We’ve just hit 2,000 signatures. This is more than a number. It’s proof that people care deeply about what happens to North Sunnyvale. About fairness. About dignity. About the right to stay in the neighborhoods we’ve helped build for generations.
This was never only about saving retail. It began as a stand for working-class, immigrant, and longtime residents who have been overlooked, underfunded, and pushed to the margins for too long. It’s about our right to exist in the places we call home.
Fair Oaks Plaza and the Lakewood Shopping Center are more than commercial spaces. They’re lifelines. Places where families buy groceries, grab a meal, and run into neighbors. Like so many essential places in working-class neighborhoods, they’re now under threat.
We’ve seen the playbook before.
First comes disinvestment.
Then comes the bulldozer.
Then come hollow promises of “revitalization.”
What’s happening here is not just a one-off planning decision. It is part of a larger pattern where redevelopment is used to quietly push people out. Injustice doesn’t always arrive with sirens or headlines. Sometimes it’s buried in zoning codes, “blight” studies, and planning documents. It shows up when a grocery store closes and nothing replaces it. When small businesses disappear overnight. When city leaders say “community benefit” but leave out the community itself.
But this time, people are speaking up. And others are listening.
More than 2,000 of us have already signed. Hundreds more have shown up at meetings, emailed councilmembers, talked to neighbors, and shared their stories. Local media is paying attention. Just today, our fight made the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. The pressure is growing, and decision-makers are starting to notice.
We are not just fighting to keep a grocery store. We are demanding a future that includes us. A future where immigrant families, small business owners, elders, and longtime residents are not treated as obstacles to someone else’s profits, but as the very people who make this city what it is.
Thank you to everyone who has signed, shared, and stood with us.
If you haven’t yet, now is the time.
Sign the petition.
Share it with your neighbors.
Show up. Speak out.
This is what solidarity looks like.
We’ve built this momentum together, and we are far from done.
Standing together,
North Sunnyvale Community