With a Japantown family-run business on the brink, a debate over historic preservation has San Jose in a headlock — preserve the past at a cost, or chase the future at a loss.
A series of debt-accruing business choices threaten Japantown’s well-known Trigg family with the prospect of losing their home and businesses. They own Jtown Pizza Co., which closed last week, as well as several other neighborhood food and beverage stops including Spread, 7Bamboo karaoke bar and Jack’s bar. The family said their problems started with city red tape over historic buildings. A blaze of contention ensued. Now the area’s councilmember — and Mayor Matt Mahan — are getting involved.
Business leaders citywide say a heavy-handed approach to historic restrictions threaten the very buildings meant to be protected — lining the streets with vacant facades without a cost-effective path for commercial interests to repurpose them. Preservationists agree the ordeal warrants another look at regulations, but don’t believe they’re entirely to blame. Moreover, they remain protective of policies fending off the demolition of San Jose’s heritage.
Yet almost everyone agrees on the need to strike a balance, and that the city office charged with walking this tightrope is spread thin. Of roughly 300 people in the city’s planning and building department, just one full-time employee is devoted to historic resources.
“I don’t think having more preservation planners at the city would solve everything, but if you don’t invest in preservation infrastructure while still having preservation rules — it is a recipe for frustration,” Ben Leech, executive director of the Preservation Action Council of San Jose, told San José Spotlight.
City planning officials could not immediately provide data on how many historic buildings are vacant in San Jose. They said they don’t believe any historic buildings are condemned, but would need to further verify.
Tamiko Rast, president of the Japantown Business Association, said she has a hard time believing that. She provided San José Spotlight a list she compiled of historic neighborhood buildings in derelict condition, including the old Filipino Presbyterian Church on North Fifth Street and the old Nishioka Building on North Sixth Street.
“The buildings are by definition condemned — uninhabitable, unusable, unsafe and not to code,” Rast told San José Spotlight. “To claim otherwise gaslights the Japantown community and everyone who lives adjacent to these buildings.”
No easy way in
Neighborhood leader Kelli Saito Martines has endeavored for years to help restore the historic Japantown home of former Mayor and Congressman Norman Mineta, the namesake of San Jose Mineta International Airport who led the city from 1971 through 1975. The Wesley United Methodist Church, where Martines serves as director of administration, purchased the home in July 2024 for renovations.
“What we did not fully understand at that time was that there are additional requirements mandated for structures listed on the city of San Jose’s Historic Resources Inventory,” Martines told San José Spotlight. “Fortunately, we have had the resources to manage our Mineta House remodel project, but we do have serious concerns about the feasibility of future investments and improvements to our Japantown community.”
Historic protections are central to the mission of Vanessa Hatakeyama, executive director of the Japanese American Museum of San Jose. But even she has frustrations with how businesses are forced to wait multiple years for permits to renovate.
“Preservation is not the enemy. But I think the problem we’re running into is the execution of the policies,” Hatakeyama told San José Spotlight. “Your average small business owner simply doesn’t have the means to comply with the city’s practices and procedures around historic structures, and that creates a situation we’ve seen with Japantown with buildings that remain closed and fall into disrepair. It’s such a high barrier to repair and restore them.”
Another point of contention is transparency. When the Triggs bought three properties in 2022 for $5 million, they said information about the historic designation was withheld from them. By that point, they had already started renovations and said they were forced to wait out permitting and construction delays.
It’s prompted questions about whether the city could do more to notify property owners.
“The fact that this wasn’t shared raises serious questions — ones I hope are resolved for the Trigg family,” San Jose Chamber of Commerce President Leah Toenisketter told San José Spotlight.
City Hall officials say they’re “saddened” by the Triggs’ restaurant closure — but argue it’s up to property owners to do their research.
“The city maintains an active Historic Resources Inventory list on our website available to anyone,” city planning spokesperson Marika Krause told San José Spotlight. “However, it is the owner’s responsibility to check the list for property status.”
Krause said there are various junctures in the city planning and permitting process that raise owners’ attention.
“Preliminary permit (applications) allow property owners to receive advice from the city if their idea or project is feasible,” Krause said.
Preservation vs. progress
Kelly Snider, a land use consultant and San Jose State University urban planning professor, said preservation has more than enough champions in town. She argues the pendulum has swung too far in that direction.
“The amount of good that’s coming from preserving our history is not sufficient to offset the bad that’s coming from chasing a family’s dreams away,” Snider told San José Spotlight. “If having a historic building like Cielito Lindo is so vital, then why isn’t the collective taxpayer paying for that? Why is it falling on that one property owner having to pay for the special sand-finished stucco or a certain kind of wood?”
District 3 Councilmember Anthony Tordillos and Mayor Mahan have publicly said they plan to take a closer look at the city’s historic resource rules. So has Leech, as the leader of the city’s premier historic advocacy group.
“I’ll be looking into how we can better balance taking care of our historic buildings with taking care of our small business owners,” Mahan wrote on X.
Leech wants to better incentivize adaptive reuse in favor of demolition. He points to Los Angeles, where officials this year approved an expansion of a policy streamlining the conversion of existing buildings into housing.
“We all know the lifespan or expectancy of a vacant structure is short and getting shorter,” Leech said. “Here’s a case where someone (the Triggs) had a good plan for buildings that really needed investment. Where did they get bogged down and how can we as a city figure out incentives to make the historic significance of a building something that would be celebrated instead of feared?”
Still, Leech stands by the process. He said the historic building code gives projects more leeway than many architects are aware of, and there are financial incentives — such as historic preservation tax credits that often go unused.
Leech cautions against a course correction that narrows the city’s historic property list.
“I take issue with the mindset of, ‘Well, these aren’t important buildings, so why are we having this discussion?’ I do think they are,” Leech said. “I don’t want any streamlining in the process to result in a scenario where we won’t know what we lose until it’s too late.“
Snider agrees the pendulum shouldn’t swing too far either way.
“But the slider bar has to move,” she said. “The only way to measure the success of our regulations is looking around our communities, and saying, ‘Does this look as good as it can be?’ Well, when you lift your head up and look out the window, and what you see out there are vacant buildings and families who can’t afford to live in their homes, your policy is not working. It’s not balanced.”
Contact Brandon Pho at [email protected] or @brandonphooo on X.
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