Following an alarming report that revealed devastating health disparities in Santa Clara County’s Latino population, several San Jose councilmembers want to put a temporary ban on new smoke shops in the city, in hopes of preventing the further sprawl of the tobacco retailers that have populated the East Side.
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Councilmember Peter Ortiz, the East San Jose representative leading the initiative, suggested the temporary moratorium would last six months to a year and would allow the city to create new licensing requirements for businesses selling tobacco products.
“This is a pause so we can finally draw a line in the sand — so we can finally say enough is enough,” Ortiz said at a press conference Wednesday afternoon. “We cannot allow our children to walk past two or three smoke shops just to make it to their school. We cannot allow our youth to grow up thinking that tobacco and smoking is normal and that cancer is inevitable or that their lives are any less than kids growing up in other parts of San Jose.”
Ortiz added that while he is pro-business, there are enough smoke shops in the city and he doesn’t support more tobacco retailers that will make money off of “selling products that will result in health problems to our community.”
The proposal, which is co-authored by Councilmembers Pamela Campos, Domingo Candelas, David Cohen and George Casey, comes several weeks after the county released its first Latino health assessment in more than a decade.
The 157-page report found that Latinos in the county often face worse health outcomes than their white and Asian counterparts, while earning lower wages on average and having lower rates of health insurance. In East San Jose, the density of tobacco retailers was more than double that of the rest of the county, according to the report. Latinos make up nearly half of all residents on the East Side, and countywide, the leading cause of death for Latino residents between 2019 and 2023 was cancer.
Darcie Green, the executive director of the nonprofit Latinas Contra Cancer, said the temporary ban on new smoke shops is long overdue.
“This moratorium is about pressing pause on harm and making the space for health and equity and possibility in our neighborhoods,” she said at the press conference. “We’re not just saying no to shops, we’re saying yes to a healthier East San Jose.”
In recent years, San Jose has been at the forefront of creating new restrictions for tobacco and vaping products sold in the city. In 2021, San Jose became one of the biggest cities in the country to ban the sale of menthol and flavored e-cigarettes.
The policy, which faced pushback from the tobacco industry, also prohibited new smoke shops from opening up within 500 feet of another retailer or within 1,000 feet of a school, park, community center, or library.
In 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill that banned the sale of most flavored tobacco products in California. The tobacco industry, however, launched a subsequent referendum campaign and put it on hold until voters affirmed it in November 2022. Since then, the state has enacted several laws that strengthened enforcement provisions around the sale of flavored tobacco.
At the council’s rules committee meeting on Wednesday afternoon, Rachel Roberts, the deputy director of code enforcement, said that the number of smoke shops in the city has decreased since the 2021 policy, from more than 600 to 575 citywide. The proposal will come back to the rules committee in several weeks after city officials conduct additional analysis.
Santa Clara County Supervisor Sylvia Arenas, who helped champion the Latino Health Assessment, said that the report validates what many Latinos in the community already knew.
“It’s finally the data that we needed to share with everyone so that we can take real action and turn what we find in the data into a policy that responds to the needs of our community,” Arenas said. “This is the first action another municipality outside of the county has taken, and it is a great source of pride.”