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Fresno City Council Postpones Vote On Housing Amendment

Joe Moore
/
Valley Public Radio

The Fresno City Council has postponed a vote on legislation that would undo a key component of the city’s newly adopted general plan.

 

It’s an amendment that would require developers of multi-family apartment complexes outside of downtown to seek conditional use permits. Those permits add significant time and money to a building’s construction timeline, but they allow for feedback from the city and neighbors.

City councilmember Steve Brandau co-sponsored the amendment because he says community feedback is essential, and it’s not required in the current general plan.

"A developer can come in, buy the land, put up an apartment complex inside of a residential neighborhood, with really no mandatory connection to the people in the neighborhood," he says, "and to me that’s proving to be problematic."

But Ashley Werner, a lawyer with the advocacy group The Leadership Counsel, argues additional building permits would drive up rent and discriminate against lower-income residents.

"It creates a further obstacle to getting the city into legal compliance with housing element law and into expanding housing opportunity in Fresno," she says.

The vote has been postponed to allow city officials to explore alternatives to the amendment.

Kerry Klein is an award-winning reporter whose coverage of public health, air pollution, drinking water access and wildfires in the San Joaquin Valley has been featured on NPR, KQED, Science Friday and Kaiser Health News. Her work has earned numerous regional Edward R. Murrow and Golden Mike Awards and has been recognized by the Association of Health Care Journalists and Society of Environmental Journalists. Her podcast Escape From Mammoth Pool was named a podcast “listeners couldn’t get enough of in 2021” by the radio aggregator NPR One.
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