An abridged version of this piece was originally published in our October-December 2025 edition of SF Heritage News.
BY ZACHARY FRIAL and Kerri Young
Zachary Frial (they/he) is a Social Development and Policy Coordinator with the South of Market Community Action Network (SOMCAN). Zachary’s work encompasses environmental justice issues, tenant rights, city and state budgeting, and community planning, the latter including conducting research for the landmarking of the Mint Mall and Mint Hall (951-957 Mission Street). To learn more about SOMCAN, visit somcan.org.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
SF Heritage: What is SOMCAN and what is its vision?
Zachary: SOMCAN, or the South Market Community Action Network, is a multi-issue, multi-strategy organization that primarily but not exclusively serves the Filipino community here in San Francisco. As an organization we were founded to fight against gentrification and the displacement of our community during the first tech boom of the late 1990s and 2000s. SOMA has traditionally been a working class neighborhood where many Filipino families moved because of its affordability—many families have lived here since the late 1950s and ’60s—and they were starting to be priced out.
Because of this “dot com” boom, many landlords were selling their buildings or redeveloping them into live-work lofts to house a new crop of tech workers moving into the city. Warehouses in light manufacturing areas, especially auto shops, were being converted into offices for tech startups as well. So SOMCAN was founded to help protect our families and protect our Filipino businesses in the neighborhood that were experiencing this type of displacement.
And SOMCAN continues to focus on gentrification and displacement. We also provide direct services—including in the Filipino language—around tenant counseling and workforce development for new families and other residents who live in the neighborhood. We act as caseworkers for new immigrant families: we help enroll their kids in school, help them sign up for Social Security or Medicaid or CalFresh and other supportive services available to people in the city and in the state of California.
We also advocate for long-term transformative change within the neighborhood through community organizing. We organize tenants, we organize workers, we organize families, especially parents and mothers, to make sure that they are able to advocate for their needs.
This includes bringing people to City Hall, and we’ve even started bringing people to Sacramento to advocate on different pieces of policy and legislation that directly impact their lives. So this organizing component is also really important. Not just to drive long-term structural change within the societies we find ourselves in, but also to ensure that people are empowered and that they have a voice.
SOMCAN’s advocacy work contributed to the creation of South of Market’s cultural district, SOMA Pilipinas. What are some long-term cultural preservation milestones that you have worked on together?
I’d say that back in the early 2000s, SOMCAN was probably the main organization for Filipinos in the South of Market that was fighting against gentrification and displacement, and ensuring that the city met the needs of Filipino residents in the neighborhood. It was founded around that spirit of community organizing. And many of SOMCAN’s early victories included allowing Filipino businesses and nonprofits to remain in the Mint Mall and Hall (see below).
For example, SOMCAN helped organize the tenants living in the Trinity Plaza Apartments, located at Eighth and Mission streets. Close to 500 Filipino residents lived there, including many seniors and disabled individuals, and the developer wanted to tear down that rent control housing. We worked with then District 6 Supervisor Chris Daley to prevent the building from being demolished, and struck a deal with the landlord that allowed these original tenants to move into the new units and keep their same affordable rental rate.
SOMCAN also helped champion a Youth and Family Special Use District with West Bay United Playaz. A lot of the city really didn’t recognize SOMA as a residential neighborhood with families, and this special use district made the Planning Department recognize and prioritize their needs, especially around affordability and open space.
SOMCAN also helped champion things like the creation of the SOMA Stabilization Fund. The neighborhood now called the East Cut, particularly the Rincon Hill area, was seeing a lot of new development, and we worked again with Supervisor Chris Daley to ensure that developers would pay into a fund to help stabilize and fund services for the South of Market community. There was a special advisory committee, which consisted of residents, community members, and artists who helped advise on how this money would be dispersed through grants to various organizations within the neighborhood.
While SOMCAN was not the only one to do all of this work of course, the organization was a major player in ensuring the creation of these community stabilization mechanisms.
However, the next tech boom that started in 2012 with the Twitter tax break saw even more gentrification and displacement, and our families were again being served with a new wave of eviction notices. And this impact was felt close to home with the Mint Mall, which stood on land owned by the Hearst Corporation (owner of the San Francisco Chronicle). They wanted to redevelop that whole area, and were planning to build a new luxury tower next door, now called the George Apartments.
It’s part of the 5M, Fifth and Mission project. SOMCAN was very opposed to this project because it was right next to the mall, which has historically been a very important affordable, rent-controlled site for Filipino families moving into the city. There was no telling whether the owners would then also sell this building to build a luxury tower as well.
SOMCAN organized rallies, brought people to the Planning Commission to oppose the project, and tried to work with the owners alongside then District 6 supervisor, Jane Kim.
The organization wasn’t able to stop the luxury tower project (The George). But they were able to work out a deal with Jane Kim where in return for approving the project, she would also help SOMCAN and other community organizations create the SOMA Pilipinas Cultural District. So it was like a give and take. So it was out of this fight that the cultural district was created.
SOMA Pilipinas was among the first cultural districts to be created, and this was before the city actually formalized the cultural districts program in 2018. The 5M fight happened in 2015. SOMA Pilipinas was officially approved and recognized in 2016.
The families and tenants were able to stay. Shades of San Francisco, San Francisco Public Library.
The cultural district was one tool that the community was able to use to legitimize the place of Filipinos within the SOMA neighborhood. It built upon the previously mentioned work done like the stabilization funds, like the Youth and Family Special Use District, and the program overall became a new tool for marginalized communities to prevent displacement of residents, businesses, and artists who created San Francisco’s sense of diverse culture.
