A large loan from the city could help a local developer start building a $29 million market-rate apartment project promised to downtown Fresno since 2019.
The Fresno City Council has approved the $8 million loan to Uptown L.P., created by local development firm Lance Kashian & Company, for the construction of the Uptown Apartments at the intersection of Van Ness Avenue and Stanislaus Street.
The money comes from the Fresno’s revolving loan fund for downtown and Chinatown housing developers, launched last year with $20 million from the state. The money is intended to fill the financing gaps housing builders have faced in downtown Fresno, where rent prices often do not justify construction costs.
“These are dollars from the state of California that Mayor (Jerry) Dyer advocated to get for this specific purpose,” Phil Skei, assistant director for the city’s Planning and Development department, said during Thursday’s meeting.
Lance Kashian president Sal Gonzales did not respond to The Bee’s request for comment .
Uptown is just one of several downtown apartment projects announced years ago that has yet to produce one unit and has applied for a gap financing loan from the city. The council on Thursday also awarded $8 million from the loan fund to a 174-unit mixed-income project next to Chukchansi Park. The Uptown project will be focused on market-rate units, which Dyer says downtown Fresno needs more of for the area to be successfully revitalized.
Housing has been planned for the Uptown site since 2015, when Fresno-area businessman Mark Astone proposed building apartments there on city-owned land. Lance Kashian took over Astone’s development agreement with the city in 2019, but has also been unable to fully fund the project, according to an update last year to the City Council.
The city had sent the firm a notice of default in October 2024 for failing to meet performance benchmarks, but city leaders decided not to move to take the Uptown site back.
The Uptown Apartments project is planned for the intersection of Van Ness Avenue and Stanislaus Street in downtown Fresno. COURTESY OF CITY OF FRESNO CITY OF FRESNO Fresno developer has permits for Uptown, needed gap financing
Despite not having broken ground on the project, Gonzales’ presentation to the council last year showed Uptown had been approved for various building-related permits.
But the presentation also showed that the project’s cost per unit came out to $546,241. The developer still had a $9 million financing gap on the $29 million project, the presentation showed.
“If the city is in a position to assist us with a gap loan, we’ll hit the capital markets,” Gonzales told the council in August. “We’ve already started talking to brokers and to lenders.”
Downtown Councilmember Miguel Arias told The Bee in December that the city loan to the Uptown project would be the “last chance” for the project.
“If the financing isn’t there from the developers and the urgency to build isn’t there, then the projects aren’t going to get built,” he said.
This story was originally published March 2, 2026 at 3:20 PM.
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Erik is a graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, where he helped launch an effort to better meet the news needs of Spanish-speaking immigrants. Before that, he served as editor-in-chief of his community college student newspaper, Riverside City College Viewpoints, where he covered the impacts of the Salton Sea’s decline on its adjacent farm worker communities in the Southern California desert. Erik’s work is supported through the California Local News Fellowship program.