Why the Future of San José's Flea Market Could Be an Abandoned Landfill

Lilia Gaspar moved into her house next to the Singleton Road landfill in San José when she was 6 years old in the early 1970s. Her parents were farmworkers – her father came to California through the Bracero Program in 1951. She still remembers how the block looked during her youth.

“It was the city dump and the recycling center right behind us,” Gaspar said. “Cherry orchards were over here, where Lantern Way is, that used to be all cherry orchards.”

Residential and commercial developments gobbled up most centrally located parcels in Silicon Valley, but the 90-acre landfill on Singleton Road has sat virtually untouched since it closed in the late 1970s.

For decades, Gaspar has watched the high flames from the landfill’s methane stacks burn in the night sky.

Now, the drying brush along Singleton Road could become a veritable field of dreams for the vendors at the legendary San José Berryessa Flea Market. The market, known as La Pulga, is set to close in the coming years.

City officials acknowledge the challenges of turning a landfill into a landmark, but they see Singleton Road as uniquely suited for a sprawling bazaar housing hundreds of small businesses that are in need of a new place to sell their goods.

“That is probably the only site that I know of right now in San José where we could keep everybody together,” said Nanci Klein, the city’s director of Economic Development & Cultural Affairs, at a meeting of flea market vendors in June. “But it’s far from a given.”

As part of a deal to redevelop the current market site on Berryessa Road, the owners of the flea market and the city are putting $7.5 million into a fund aimed at helping vendors when the market closes, which could come as soon as 2025.

The goal is to mitigate the effects of what would be a massive displacement of at least 460 small businesses. By comparison, the Westfield mall in San Francisco housed around 50 stores when its well-publicized closure was announced.

On Thursday evening, an advisory group of flea market vendors will review an analysis of potential future market sites prepared by a city consultant. The firm identified eight future sites and designated five as “more viable.”

They include the Singleton landfill, the former Sears store at Eastridge Center, the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds and a small piece of land on the current market site. The fifth option would be to help individual vendors set up shop in vacant storefronts throughout the city.

On the meeting’s agenda, only the Singleton Road landfill is singled out for discussion. Of the five sites, it’s also the only one owned by the city that could potentially keep the market whole in the future.

“That’s our north star for the Vendor Association, right? Advocating and fighting for a whole relocated spot,” said Roberto Gonzalez, president of the Berryessa Flea Market Vendors Association.

Gonzalez, a member of the advisory group, preferred casting a wide net for future sites, and not zeroing in on one replacement location too soon. But the Singleton parcel, he said, “obviously is attractive because it’s a large piece of land [and] San José doesn’t really have anything like that around.”

From the mid-1960s until the late 1970s, the land was home to private and municipal dumps. Problems quickly piled up. The Mercury News in San José documented resident complaints about dust control and fears about the landfill contaminating local groundwater.

“The city landfill on Singleton Road was cited for not properly covering refuse, having a history of fire problems and not controlling access by the public,” read an article from October 1980.

Over the ensuing decades, the land was imagined as a future golf course, a methane power plant and a recreational sports complex, none of which panned out. It sits mostly vacant now, apart from the flare stacks burning off methane — and several roosters being raised for cockfighting that city inspectors stumbled across last year.

The land still holds value: A 2008 city estimate pegged the site’s worth at up to $57 million. It sits along Capitol Expressway and is less than two miles from Highway 101. The size of the site would allow vendors to relocate together, and potentially recreate the cross-pollination of shoppers that takes place at La Pulga. By contrast, the future market space envisioned for the current flea market site (if the current owners find a willing developer) would only have room for some vendors.

“Retail is most successful when there is a critical mass of compatible retailers located in the same place,” consultants write in the alternative site presentation to the advisory group. “A smaller market could still succeed, but would need to offer something special or different to attract shoppers and generate sufficient revenue for vendors to make a profit.”

The methane releases at the Singleton site are unlikely to pose a threat to merchants and shoppers in an open-air market, said Gabriel Filippelli, executive director of the Indiana University Environmental Resilience Institute. The flaring is a method of managing the gas releases that occur as bacteria consume the materials in the landfill over time.

“In general, this kind of reuse — reusing the surface of the landfill for another activity — is viable, and it’s done in a lot of other places, and it can be safe,” said Filippelli, who reviewed the city’s quarterly inspection reports for KQED.

A top concern for developing the site, Filippelli added, is ensuring the landfill’s structural integrity in case of an earthquake.

“You always have to remember that you are sitting on a pile of material that has a potential to release toxins,” he said. “So, you have to keep monitoring it, you have to keep checking it, and of course, if there’s any seismic disruption or digging or trenching, you have to pay extra special care.”

The alternative site analysis lays out additional concerns: a long public process for development, regulatory hurdles and “significant site work.”

“There’s a heck of a lot to think about if this site could be made to be a home for the vendors,” said Klein, with the city’s Economic Development and Cultural Affairs department, in June.

The city will also need to convince residents near the Singleton landfill that the flea market would be a positive addition to the Seven Trees neighborhood.

From her perch next to the landfill, Gaspar said she didn’t like the idea of La Pulga coming to the neighborhood. For one, she’s worried about the rush of customers it could bring to the area.

“We already have enough traffic here, it’s too congested,” she said.

Seven Trees resident Alie Victorine also had concerns — about the traffic, noise and potential illegal parking by market customers.

But she described the area around the landfill as ripe for attention and investment from the city.

“This is the area that we are hoping to really tackle next year, to get the city to do something about it, to improve the look so that the neighbors aren’t dealing with the crime issues and the blight issues for this area,” she said.

Gaspar is not getting her hopes up for a transformation. In 2000, San José voters passed Measure P, a bond to fund a proposed sports complex on the Singleton landfill.

“Everybody was excited, everybody went for it and everything,” she said. “And to this day, we’re still waiting.”