What was unique about the cultural districts was that they really focused on anti-displacement. That was the core tenet of the program. This was unlike previous historic preservation tools, which helped maintain the facade of a building; but they didn’t maintain the life, the spirit of the people that inhabit that space, right?
And there are also stipulations that the city would collaborate with the cultural district to ensure the creation of these types of preservation and sustainability strategies, so that our community would be able to live and thrive within this neighborhood.
You helped to create the landmarking documentation for the Mint Mall and Hall. Tell us more about the significance of this site.
Even back in 2000s during the wave of displacement affecting Filipino residents and businesses during the dot com boom, the Mint Mall was considered a historic landmark.
It was built in 1916, and didn’t go by the name Mint Mall and Hall until the 1980s when it became solely owned by Filipino owners, the Nocon family.
The building is seven floors. The upper floors are residential, that area is called the Mint Hall. And then there are the ground floor and basement that is called the Mint Mall, which contains different retail spaces that have been occupied by non-profits, restaurants, hair salons, print shops. Right now there is a business that manufactures wetsuits and other water sports apparel down there (Aeroskin Worldwide).
These wide range of businesses are used by tenants in the Mint Mall. By 1981, there were already Filipino businesses moving into the the mall portion.
By the 1990s, some significant tenants in the building included Arkipelago Books, which at the time was the only Filipino specialty bookstore in California, if not the entire country. There was also Teatro ng Tanan, a Filipino theater and cultural organization, a Filipino American Music and Arts Society, and Super Reproductions, a print shop. There was New Filipinas Restaurant, which is now [still present in the mall and] called JT Restaurant. The original brother and sister owners eventually passed it on to their other sister Tess Diaz, who is now the current owner. In 2000 they were being served eviction notices by the owners of the Mint Mall, who wanted to convert those retail spaces into office spaces to capitalize on the tech movement happening at the time.
And the Mint Mall up until this point was very significant, because the businesses were a gathering place for the tenants who lived upstairs, the majority of whom were Filipino starting in the 1980s and ’90s. It was also Filipinos in the neighborhood would go to the Mint Mall, especially after closing time when people would still hang out—tambay—in the basement area and do like informal things like karaoke.
And especially around Archipelago books that was like a huge place for especially organizers to pass on their knowledge to youth and other people that were hanging out in the mall. Our director, Angelica Cabande, was one of those youth that would go there and would learn from from the Manongs (first generation Filipino immigrants) who participated in the International Hotel fight, and then learn about how they protected their community.
So the Mint Mall was not just a place for gathering, but a place for transferring this knowledge to the next generation. So the potential loss of these businesses was going to be very significant for the Filipino community.
Arkipelago Books owner Marie Romero and the founders of SOMCAN—Bill Sorro, Jeanne Batallones, and Roy Recio—helped convene a new group of of businesses and residents who wanted to defend the Mint Mall as an important site for the Filipino community.
They were successful in negotiating long-term leases for these businesses, and were able to legally challenge the owners on the grounds that they were illegally converting these retail spaces into office spaces. Raquel Redondiez, the current director of SOMA Pilipinas, would call up the zoning administrator every week to ask them investigate illegal conversions, that was her role within the Organizing Committee. No response. But the second she was hired as a legislative aide by Supervisor Daley, now when she was made those phone calls, they actually started listening to her and started doing the investigations. But it took basically a year until 2001 before they started getting any traction.
Another strategy the Organizing Committee used was turning the Mint Mall into a place of celebration. So in December of 2000, they had the first Paskó—Christmas—SOMA celebration. And it was a strategy that they had to visibly promote this as a space that the Filipino community loves. They held that celebration there for the next couple years, even after their victory. Eventually, a lot of that activity then was transferred into the Parol Lantern Festival, which is still celebrated by SOMA Pilipinas to this day.
And from my perspective and definitely from the perspective of a lot of the longtime community organizers, that was the moment that eventually led to the creation of a SOMA Pilipinas cultural district that really ignited a new wave of activism for the community and really defending this as our home.
This is our space. We need to fight to protect it.
What can you tell us about the new exhibit at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, (Makibaka), which celebrates the history of Filipino life in the South of Market?
To begin, I want to talk about the name of the exhibit, which is Makibaka. Makibaka means fight or struggle, and I feel like that really encapsulates that spirit that has kept the Filipino community going in the South of Market in spite of all the redevelopment, in spite of all the gentrification and displacement that has afflicted our community since the sixties and the seventies.
The Yerba Buena Gardens area, Moscone Center, that whole area used to be a community. And there were over 3,000 people that were displaced from that area, many of them Filipino families. As a result, many of these families were pushed out of that area and into other parts of the South of Market or other parts of the city.
The exhibit focuses on the decades after this transformation of the Yerba Buena area, from the 1990s until today. Not only focusing on the struggle that Filipinos face in the neighborhood, but also the vibrancy of the community and the acts of daily resistance that make sure that we continue to have this place within San Francisco.
Some of the exhibits in Makibaka include a timeline that highlights the development of the SOMA Filipino community as it is today. There are photo exhibits as well—one of which is really impressive by Erina Alejo—and sculptural pieces. But I think one thing to highlight is SOMCAN’s installation as part of the larger exhibit, which showcases the history of activism within the neighborhood and within San Francisco. We have posters and flyers and documents, but another thing we wanted to do is really highlight the people behind this work. So we have photos of people participating in those [advocacy] campaigns, and also just current photos of our members and our staff, the people who lead this work. And I feel like the way it ended up turning out and the way we put it together too, was very collective.
We may not always get name recognition and credit [for our work], but it’s through the things that seem little, that we create a big change.
Makibaka: A Living Legacy runs at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts until January 6, 2025.
