What’s at stake?
Residents say the plan will lay the groundwork for future development they say is better tailored to the community’s needs — including broader access to banks, grocery stores and health care facilities.
The Fresno City Council will weigh on Thursday whether to support a new plan for the growing neighborhoods west of the 99 highway, a policy seven years in the making.
Supporters of the new land use roadmap, known as the West Area Neighborhoods Specific Plan, hope it will lay the groundwork for future development that they say is better tailored to the community’s needs.
Those needs include broader access to banks, grocery stores and health care facilities, only a handful of which currently serve the community of over 40,000 residents. These priorities were laid out through years of community engagement that began in 2018.
“We hear the mayor talking about ‘One Fresno.’ Well, we want to have that same opportunity,” said April Henry, executive director of the Highway City Community Development, Inc. and a supporter of the plan.
The Planning Commission already approved the specific plan at a meeting earlier this month. Now, the ball is in the council’s court.
Two councilmembers represent the bulk of the plan area: Mike Karbassi, the council president, in the part of the plan north of Shaw, and Annalisa Perea in the area south of Shaw and north of Clinton. Miguel Arias also represents a small part of the plan’s southernmost area.
Perea, who supports the plan, told Fresnoland her constituents’ feedback has made passing the plan a top issue for her.
“They’ve asked me to prioritize approving the West Area Neighborhoods Specific Plan prior to approving any other growth area of the city,” she said, “and I’m listening to my constituents. This is what they’ve been asking for.”
Karbassi, however, said in an interview Tuesday that there are some questions he needs answered before he can get behind the plan.
That includes checking whether the city has ensured all property owners are in the loop on these potential changes coming to the west area — especially since he believes developers can help trigger the types of investments residents want to see.
“The one big complaint I hear from folks is they want a grocery store, for example, or a bank, or services west of the 99. And they’re right to want that,” he said. “Housing typically precedes that kind of growth.”
Karbassi added that he’s trying to avoid a situation where developers change their mind about building in an area because they didn’t know about upcoming land use changes.
“Because that’s happened in the past,” he said, “where land use changes happen, the owners claim they didn’t know, and we can’t really do anything.”
Despite these concerns, Karbassi said he doesn’t plan to ask for the item to be pushed in advance of Thursday’s hearing.
“If it does seem like there are folks or interest groups in the area that feel like they have concerns, and we can’t address it during the hearing, then I probably would see what my colleagues … feel about maybe delaying it a little bit longer,” he added, “But I don’t want to delay this to a point where it doesn’t happen.”
After seven years, however, residents are eager their wait will finally come to an end Thursday.
“We’re all, I think, a tiny bit discouraged to think that it might not be passed, or it could be delayed, yet again,” Henry said. “The more it’s delayed, the more it’s pushed out of mind … the more this area will be disenfranchised and disinvested in.”
What’s in the west area plan?
The West Area Neighborhoods Specific Plan establishes an updated land use map for the over 7,000-acre area, laying the groundwork for the future development of anything from retail to new housing.
A key feature of the plan includes the designation of six “catalytic corridors” along Shaw, Ashlan, Veterans Boulevard, Shields, Clinton and Brawley Avenues. Planning documents define these as “highly walkable areas” that have wider sidewalks and trees as well as mixed-use buildings and higher-density housing.
The plan also calls for improvements to transportation infrastructure, by building out the area’s sidewalk network and locating transit routes “near or adjacent to the community centers, schools, parks, and retail centers.”
Some residents who grew up without parks in their neighborhoods west of the 99 were also pleased to see a proposed 52-acre regional park in the specific plan.
That would be the first of its kind in the west area, which currently has only one neighborhood park — Inspiration Park — and a little over seven acres of small “pocket parks.”
“I didn’t really grow up going to parks unless they were, you know, at the school,” said Harman Singh, a resident of the west area near Island Waterpark.
“These pocket parks, as much as they’re nice for residents, they don’t carry that same impact — that same weight — that something like a Woodward Park is going to have,” he said.
The specific plan proposes a regional park that straddles the north and south sides of Shaw Avenue.
But the park’s potential location has become a point of contention.
The owners of overlapping and adjacent properties have objected to the proposal in public comments shared with the Planning Commission, saying it would make it more difficult to build housing on those properties.
Councilmembers also raised questions over the safety of having the park divided by Shaw.
“I would prefer not to see any park that’s divided by a major thoroughfare,” Perea said.
Karbassi said he shares these concerns over pedestrian safety.
“What we have at Woodward Park is people park across the street and they walk. We’ve talked about putting a pedestrian bridge, but it’s over a million dollars and that’s not going to happen,” he said. “So how the heck are we going to do it over here?”
Karbassi added that he’s open to alternative locations for the regional park — three of which the plan also specifies in different areas.
‘The west area needs a plan’
Population growth in the west area has outpaced the rest of the city’s growth in recent years, according to planning documents.
But Fresno leaders had previously set their sights on the opposite side of the city as the frontier for new housing developments.
That development plan is the embattled Southeast Development Area, or SEDA, which proposes to add 45,000 homes on the southeast fringes of Fresno.
A new tax-sharing agreement reached in late 2024 between the city and Fresno County incentivized growth in the southeast area, giving the city a larger share of property tax of land annexed in SEDA than what the county receives.
But earlier this year, SEDA faced its own indefinite delay as the city scrambled to answer whether the costly plan’s $3 billion funding shortfall could ever be addressed — or justified by the city’s trends in population growth.
Despite these big bets on growth in other parts of town, both Perea and Karbassi said they aren’t going to hold out for SEDA to materialize before throwing support behind the west area’s plan.
“The west area needs a plan,” Karbassi said. “So we should approve it on the merits of that argument alone. If it encourages people to build in the west area, and they don’t build in SEDA, the point is they’re building housing working families need, and it all goes to the same pot of money. It’s our tax base.
“So I don’t want to hold off development in one area because another area wants it,” he added. “That’s just not smart.”
Perea said she intends to follow through on her commitment to her constituents not to approve any other growth area plan before the west area’s “because it has been kicked down the road for so long.”
Proponents are hopeful these debates can still be settled once and for all Thursday, especially after the years they’ve also poured into shaping the plan.
Naindeep Singh, executive director of nonprofit Jakara Movement and a city council candidate running to represent part of the west area next year, was one of 11 community members to sit on a steering committee that met over a dozen times between 2018 and 2022 to shape the plan.
He said he hopes the council will honor those years of work.
“I think a lot of community input, a lot of community outreach, and even city resources went in to get as many different diverging viewpoints as possible,” he said. “So we’re hoping that the city listens to the larger community here in the west area and passes a plan on Thursday.”
Related