SGV Connect

This week Chris brings us a special feature interview with artist Isabel Pan. Pan is the artist in residence at C.A.S.A Zamora in El Monte. Her project has been a documentary-style, slice of life comic strip depicting the impact of sweatshop labor and refugee crises on the children of immigrants in the San Gabriel Valley.  Pan's subject is the son of a sweat shop worker, Denny. His parents came to...

This week's SGV Connect continues our theme of focusing in on various areas of the SGV for our podcast episodes by looking at the Greater Pasadena area. First, Damien and Chris traveled to El Sereno to meet with some of the Reclaimers , unhoused residents of El Sereno who moved into Caltrans owned properties during the pandemic. Benito, Sandra and Fanny return to SGV Connect (their first appearanc...

This week's SGV Connect is focusing on the election to replace Councilmember and Vice-Mayor Sasha Renée Pérez of Alhambra. Pérez has given up her seat to run for the State Senate.   Chris interviews  Nicolas Kiet Quach, the president of the Alhambra Library Board of Trustees. While only 18, Kiet Quach is no newcomer to politics having worked for and with Pérez. If you choose, you can read a transc...

We continue our tour through the San Gabriel Valley with an episode focused on the City of Glendora, known as the Heart of the Foothills. It might surprise you if you're not familiar with what's going on at this small suburban community, but Glendora is working hard to build out a bike network, calm traffic on its streets, build up a downtown in its 'village' area and continue to plan for the comi...

Welcome to the first SGV Connect podcast of 2024! We start our new year with the first in a new series that focuses on different regions and communities in the San Gabriel Valley and examines both the state of their mobility projects and cultural and community projects.   This week, both interviews were completed by Chris Greenspon. The first is with David Diaz, the executive director of Active SG...

Last Friday, Foothill Transit celebrated its 35th anniversary with a party in the parking lot of its West Covina headquarters. Joe Linton and Chris Greenspon were among those on-hand and they had a chance to catch up with a handful of people that helped shape Foothill Transit's past and will guide the agency into the future. Those short interviews are included in this podcast and include: Congress...

Jeanie Ward-Waller is not a household name in California, but until recently she may have had the most important job in the state as far as Streetsblog readers are concerned. Ward-Waller served as the Deputy Director of Planning and Multimodal Programs at Caltrans, where she not only oversaw many of the great programs that we regularly highlighted at Streetsblog; but also served as the internal wh...

This week's SGV Connect podcast is a special episode where the Streetsblog San Gabriel Valley team, Chris Greenspon, Joe Linton and Damien Newton, sit down and discuss the great success that was ArroyoFest 2023. All three were at the event but experienced it differently with Linton and his family biking the route, Newton completing the "Run the 110" 10k race and Greenspon walking along the 110 lat...

This week's SGV Connect Podcast looks backward at the first year of the GoSGV Bike Share program and looks forward to Halloween and ArroyoFest. First, we speak with Jose Jimenez, the education director for Active SGV about the GoSGV's first year, celebrated earlier this month. There are over 100 bikes being rented monthly at the moment and over 400 people took part in the program in its first year...

This week's SGV Connect breaks our regular mold as Streetsblog L.A. editor Joe Linton conducts both interviews on the past and future of ArroyoFest which returns at the end of this month, on Sunday October 29th when a portion of the I-110 will be closed to cars and open to other uses in the morning. First, Linton interviews Robert Gottlieb and Marcus Renner some of the leaders that brought Souther...

This week's SGV Connect features a pair of interviews that will change and improve the lives of residents of the San Gabriel Valley. First, we talk with Alhambra Councilmember Adele Andrade-Stadler. Andrade-Stadler is the winner of this year's Elected Official of the Year award given by ActiveSGV at their Noche de las Luminarias. You can read more about her award and her relationship with ActiveSG...

This week's SGV Connect focuses on two different parking programs in Pasadena. As the city closes in on approving its Strategic Parking Plan, we welcome retired UCLA economics professor and parking pricing guru Donald Shoup. Shoup's The High Cost of Free Parking which is still considered essential reading for urban planners decades after its original publication. He was also involved when Pasadena...

This week's SGV Connect Podcast is the second part of a two part series on housing and tenants issues in the San Gabriel Valley and features Connie Tamkin, the president of the San Gabriel Valley Community Land Trust. If you missed part one of the series with Allison Henry, one of the leaders of the San Gabriel Valley Tenants Council, you can find the audio and transcript here . As with the first...

