The future uncertain, La Comida scrambles to find new space downtown

Jan Holliday discovered La Comida more than two decades ago, when her daughter, son-in-law and two grandchildren moved into her Crescent Park home.

She didn’t have full access to her kitchen at that time, and so she began to attend lunches that the nonprofit was providing at a Bryant Street building occupied by the nonprofit Avenidas. The program, she said, was a “lifesaver.” She was able to obtain nutritious meals while meeting people in the community.

But after close to four decades in Avenidas, the dining program came to an acrimonious halt in 2017, when Avenidas began to rehabilitate the building and the newly reconfigured dining area was deemed by La Comida to be too small for its needs. In August of that year, La Comida left Avenidas.

The food fight between Palo Alto’s two preeminent senior-serving nonprofits had by then turned bitter. La Comida users argued that Avenidas’ proposed dining space, which would accommodate around 90 people rather than the pre-rehabilitation 120, amounted to an eviction for the dining program. The debate over space turned into a legal scuffle in 2016, when La Comida filed an appeal against Avenidas’ rehabilitation plan. (The two sides ultimately reached a settlement that, among other conditions, committed Avenidas to help pay for a new location for La Comida.)

These days, Holliday and many other residents in north Palo Alto are settling for the next best scenario: picking up takeout meals that are prepared, packaged and distributed to dozens of seniors on weekdays at the First United Methodist Church on Hamilton Avenue. In south Palo Alto, La Comida continues to run a congregate dining program at the Stevenson House apartment complex, where it prepares all of its meals and serves about 150 visitors at about 70 tables on a typical afternoon, according to Bill Blodgett, co-president of the La Comida board.

The downtown takeout program is also a hit. On a typical lunch hour, it attracts about 140 seniors, according to Blodgett. Most are low income; a few are homeless. Many are residents of Lytton Gardens or other downtown senior residential facilities. By 11:45 a.m. on a recent Monday, about two dozen individuals had lined up to get lunches just as the program opened for the day.

Holliday arrived a bit after noon to pick up La Comida’s daily offering: pollo asado, pinto beans, green pepper strips, zucchini and fresh fruit. She exchanged pleasantries with passersby. A woman cheerfully greeted her. “Nice to see you,” she replied, smiling back. The community interactions are still there in the takeout program, she said, but they’re fleeting.

“The social connections that I made while having lunch at Avenidas are invaluable in my life,” Holliday, 81, said. “From the bottom of my heart, they are invaluable. Losing that has been a great loss in my feeling of well-being.”

The downtown program is now in jeopardy. Starting in July, La Comida will be required to return to congregate dining to remain eligible for the various state and federal grants that pay for its operations. The pandemic-era exemption that allowed the nonprofit to switch to takeout is about to go away thanks to the recent expiration of California’s state of emergency.

A return to Avenidas?

Holliday, who nine years ago joined the La Comida board of directors, is one of many diners and La Comida volunteers who believe that it’s time for La Comida to return to Avenidas. Tatyana and Miron Tuchinsky, who live close to the downtown location, said they would like to see the program remain in north Palo Alto, potentially at Avenidas.

“You can’t expect all these people to fit at Stevenson House,” Tatyana Tuchinsky said in Russian, pointing at the line of people waiting for their meals.

Blodgett noted that just about every senior center in the region includes a congregate dining program. This includes centers in Mountain View, Santa Clara, Milpitas, Gilroy and San Jose.

“They’re all sites where the meal program is housed in a city facility with the other senior programs,” Blodgett said. “We think that’s a wonderful benefit for seniors. We can refer seniors who are in need of other services to Avenidas; they can refer people to us. I thought it worked well for 40 years.”

It also doesn’t hurt, he noted, that the Avenidas building at 450 Bryant St. is owned by the city and is located in a central downtown location with access to transit and ample parking. (A city garage is right across the street.)

The looming deadline has revived the idea of La Comida returning to the Avenidas building. The idea has the support of this year’s Palo Alto mayor, Lydia Kou, who has volunteered at La Comida and whose husband, John St. Clair, serves on the La Comida board of directors.

