 |
| Part of the Japan Center Mall is designed to look like an alley in Japan. |
Dozens of small businesses, including restaurants, souvenir shops and mom-and-pop boutiques, in San Francisco's Japantown mall are expecting to receive eviction notices any day now.
Kristy Wang, a community planning policy director with the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) told KQED that keeping ethnic businesses alive in these neighborhoods is essential in preserving a cultural home base for communities, even if the former residents move away.
Like many small businesses, the more than 50 businesses inside the two-block long, indoor two-story mall, have been severely impacted by the safety measures employed to combat the coronavirus pandemic.
The mall, the core of the Japanese American cultural district known as Japantown, is run by two landlords, according to KQED News.
In addition to the rent, businesses must pay the common area maintenance fees that have more than doubled for some tenants since a turnover in property management in 2018, according to KQED.
Exacerbating to their plight, one of the landlords, Kinokuniya Bookstores of America, has been unresponsive to appeals from the tenants, says Diane Matsuda, a staff attorney with Asian Pacific Islander Legal Outreach (APILO), a nonprofit organization.
“The biggest challenge here is that you have two really big mega landlords and those mega landlords control a lot of the cultural and economic hub of Japantown,” says Matsuda.
“Should they not want to negotiate or have any kind of rent abatement ... you’re really talking about us losing literally a whole ethnic community that has been here since the start of the 19th century."
 |
| The Japan Center's Peace Pagoda is the backdrop to a street festival. |
Japantown used to cover a 40-block area in San Francisco. Japanese immigrants settled into the area after the 1906 earthquake. It was thriving community with a thriving commercial area, Japanese-language newspapers, Buddhist temples and churces. World War II changed all that when Americans of Japanese descent were incarcerated and ordered to live in the infamous internment camps.
With most of the residents gone, the commercial area remained and became a cultural hub for Japanese Americans, now spread out throughout Northern California. The Japan Center mall became the site of cultural celebrations and parades.
It grew into a thriving community that spanned about 40 blocks during its heyday until Executive Order 9066 during World War II swept Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans into internment camps.
Kristy Wang, a community planning policy director with the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) told KQED that keeping ethnic businesses alive in these neighborhoods is essential in preserving a cultural home base for communities, even if the former residents move away.
An effort is being made through the Board of Supervisors to extend the city's commercial eviction moratorium, which ended Monday (Sept. 14), but the results of that effort is uncertain as is the fate of the tenants of the mall.
No comments:
Post a Comment