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Challenge: Make a boring story interesting. As editor of a 22,000-circulation newsletter for the Sierra Club, a nationwide environmental organization, I rewrote at least some of almost everything submitted by volunteer writers. I rewrote this completely.Publication: The Loma Prietan, the 22,000-circulation newspaper for the Silicon Valley-area chapter of the Sierra Club.

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Vision of Community in East Palo Alto

In the 2.5-square-mile city of East Palo Alto, where others see only poverty and land ripe for development, Trevor Burrowes sees history and possibilities for a renewed community.

“Look at this beautiful land,” said Burrowes, founder and executive director of the East Palo Alto Historical and Agricultural Society. “Rich soil, lots of canopy oak trees… This is what got me involved.”

His 80-member group was founded in 1990 and borrowed its motto, “One acre and independence,” from a utopian community that flourished in East Palo Alto beginning in 1916. Since then, the Weeks Poultry Colony’s original 600 acres have been pinched by development. But greenhouses, grassy one-acre lots, old oaks, and small farms still make the neighborhood feel rural.

Burrowes’s society tries to carry on the Weeks tradition by promoting local farming. The society helps locals run their own or community gardens, and in 1993 it started the East Palo Alto Farmers’ Market, which sells produce from local growers.

The group now envisions something even bigger. With help from the National Park Service and Urban Ecology, the group has drawn up a plan it hopes will lift the community out of its chronic high unemployment and poverty.

“We hope this place becomes the organic produce capital of the Bay Area,” said Burrowes.

Alongside the farms, he sees the “Weeks Neighborhood,” a self-sufficient, “green” village developed carefully and selectively. Businesses would concentrate close to the city center, the Four Corners (University and Bay roads) and along some already-widened streets: Capitol, Pulgas, Clarke, and Cooley.

Nearby housing, built for a diversity of income levels, would enable flexible grouping of back lots.

“The beauty of it is the flexibility and range of incomes we can accommodate,” said Burrowes, “as opposed to the housing going in now that are all of one stamp, in which only one kind of person can live.”

Others disagree. “‘One Acre and Independence’” won’t fly today,” said East Palo Alto’s community development director, William Howard. “Agriculture contributes absolutely nothing to the city coffers.”

Howard favors Gateway 101, the first of three redevelopment projects in East Palo Alto. It is to be located at the south edge of the proposed Weeks Neighborhood. The city of East Palo Alto expects to complete agreements with Home Depot as anchor tenant and five other retailers by next January. Street widening and other “improvements” are to begin this summer.

“To survive we have to broaden the economic base. That base can be broadened through Gateway 101,” said Howard.

“[East Palo Alto] is about the only place left on this Peninsula you can find land in large acreage for industrialization,” he said. “We guess-timate that Gateway 101 will [bring in] $1.5 to $2 million dollars to city coffers.”

Plugging the “leakage” of income to businesses outside the city, which Howard said exceeds 75 percent, will provide more local jobs and tax revenue, he said.

Myrtle Walker, a member of the East Palo Alto City Council and chair of the city’s Public Works and Transportation Committee, thinks Gateway 101 can turn the city around. And its location next to a freeway makes sense. “We’ve got the pollution and noise and traffic already,” she said.

But she said she also wants to preserve as much of the land as possible with controlled building, particularly in the Weeks Poultry area.

“East Palo Alto is the last bastion in San Mateo and Santa Clara Counties where there is land, where there is some open space, where you can have a garden if you want to,” she said.

The price for development will be high. Gateway 101’s environmental impact report foresees displacement of residents and businesses, loss of 33 acres of commercial nurseries, a net loss of 7.8 acres of open space, and increasing already-high levels of traffic and air pollution.

Burrowes doesn’t buy it. “They think that land is an empty slate with no importance or distinguishing features, just a place to go and create a new thing. East Palo Alto doesn’t need to be torn down and started all over again. It just needs careful nurturing and refurbishing of what’s already here,” he said.

“We’re trying to get the community to believe in itself,” he said.

Burrowes hopes his plan will be integrated into East Palo Alto’s general plan by September.

What You Can Do

  • Take a tour. Call the East Palo Alto Historical and Agricultural Society at 415/329-0294 to arrange a tour.
  • Become a volunteer. The society needs volunteers to do such things as lead walking tours, do office work, identify and inventory heritage trees, write grant proposals, organize fundraising, and help run the community garden starting May 7.
  • Call the city. If you’re concerned about development in East Palo Alto, call city manager Jerome Groomes or project manager Leonard Randolph. Reach both at 415/853-3100.
  • Join [excised]. Help support local agriculture.