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Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Center-ist: Recreation Specialist Nasario Gutierrez Jr., has worked at the Sherman Oaks Community Center for the past two years. The center's office is located next to the Korean American Community Services offices.
Community centers in District 6 are in short supply and in high demand
Council district is the city's only one without a multiservice center
By Kate Carter
As a community, the people of San Jose's District 6, including Willow Glen residents, benefit from living in one of the wealthiest of the city's districts, and having possibly the most active neighborhood associations of any of the city council districts.
But District 6 is the only district without its own multiservice community center. Located near the center of the city and already densely developed, the district has little room left over for the additional community space it needs. While the passage of Measure P by San Jose voters in November, authorized the parks and recreation department to spend money to alleviate the acknowledged problem, the solution still isn't clear and won't be implemented anytime soon.
Parks and recreation officials proposed that the Willows Senior Center be expanded into the district's multiservice center.
But not everyone supports that plan.
Terry Eberhardt, a deputy director of San Jose's department of parks and recreation in charge of neighborhood services, says the department is interested in looking at other options for a multiservice center in District 6.
"We need to look at all avenues at expanding service and expanding space," he says.
But there really aren't many spaces in District 6 where a new large multiservice center could go.
The lack of a large, multifunctional community center in District 6 goes back to earlier philosophies in the parks and recreation department that encouraged smaller community facilities to serve smaller geographic areas.
But smaller facilities are limited in the variety and amount of programs they can offer. About three years ago, the department decided to align itself more closely with the council districts and have a single large multiservice center serve an entire district and oversee programs at other smaller satellite centers within the district.
District 6, however, didn't have a facility that could do that. In general, the district stretches north-south from Interstate 880 to Capitol Expressway and east-west from Highway 87 to Winchester Boulevard.
The Willows Senior Center on Lincoln Avenue near Curtner Avenue was the district's largest facility, but its programming was primarily aimed at seniors. There are only a few parks in District 6, and some of those have small shelter buildings, but nothing large enough to house a major programming operation.
"We're really facility-poor in District 6," says Alan Tokunaga, the department's recreation supervisor for its facilities and programs in District 6. "The department knows of the problem, and by developing a strategic plan, they're trying to address it."
The city was renovating a multipurpose room at the site of the Sherman Oaks Elementary School in the Campbell Union School District to be leased by San Jose as a community center. But the single-room facility on the corner of Fruitdale Avenue and Sherman Oaks Drive was also not sufficient for a multiservice center and would be occupied primarily by another organization.
The new Hoover Community Center at the Historic Hoover Middle School site in the Rose Garden won't open until next year, and wouldn't have been large enough even if it had been available three years ago.
So the department chose to look outside District 6 for a community center "hub" to house staff and provide programs. The Gardner Community Center in San Jose's downtown District 3, located on W. Virginia Street, became District 6's multiservice center.
The department never planned that Gardner would be District 6's center forever. In its Greenprint plan, which outlines a series of capital improvements to city parks that will be funded in part by Measure P bonds, the department proposed that Willows Senior Center on Lincoln Avenue be expanded into District 6's multiservice center.
If all goes according to the plan, that won't happen until 2008 at the earliest. But not everyone thinks that expanding Willows is the right solution to the problem.
The parks and recreation department says District 6 needs more than 70 additional acres of community space to adequately serve a population expected to increase from 84,640 residents to 100,840 residents by 2020. Those residents will continue to suffer from a lack of space and programming that won't be resolved anytime soon.
Tokunaga is supposed to serve the District 6 community's parks and recreational needs, but he finds his job difficult because he's located at the small Gardner Community Center in District 3.
Tokunaga, a lifelong San Jose resident who started with the department in 1968, oversees all the programming at the centers in District 6 that is run by the two full-time staff persons at Gardner and Sherman Oaks community centers and a host of part-time staff.
His center, Gardner, will be expanded from its current 5,000-square-foot size to 12,000 square feet by Measure P funds. That doesn't come close to the 40,000-square-foot guideline parks and recreation has for its multiservice community centers and only approaches the 20,000-square-foot goal of its satellite centers.
And even if it was large enough, it would still be harder to coordinate programming for District 6 from outside the district's boundaries.
"We would still have the same problem of not being able to reach the heart of District 6," Tokunaga says.
Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer
Community Haven: The Willows Senior Center is not only a place where seniors gather to learn new skills, socialize or eat--it's also a great spot to just sit and read.
Willows Senior Center is on a site large enough to serve the needs of all District 6 residents. Department officials think it could be expanded to offer programming to people of all ages, not just seniors. The facility is currently 20,800 square feet, and there are plans to add about 20,000 additional square feet that would make it large enough to be a multiservice center.
"We are excited to be able to extend our services to the entire community," says Anthony Bryan, interim director of The Willows.
But Tokunaga says some Willows Center participants don't want to welcome more people to their facility, for fear they would lose space and have their own programming reduced.
Bryan says he doesn't know about that, but the addition won't happen for quite a few years, anyway.
Also, The Willows isn't centrally located in District 6, or near any major public transportation locations such as light rail lines.
Susan Price-Jang is a resident of District 6 in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood and works as the neighborhood services coordinator at Sherman Oaks Elementary School, right next door to the Sherman Oaks Community Center.
She says she's concerned about plans to locate the multiservice center for District 6 at the Willows, because it is so far from the mostly low-income residents of the Sherman Oaks community, who have a greater need for the services of a community center.
And she says the community isn't getting those services from the Sherman Oaks Community Center right in their neighborhood.
The problem, as Price-Jang sees it, is that the Sherman Oaks Community Center, while leased until 2023, by the city of San Jose from the Campbell Union School District, is largely occupied by Korean American Community Services. KACS is a nonprofit organization that provides services to seniors, youth and recent immigrants, mostly from the Korean community. KACS has a 25-year sublease for the center from the city, in exchange for the $50,000 it contributed to the center's renovation.
But the Sherman Oaks community is populated mostly by Latino and Vietnamese families, who are often low-income recent immigrants, Price-Jang says.
"This is where the need is, and it's largely Latino," Price-Jang says. "We need to have the needs of the community recognized. They're [San Jose city officials] not paying attention and they have no intention of listening."
Hwaja Choi is the executive director of KACS, which moved into the center when it opened in spring 1998. She says the programming her organization provides is important to the members of the county's Korean community and over half of them come from within San Jose. She also says that, because it's a nonprofit organization, KACS must provide its services, which include a daily senior lunch program, English as a second language classes and social services programs, to anyone who wants them.
KACS has access to two of the three partitioned areas of the center from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, and uses the whole center during its daily senior lunch.
The city provides after-school programs in the third area of the building after 3 p.m. and other classes in the evenings and weekends. But Price-Jang says the school district and the neighborhood thought they would be getting more use out of the building. She says if they had known they would have to share so much of it with KACS, they would not have agreed to lease it to San Jose.
Choi says she had understood KACS would be the primary user of the facility when they subleased it from the city. She says she was surprised when she heard they would only have two-thirds of the room, and she says now they use less than 50 percent of it.
"As soon as we moved in, there has always been this unsettling feeling with everybody involved," Choi says. "Sometimes there's conflict of spaces overlapping because we don't schedule ahead of time. We expect the two rooms to be for our own use."
Eberhardt, with the parks and recreation department, says the department is in discussion with the school district to expand the Sherman Oaks Center because the two-year-old facility is already in such high demand.
"To make Sherman Oaks happen took a lot of work by a lot of people," Eberhardt says. "We've maxed it out already."
But Dale Thurston, assistant superintendent for administrative services with the Campbell Union School District, says the district has the option of terminating the lease with the city in 2002. He says he will be meeting with the school board later in December, to begin to decide if they will terminate the lease, but he doesn't yet know what the board, or the school, wants to do.
Eberhardt says District 6 isn't under-served by community centers and programs, but it just lacks a big multiservice community center.
"I think what we're trying to do is maximize facilities," he says. "We're trying to place them where we have the most needs and where we have the space to do it."
District 6 recreation supervisor Tokunaga says the district is lacking in community space and programming.
"I don't know if there's going to be any real quick answer to this problem," he says. "Sharing it or leasing it is not the answer. We need something that is city-owned and in an ideal location. But you just can't get property cheap enough."
Sherman Oaks neighborhood activist Price-Jang says there has to be something the city can do to help her community get the services it thought it would already have by now.
"There's a problem with land, but the biggest problem is basically one of will," she says.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
