"My job is helping keep farmers farming and customers eating well, healthy and well," Gretchen Sterling told Pasadena Now earlier this summer. She has run both of Pasadena's certified farmers' markets since the early 1980s, and if you only know one of them, you know half the story.
Most residents treat the Tuesday market at Villa Parke and the Saturday market at Victory Park as the same institution on two different days, pick whichever fits your schedule, buy your peaches, move on. That reading misses what actually happened here. These are two markets with two different founding purposes, two very different sizes, and right now, two different levels of exposure to a funding fight in Sacramento that could change what a CalFresh shopper's dollar buys at one of them before next spring.
A market built for need, a market built by demand
Villa Parke came first. It opened in 1980 with 17 farmers setting up on Tuesday mornings at what's now Villa Parke Community Center, on the corner of Garfield Avenue and Villa Street. Sterling has explained the siting decision in plain terms: the location was chosen to serve the part of Pasadena with the lowest-income census tract and the highest concentration of elementary school-age children in the city. It launched with support from the Interfaith Hunger Coalition and the state's Direct Marketing Program, riding a 1979 change in California law, signed by Governor Jerry Brown, that let farmers sell "field run" produce, meaning fruit and vegetables with blemishes, directly off their own property for the first time.
Victory Park came four years later, in March 1984, and for a different reason. Tuesday's success created demand for a weekend option, so the city added a second location on the 2900 block of North Sierra Madre Boulevard, in front of Pasadena High School. One market was a deliberate intervention. The other was an expansion chasing popularity.
That origin gap still shows up in the numbers. Villa Parke typically runs about 13 vendors. Victory Park draws as many as 60. Sterling's own customer surveys put roughly 60 percent of Saturday shoppers as Pasadena residents, with 40 percent coming from outside the immediate area, a scale and reach the Tuesday market was never built to have.
| Villa Parke (Tuesday) | Victory Park (Saturday) | |
|---|---|---|
| Address | 363 E. Villa St. | 2900 block N. Sierra Madre Blvd. |
| Founded | 1980 | 1984 |
| Hours | 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. | 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. |
| Typical vendor count | About 13 | As many as 60 |
| Co-located with | Head Start preschool, WIC center, library branch, community garden | Pasadena High School |
| Entry | Open access | Monitored entrance, northwest corner of the parking lot |
Both markets answer to the same rule book. Every vendor is certified by the county agricultural commissioner and can only sell what they grew themselves, pesticide- and chemical-free, no exceptions. Sterling keeps a strict ratio of four farmers for every one food artisan, and craft vendors aren't permitted at all. That's a deliberate choice, not an oversight. This isn't a flea market with a produce section bolted on.
The system underneath the tomatoes
The City of Pasadena took over full operation of both markets in 1995, after the program started as a nonprofit and organizers decided city ownership would secure its long-term future. Surplus revenue now funds recreation programs at four community centers around town. In 1997, the markets program won the Arthur Nobel Award for making life better in Pasadena, a recognition that has aged well: growers still drive in from the Fresno area, the Coachella Valley, San Diego, and San Luis Obispo every week to sell directly to residents, no grocery markup, no intermediary.
Both markets run rain or shine, every week of the year, with one exception. They close the week of the Tournament of Roses Parade, since Victory Park sits close enough to the route that the space gets used for float staging. Neither closed during COVID. The city worked out a protocol with the Pasadena Health Department that let shoppers wait in line for an hour rather than shut the doors. And when the Eaton Fire burned within a mile of Victory Park in January 2025, that market reopened the very next Saturday. Sterling has described customers volunteering cash on the spot to pass along to two of the market's own farmers who lost their homes in the fire, a detail that says something about how residents in Altadena and Pasadena treat this particular Saturday morning as closer to civic infrastructure than errand-running.
The part that's actually fragile right now
Here's where the two markets diverge in a way that matters this year specifically. Villa Parke accepts EBT and participates in Market Match, the statewide program that matches CalFresh spending dollar for dollar, up to $15 per visit, turning a $15 CalFresh swipe into $30 of fresh produce inside the market. It's funded through the California Nutrition Incentive Program, and for the past three fiscal years that program ran on $35 million in state money.
Governor Gavin Newsom's initial 2026-27 budget proposal didn't include that $35 million at all. The California Senate and Assembly's own initial budgets, released June 4, 2026, left it out too. Advocates warned the existing funding would run dry by around March 2027, meaning the doubling that makes Villa Parke's produce genuinely affordable for CalFresh households was on track to simply stop, not shrink, stop. Program administrators had asked for $20 million to keep the current scale running and $30 million the year after to expand it to markets that wanted to offer the match but couldn't afford to.
Lawmakers didn't fund it at that level. On June 11, 2026, the legislature wrote a one-time $15 million allocation into the budget it sent to the governor's desk, and Newsom signed it. That's $5 million short of the $20 million administrators said they needed just to keep the program running at its current size, and half of the $30 million they'd sought for the following year to expand it to more markets. It buys another year, not a resolution. Assemblymember Damon Connolly, who championed the funding, put the fiscal reality bluntly when he told Capital & Main in May that the state is working with tight budget numbers. The $15 million stretches CNIP through this cycle. What happens in the 2027-28 budget is, as of today, an open question.
That's the mechanism worth understanding if you shop at Villa Parke, or if you don't but care whether it's still there in two years. A market with only 13 vendors doesn't have a lot of slack. If CalFresh shoppers lose the incentive that doubles their purchasing power, some of that Tuesday morning foot traffic doesn't just get smaller, it potentially disappears, and a market built specifically to serve the part of Pasadena with the least room for grocery bill surprises is the one absorbing that risk. Victory Park, bigger and drawing a broader geographic customer base, isn't insulated from the same funding fight, but its scale gives it more room to weather a bad budget year than its smaller Tuesday counterpart has.
What this actually changes about your Tuesday or Saturday
None of this means skip Villa Parke or treat Victory Park as the safer bet. It means understanding that when you check in at the information booth to use Market Match, you're participating in a program that gets re-litigated in Sacramento every single budget cycle, with no permanent general fund appropriation behind it since it started. Staff at both markets process CalFresh benefits directly and issue Square-based tokens for shoppers who run out of cash mid-visit, a level of on-the-ground administrative work that Sterling herself had to get trained and certified by the USDA to handle.
If you're a Saturday regular at Victory Park, the practical update is simpler: come through the new monitored entrance at the northwest corner of the parking lot, off Sierra Madre Boulevard between Paloma and Washington. If you've been parking and walking in from a different corner out of habit, that's changed. If you're a Tuesday shopper at Villa Parke, the market sits inside a building that also houses a Head Start preschool, a WIC center, a library branch, and a community garden, so plan for a slower, more errand-stacked visit than the Saturday sprawl at Victory Park.
Either morning, you're shopping at what Sterling says is now the longest continuously operating certified farmers' market in the Los Angeles County region, a title Pasadena inherited after Gardena's market closed during COVID. Los Angeles County has roughly 170 certified farmers' markets today, up from just 14 when Pasadena's first opened in 1980. That growth makes it easy to assume every market runs the same way, on the same footing, with the same guarantees. Pasadena's two don't, and knowing which one you're actually standing in changes what you're paying attention to.
If you're weighing a move to Pasadena and want a sense of how a neighborhood's daily rhythm, not just its median price, actually feels day to day, Waymon Hobdy is easy to reach when you're ready to talk it through. Let's Connect.