During her “State of the City” address last month, Kou cited La Comida as a nonprofit that is of “particular interest” to her and cited its history: its founding in 1972 by Rotary Palo Alto and its long history of serving lunch at the Avenidas building. Kou said it’s her priority this year to “find a dine-in space in north Palo Alto for the meals program to continue.” She also implied that Avenidas is ideally suited to provide that space.

“A city contracted senior center is a senior center for all seniors, and services should be contained in one building to foster ease for seniors to go from one activity to another and meet friends, old and new,” Kou said during the address.

Her City Council colleagues joined her in this effort on April 10 when they approved by a 6-1 vote a new list of 2023 priorities that included “facilitate location for La Comida in north Palo Alto.” At that meeting, Kou said that the first step should be to review the city’s contract with its senior-services provider, Avenidas. Using the city-owned building, which is already devoted to senior services, would likely make the most financial sense, she suggested.

“There’s also costs involved if it’s other places and (it involves) retrofitting the areas. In this city-owned building, it’s already provided and it falls under senior services,” Kou said.

Exploring other options

Like other nonprofits, La Comida had to make numerous adjustments during the pandemic. It switched to the takeout model at both of its locations and only returned to indoor dining at Stevenson House in March. (It had briefly restored congregate dining about six months ago but abandoned the experiment after a small spike of COVID-19 cases in the community, Blodgett said.)

It also found itself doing more during the pandemic, with the number of meals roughly doubling from about 170 meals at the two locations before the pandemic to between 350 and 360. In recent months, as congregate dining returned to Stevenson House, the number dropped to between 290 and 300 per day, Blodgett said, slightly below the pandemic peak but well above historic levels.

With the July 1 deadline looming, Blodgett said the nonprofit has been considering various other options for congregate dining in north Palo Alto. There’s a former restaurant space located at the Barker Hotel, an affordable-housing complex on Emerson Street operated by the housing nonprofit Alta Housing. There’s the city-owned building at 445 Bryant St. that until recently housed Form Fitness but that now stands vacant as the city seeks a new tenant. And there’s First United Methodist Church itself, which has an auditorium that could potentially accommodate La Comida’s clientele.

Each option, however, has its drawbacks. The Barker Hotel space, while vacant, is relatively small and it remains under lease with the prior tenant. Thus, it’s not clear if and when La Comida would be able to use its space.

The building at 445 Bryant, meanwhile, is intended to raise funding for youth programs under a long-standing city policy. Repurposing it for La Comida would effectively cut into its revenue-generating potential.

As for the church, using its upstairs auditorium would require an installation of an elevator, Blodgett said. While the building has an elevator shaft, La Comida leaders note that it would take many months and probably more than $200,000 to get a contractor to install an elevator. Furthermore, contractors are hard to find in the current construction climate.

“We’ve been trying for two months to find someone to come in and do a bid,” Blodgett said during a recent interview at Stevenson House. “There’s just great demand for building contractors, and it’s just quite a challenge to get someone willing to come out to install a single elevator at a single site.”

A failure to communicate

In recent interviews, board members from both La Comida and Avenidas said that they are perfectly willing to work with their counterparts at the other nonprofit to find a mutually agreeable solution. That willingness, however, occasionally gets lost in translation when the two nonprofits try to communicate with one another. Blodgett said his board has requested discussions with Avenidas board members but did not receive a response.

Avenidas Board Chair Rick Stern was surprised when a reporter asked him about these requests from La Comida during a recent interview at the Avenidas building. He also noted that La Comida never responded to a letter he had recently submitted, which offered 21 seats at Avenidas for the congregate-dining program.

Stern and his colleagues at Avenidas said they were surprised by how the debate over senior dining has been characterized by the city and the media. La Comida supporters often allege that Avenidas effectively kicked out the senior dining program during the building’s renovation. Kou told the crowd during her “State of the City” address that La Comida was “asked to leave” the senior center, while Holliday used the term “excommunicated” to describe what happened to La Comida in 2017.

To Avenidas leaders, that is a gross mischaracterization of what happened. Amy Yotopoulos, Avenidas CEO, said the decision to reduce space for senior dining was driven by factors beyond her organization’s control. The building’s historic status limited what Avenidas could do during the renovation and required it, for example, to retain a small annex at the ground floor of the building that once functioned as a carriage house.

