it cannot close underenrolled schools. Both teachers have said this is the way to stop the district’s threats to disinvest in schools with many Black and Brown students.

Despite the backlash and calls to stop, San-Chez and Omolade aren’t stepping down from their hunger strike. On Friday afternoon, they gathered with Omolade’s kids, families, students and community members on the school lawn who were playing, eating and painting murals to keep them company.

“The commitment is strong and there is no regret. This is for the children,” Omolade said.

In August 2021, Bridge paid $134 million for the north San Jose sites. It disclosed its development plans a few months later.