uNCovered 3rd

Being from a neighborhood as mine which is now predominantly Latino with the roots of a gentrified working class small town into its future plans of becoming a venture capitalist's dream. A city which is only 2/3 of a mile in square footage (if I'm not mistaken) being colonized from a hotbed of history for many blacks, Latinos, and Polynesians alike into a manufactured city. Destroying the majority of the small businesses in our community to build one hell of a four-star hotel that I am sure has driven up the property taxes in my area tremendously. Every time I have returned home from college in Maryland to comeback and find out another one of the few small business owners in my town have been bought out to be replaced with a conglomerate owned chain store. There was once a auto parts store called Tadlock's in my town. I come back home last summer from college to find that it has now been turned into an Autozone. I walked into the store to see if anything has been changed; nothing different about the store other than better lightning and some Autozone promotional items everywhere.

And it just gets worse. I now see that the city has plans to build a marina where there are also many other small businesses that will be no longer every soon. This marina will have any restuarants, shops, and such that I'm sure will include Starbuck's, Panera Bread, and other various chain restaurants. Wow, I can only imagine what this will do for the already ridiculously inflated prices of real estate in East Palo Alto, California. All of the places that were once parts of the culture in East Palo Alto and even my side of the neighborhood, Belle Haven of Menlo Park, have been destroyed to build Starbuck's, Ikea, Home Depot, Four Seasons, etc. If at all the peninsula of the San Francisco Bay Area (San Mateo County) wasn't corporate enough, the few neighborhoods such as mine that had immense roots of culture and tradition have been turned into a cash cow for venture capitalists. Building plush and lavish manufactured homes and condos to drive up the cost of blue collar citizens' property taxes is putting a strangle hold around our citizens' necks. Many people can not afford to live in East Palo Alto any longer, and have moved to areas of the Central Valley such as Stockton and Modesto where the cost of living is much cheaper. In twenty years, when I bring my kids back to my neighborhood to show them the place that molded me into the upstanding young Black man that I am; they won't believe that this small 2/3 of a square mile was a working class city. Many of the places I used to play and eat at in this town will no longer be here, and they will laugh at me thinking that I have lied about the neighborhood I so loved to say I grew up in. As much as East Palo Alto has been given a bad dose of news headlines slated with murder and drug problems, let's not forget about programs such as College Track, EPA Can Do, and OICW that are shining examples of positivity in East Palo Alto. The gentrification must stop!