Protesters stormed a private event Friday morning at the Fairmont Hotel, disrupting a room full of influential city leaders, developers and stakeholders discussing the future of downtown San Jose.
The event, hosted by the Silicon Valley Business Journal in downtown San Jose, was attended by nearly 400 people Friday morning and featured about a half dozen panelists, including developer Case Swenson, real estate professional Erik Hayden and Alexa Arena, Google’s director of real estate development. Tickets to the event cost $155, according to the business journal.
About 20 protesters entered the hotel’s ballroom as Mayor Sam Liccardo, the event’s keynote speaker, began speaking. After about 10 minutes of chanting phrases like ‘Google is not welcome here’ and ‘we won’t be displaced! We won’t be replaced!’, event organizers gave a microphone to one of the protesters and allowed them to answer a few questions over their concerns about development within the city.
“Clearly they were frustrated,” said J. Jennings Moss, the editor and general manager of the Silicon Valley Business Journal. “And so my point was to at least try to have a conversation and get their point of view to the audience that was there to listen.”
After about 20 minutes, a group of police officers entered the ballroom and escorted the protesters out of the hotel. Mayor Liccardo resumed the stage to finish his speech and the event went on with its planned panelist discussions.
The protesters — associated with the group Serve the People San Jose — said that they were concerned about the event’s lack of inclusiveness and about how development within the city was causing gentrification, skyrocketing property values and an exponential increase in homelessness.
“Community members heard about this a few days ago and thought that it was really gross, honestly, that people had to pay a lot of money to get in and they weren’t including the views of the people who are actually going to be affected by all of this,” Sophia Smith, a Santa Clara University student living in San Jose said.
The project of greatest interest and concern, though, lies with Mountain-View based Google.
Google has submitted plans to build a transit village just east of Diridon Station that would create 6.5 million square feet of office space; up to 300 hotel rooms; 3,000 to 5,000 residential units; 300,000 to 500,000 square feet of commercial and active space, including retail and restaurants; up to 100,000 square feet of event space; and up to 800 rooms that would be set aside for visiting Google employees, according to project plans submitted to the city.
