A survey conducted by New America Media shows that people of color do care about the preservation of public lands. This is confirmed by the fact that Fremont’s Mission Peak is a favorite place for Asian Americans to hike, and its popularity is causing problems. The city of Fremont has decided to place restrictions on parking, leaving certain areas of the neighborhood near the Stanford Avenue trail head available for parking only by residents on weekends and holidays. The affected area is shown within the yellow border in the picture above.
Certain streets are available all the time as are the spots near the Ohlone trail head. Specifically for the weekend, the following are available:
- Stanford Ave staging area entrance – 40 spaces
- Antelope and Vineyard Avenue – 150 spaces
- Ohlone College – 900 spaces
If you look at the comments from our post on the crowding problems, people on both sides of the issue feel pretty strongly, and to no surprise, the Fremont City Council’s decision raised mixed feelings.
Although Number Two Son recently went to Mission Peak with his friends, I wondered if it had become any less popular with Asian Americans since I last wrote about it two years ago. I quickly found a planned Asian American meetup that involved hiking Mission Peak. I’ll have to let my kids know about the parking changes. The resident permit system goes into effect on October 1, 2016.
Because I had grown up in neighboring Newark and then lived in Fremont California for many years before moving to San Jose, I was intensely curious to read what Trespassers? Asian Americans and the Battle for Suburbia by Willow S. Lung-Amam had to say about Asian Americans life in suburban Fremont. Would it present anything that I didn’t know already? After reading the book, I was surprised at how much was new to me – primarily the amount of resistance Fremont’s Asian American community encountered when it starting asserting itself in areas ranging from education to shopping centers to housing.