Even with the renovation, Avenidas was preparing to allow La Comida to continue its dining program, albeit with a smaller footprint, Yotopoulos said. But when Avenidas proposed limiting the space to 90 diners, La Comida decided that that wasn’t enough and opted to explore other locations, she said.

“Our hands were tied with the way the building had to be done,” Yotopoulos said. “We offered everything we could and it didn’t work for them.”

Both Stern and Avenidas Board Vice Chair David Gordon said they were surprised by the city’s recent effort to review its contract with Avenidas to see if it could require the inclusion of the nutrition program. Gordon said that this falsely implies that Avenidas has not been working with La Comida to find a solution.

“It’s a mischaracterization of our efforts,” Gordon said. “We’ve been trying all along to work with them, obviously with the constraints they have. We know what their ideal situation is, and we just can’t provide that.”

That said, the situation has changed since 2017. La Comida has recently extended its lease with Stevenson House, guaranteeing it will stay in south Palo Alto at least until 2028. Thus, unlike six years ago, it is no longer seeking a space to accommodate its entire program but just its north Palo Alto clientele.

The space for 90 diners that Avenidas had proposed back then isn’t too far off from what La Comida is looking for today. Its takeout location at the First Methodist Church currently provides 140 meals and not everyone who drops by for a meal is expected to come in for congregate dining. Blodgett and the La Comida board are seeking about 50 seats that would accommodate about 100 diners (given that each seat can turn over during the program to accommodate two people).

“As it turns out, that space would have been fine today,” Blodgett said during the Stevenson House interview.

That offer, however, is no longer on the table. Avenidas has filled the space that it had initially offered to La Comida with other programs, many of which are covered by state and federal grants. These include a program to help seniors access technology, a program to educate and support caregivers, a series of exercise classes and health services and assistance with complex topics like health insurance and taxes. Given the grant funding, Avenidas is contractually required to retain these programs, Yotopolous said.

The organization has also proposed a smaller-scale plan to assist La Comida, one that would allow it to occupy 21 tables that are scattered in a U-shaped configuration on the ground floor of the Bryant Street building. While falling short of La Comida’s target, this would create space for about 50 diners.

During a recent tour of the space, Avenidas leaders considered additional possibilities, including converting a few parking spaces into parklets to accommodate additional diners. The proposal would require support from the city in both constructing the parklets and potentially allowing Avenidas to use other spaces near the building for its parking needs.

“I think it would be a perfect win-win-win if the city could say, ‘Put four spaces on the other side (of the building) and put a parklet here so that La Comida can have indoor and outdoor space,” Stern said. “I think there’s a lot of room for flexibility here.”

So far, most of the discussions between the two organizations have taken place at the staff level. Yotopoulos said her preferred approach has been to explore a small pilot program, see if it works, and adjust it as needed. But when Stern was asked during the interview whether members of his board would be willing to have a more direct engagement with members of the La Comida board, Stern said he was not opposed to that possibility. One idea that he said could be workable is having two board members and two staff members from each organization meet as a subcommittee and consider possible solutions that would keep La Comida in north Palo Alto.

Both Stern and Gordon also said that there are other ways that their organization could help La Comida. It could, for example, assist in finding a contractor to install an elevator at the First United Methodist Church. Gordon suggested that if the church could work as a viable permanent location for La Comida’s lunch program in north Palo Alto, La Comida could temporarily rely on a smaller location — whether in Avenidas or at another downtown site — while it has the elevator procured and installed.

Avenidas board members also suggested that La Comida could use multiple small sites while the elevator project is moving ahead, though that option could prove challenging given that La Comida’s staff consists of just six employees. (The organization relies greatly on volunteers to serve lunches.) They acknowledged that this wouldn’t be a perfect solution. It may, however, be good enough during the interim period while a permanent location is being developed.

Gordon emphasized that Avenidas fully supports La Comida and the services that it provides. He and Stern also said they are perfectly willing to get past the disagreements of yesteryear.

“It’s a waste of everyone’s time for us to be in this back-and-forth,” Gordon said. “We’d like to get them in a good situation. One, so that they’re not distracted with it and so that we’re not distracted with it. And also because we’re supportive of what they’re doing. It’s another service for seniors, and that’s what we’re all about.”