2014-2024: ten years of community advocacy
Guest Author: Ener Chiu, one of the Co-founders of Friends of Lincoln Square Park and the Oakland Chinatown Coalition reflects on our progress towards building a new center, ten years to the month after the City Council approved the Lake Merritt Station Area Plan.
The City of Oakland and BART began a planning process for the Chinatown neighborhood surrounding the Lake Merritt BART Station in 2008. Cities rely on plans like these as a tool to identify priorities and define the types and density of land uses that will be allowed in a neighborhood over the following generation.
Our community remembered the last time public agencies planned our neighborhood without our stakeholder involvement, and it resulted in the cratering of residential Chinatown in favor of freeways, transit, and county administrative buildings - services that benefited the region without improving or making room for us.
And so over the following years, we organized a parallel community driven plan that put forward 9 consensus principles of what new development should include for the benefit of neighborhood residents, merchants, and cultural institutions. One the 9 principles explicitly called out the need for a public community facilities and open space - a direct reference to the need for modernization and expansion of Lincoln Recreation Center. It has had critical deferred maintenance and was and is still too small to accommodate the many thousands of new residents anticipated by the Specific Plan.
Survey results from Chinatown residents at the time, including children and seniors, ranked "parks and recreation centers" as the number one aspect (out of eighteen other criteria) that makes an area a healthy place to live, work, and do business. The plan acknowledged the need to improve the center.
“There would be a need for additional recreational and educational facilities to serve the population growth in the Plan vision. As part of the vision for Upper Chinatown, the Plan includes improvements to Lincoln Square Park, which is a multigenerational-use center that is often over capacity, with buildings in need of renovations and improvements.”
- Lake Merritt Station Area Plan (3-10)
The Specific Plan was officially adopted by the Oakland City Council six years later in December 2014, ten years ago this year. The implementation plan included improvements to Lincoln Rec Center, which was ranked by Oakland Chinatown Coalition members even back then as a top community facilities priority. This plan follows other City actions and commitments to expand the rec center dating back to 1996.
Lincoln Park improvement planning and advocacy started in Spring 2016 as community members like Thomas Wong and APEN organizer Kenneth Tang spoke out at public meetings, sharing the crowded situation at the park, calling for a more equitable distribution of resources, and asking for Lincoln to get our fair share of the CIP investments and prioritization for funding and bond allocations.
Lincoln Rec is such a jewel to Chinatown and the whole City…but Lincoln Rec has been overlooked and underfunded for improvement, for years. - Kenneth Tang, March 22, 2016
Flyers from our first Lincoln Summer Nights
Later that year, Lincoln Seniors spoke out at a June City Council meeting emphasizing why investments and expansions are needed in Lincoln Park facilities. Our first Lincoln Summer Nights events were held that summer to provide safe evening programming for all ages, and draw broader attention to the rec center needs for major investment.
Friends of Lincoln Square Park was subsequently founded in early 2017 with the intent to help actualize the community desire for a new and improved Rec Center.
We started this campaign because we believed that community members deserve a modern facility where they can gather, meet new people across age and social background, play with one another, learn new skills, teach and share their special talents to others, and take shelter in emergencies. We know that people who visit Lincoln from other neighborhoods and from other cities on a daily basis to meet their friends, also stay to shop, eat, attend their medical appointments, and contribute to cultural programs.
A decade later, we remain committed to building what we planned for, so that the next generation of Oakland Chinatown is resilient far into the 21st century.