This week's podcast is the first in a two-podcast mini-series looking at housing issues in the San Gabriel Valley. In this podcast, Damien and Chris talk to Allison Henry, an SGV housing justice organizer with LA Forward and co-founder of the San Gabriel Valley Tenants Alliance. In the podcast, we discuss the recent and long-term history of the battle for housing justice in the SGV and how local p...

On Saturday, the Gold Line Foothill Construction Authority is hosting a ceremony to commemorate the completion of the light rail track system for the 9.1-mile, four-station Foothill Gold Line light rail project from Glendora to Pomona. The ceremony is taking place this Saturday, June 24, 2023, at 9:30 a.m., at the D Street railroad crossing (north of Arrow Highway) in the city of La Verne. During...

In our first interview this week, Chris Greenspon interviews Nathan Allen, the owner of Underdog Bookstore in downtown Monrovia. In Nathan's own words, "Underdog Bookstore, targets specifically books by and about authors of color, as well as LGBT authors, who we consider underdogs, as well as local vendors." Allen explains the need to create safe spaces for youth, especially people of color and LG...

This week's SGV Connect is the second in our "Reclaimers" series, focusing on the efforts of a group of formerly homeless activists in the El Sereno to be housed in formerly unoccupied homes owned by Caltrans. The first interview featured six Reclaimers who shared their personal stories on how they fell into homelessness, strived to be rehoused, and then life as a Reclaimer. The stories are powerf...

We are Reclaimers because we have to because of desperation. - Benito, one of the Reclaimers living in El Sereno. SGV Connect is sponsored by Foothill Transit. Foothill Transit was not consulted about the content of this podcast and the views expressed are those of the participants and interviewer and may or may not be representative of the views of Foothill Transit, its board, or its staff. A cou...

This week's SGV Connect features a pair of interviews with former Pasadena Mayor Rick Cole and San Gabriel Valley Conservation Corps (SGVCC). Director Norma Quinones. In our first interview, Damien talks with Cole ostensibly about the dozen opinion pieces Cole has written in 2023 about how Pasadena can grow as a city in the future. In the interview Cole laments how Pasadena has changed in the two...

Damien Newton and Chris Greenspon catch up with Alhambra Councilmember and State Senate candidate Sasha Renée Pérez on the state of her candidacty and what is going on in Alhambra. The interview, the first in a series on the election, pings back and forth between her work in Alhambra and her vision for Senate District 25 This is Pérez's third time on SGV Connect. To listen to the other podcasts, c...

 This week's SGV Connect is a special episode celebrating the centennial for West Covina. Chris Greenspon interviews local historian John Garside about the city's history, covering topics ranging from how the city hall got its name (from a stagecoach company) to lamenting some businesses that closed in recent years. You can read a transcript of the interview, here . West Covina is holding a festiv...

Welcome to SGV Connect episode 106, the first episode of 2023. This episode is nearly an hour long with a pair of great, but very different, interviews. First, Chris Greenspon interviews Steve Valenzuela, El Monte poet and writer in residence for the new Zamora Art House in El Monte. The interview touches on Valenzuela's poetry, his work as a school teacher and how his life experiences influence h...

It's mid-December, and that means it's time for our annual end-of-the-year SGV Connect Podcast featuring not just Damien Newton and Chris Greenspon, but also Streetsblog LA Editor Joe Linton and Streetsblog California Editor Melanie Curry. After that, we have one last interview by Chris with John Axtell published a literary zine this year about the landscape and culture of the SGV. John and Chris...

This week's SGV Connect features an over forty minute interview by Chris Greenspon with author and history professor James Zarsadiaz about his recent book, Resisting Change in Suburbia: Asian Immigrants and Frontier Nostalgia in L.A. (Buy it from University of California Press, here .) Zarsadiaz's book focuses on six communities, five in the San Gabriel Valley ( Walnut, Diamond Bar, Rowland Height...

With the next election day less than two months away, SGV Connect sits down with Topher Mathers who reviewed dozens of ballot measures throughout the San Gabriel Valley before Active SGV made endorsements for local measures throughout SGV cities. This is our second podcast focusing on the 2022 election. SGV Connect #100 featured an interview with Ricardo Martinez, a progressive challenger to the i...