How $300 million for Fresno’s downtown will be spent. What gets built first

The demolition of a deteriorating warehouse this month along the railroad tracks near the Chukchansi Park baseball stadium will be one of the first steps in Fresno’s unprecedented plan to revitalize downtown and neighboring Chinatown.

Mayor Jerry Dyer has nearly $300 million in state grants to spend on infrastructure – parking garages, sewer, water, storm drain lines and more – within roughly 250 acres to spur new housing in the city’s historic core.

How the mayor spends this slug of money could come to define his second term and the future success of downtown Fresno. The Republican ex-police chief has staked a huge amount of his political capital on attracting more downtown residents to new housing – enough to create a critical mass to attract more retailers, restaurants and nightlife, initially in an area anchored by a planned high-speed rail station at Mariposa and H streets.

The utility work, including inevitable disruptions to city streets, could start as soon as June, Dyer told The Bee.

“We have about 3,000 people living downtown. We need about 10,000 people to get us to a tipping point to create that vibrancy at night,” Dyer said in a recent panel discussion hosted by the Maddy Institute.

Ground zero for the spending is an area bounded by Van Ness Avenue, Tuolumne and Ventura streets, and Highway 99 - which also includes the Fulton Street corridor and baseball stadium east of the Union Pacific rail line and future California High-Speed Rail Authority line. About $100 million of the money is slated for historic investments in Chinatown neighborhoods running from west of the rail tracks to the freeway.

Before much of the housing can be developed, however, aging water and sewer lines – some of which are well over 100 years old – need to be upgraded, and more parking will also be needed for the influx of residents.

Dyer says that developers have not taken on big downtown renovation projects because the water and sewer lines beneath downtown “are far too small to accommodate the growth in terms of all the residences that we want.” It’s too expensive for developers to upgrade and the investments “don’t pencil out,” he said.

”Some of the reasons it doesn’t pencil out are (that) rents have been low and there’s all these infrastructure problems: water mains, sewer mains, streets, curbs, sidewalks, gutters, streetlights, all of those things – and parking.”

In a recent interview with reporters and editors from The Fresno Bee, Dyer acknowledged that parts of the grand plan are more fluid than others as city-hired consultants assess which pipelines need to be replaced, and the most strategic locations for parking structures to serve new downtown residents and visitors.

“We may end up with five (parking structures), placed around housing,” Dyer said, “to serve for high-speed rail, people coming in (to downtown), can serve for venues, restaurants and housing – multi-purpose parking.”

What’s on the drawing board?

While not set in stone, other parts of the plan are more advanced, including immediate development of 860 apartment units across four different sites, Dyer told The Bee. Those include:

• CVS Pharmacy building: The now-closed building at Fulton and Tuolumne streets, a site owned by the Fresno Housing Authority, will be demolished and the housing agency is expected to build 462 apartments, Dyer said. The plans call for using some of the money to build a new parking structure for an estimated $11.7 million.

• City-owned warehouse: The abandoned warehouse on H Street between Inyo and Mono streets, just southwest of Chukchansi Park, is slated to be demolished. Dyer said the city will seek a developer to build apartments on the site – as many as 293 units, according to plans circulated earlier this year. A new parking structure is also envisioned behind the apartment building, along the Union Pacific tracks.

• Bow On Tong building: The former 103-year-old Bow On Tong fraternal building, which was largely destroyed by fire in March 2022, is on China Alley between Tulare and Kern streets in Chinatown. It is expected to be the site of a project that could create up to 71 apartments. Jan Minami, a project director with the Chinatown Fresno Foundation, said the buiding’s fate depends on resolving some longstanding liens.

• Peacock building: A renovation of the 1910-era structure, located on F Street between Tulare and Kern streets in Chinatown, could provide as many as 84 apartments.
  
  

Dyer called these four “catalyst projects” that will serve as a springboard for future mixed-use developments – buildings with retail, restaurants or other commerce on the ground floor with housing on upper floors – throughout downtown, he said.

The projects are in addition to other developments already taking place in the target area ahead of the planned infrastructure efforts.

The old Hotel Fresno is reopening soon with 79 apartments at Broadway and H Streets, and developer Sevak Khatchadourian is renovating the Helm Building at Fulton and Mariposa streets for residential units above ground-floor commercial uses. Farther south on Fulton, at Tulare Street, developer Will Dyck has submitted plans to the city to renovate the old Radin & Kamp building – later home to a JCPenney department store – into 162 apartments with ground-floor commercial uses, Dyer told The Bee. In Chinatown, the new 57-unit Monarch @ Chinatown apartment building opened last year at F and Mariposa streets.

Dyer also acknowledged what some consider an unprecedented level of investment in Chinatown by the city from the grants. While there is no discrete breakdown of spending on the Chinatown side of the tracks relative to the downtown side, “we’re not going to just develop downtown alone,” he said. “Everything we do is in this (Chinatown/downtown) footprint now.”

But, he added, “there’s going to be well over $100 million in Chinatown” infrastructure work from the grants.

‘If infrastructure is working, everything works’

The term “infrastructure” doesn’t exactly tingle the senses with excitement, but water and sewer lines, curbs, gutters, and streetlights are necessary for the kind of revitalization leaders foresee for downtown and Chinatown.

“Infrastructure is the thing that people take for granted,” Elliott Balch, CEO of the Downtown Fresno Partnership, said at the recent Maddy Institute program. “If infrastructure is working, everything works.”

“We’re seeing projects that are happening now,” Balch added. “We’re doing the infrastructure that’s necessary to help those projects happen … in advance of high-speed rail.”

How did we get this money? Fresno was on the receiving end this year of two significant grants from the state of California: a $250 million award over three years, and a separate one-year grant of $43.7 million, both aimed at infrastructure. Between the two grants, plans floated earlier this year include:

• About $82 million for parking structures to add 2,000 parking spaces to the approximately 2,100 city-controlled stalls already in downtown.

• Almost $27 million for sewer system upgrades.

• About $25 million for stormwater drainage infrastructure.

• More than $24 million for water main upgrades.
  
  

• About $20 million for roadway, sidewalk, streetlights and landscaping along streets including in Chinatown.
  
  

• About $20 million for a multi-modal transportation hub for Fresno’s city bus services, high-speed rail, electric vehicle charging and other transportation services.

• About $15 million for pocket parks and linear parks along corridors in the area.

• $80 million for other efforts to attract new investment, job retention and neighborhood revitalization.

A consultant is working on the best schedule for the work. Once that evaluation is completed, “we anticipate awarding a construction contract in late June for the roads to be tore up and disrupting downtown,” he said. “That’s how fast we’re going to be moving on that.”

Dyer told The Bee that the city has been meeting with the California High-Speed Rail Authority and the Fresno Metropolitan Flood Control District over what storm-drain work will be needed to keep heavy rains from flooding the bullet-train tracks, which Dyer said are in a 100-year-flood plain.

Discussions are also underway with Pacific Gas & Electric Co., for possible relocation of above-ground power lines to go underground instead while the city has streets torn up for its own infrastructure work, as well as to ensure that the utility has the capacity to provide gas and electricity to a growing downtown residential population.

While there are other infrastructure needs in the greater downtown area that stretches north to Divisadero Street and south and west to Highway 41, Dyer said he believes the two grants together will cover the entire cost for plans in the Ventura-Van Ness-Tuolumne-Highway 99 core area.