Fresno Councilmembers want to convert this venue into a shelter. They say it’s an emergency
Three Fresno City Councilmembers would like city officials to declare a local emergency around housing and homelessness and discuss a number of potential policies, including a proposal to turn the Fresno Convention Center into a homeless shelter.
Councilmembers Miguel Arias, Luis Chavez and Annalisa Perea sponsored an agenda item for Thursday’s City Council meeting to discuss the issue. What exactly the councilmembers end up voting on depends on what input they consider from Mayor Jerry Dyer and his administration and the rest of the council. So far, they haven’t formally proposed any policy or emergency order.
The three south Fresno representatives want to send a message to state and federal agencies that Fresno’s housing crisis is urgent as temporary shelters created during the COVID-19 pandemic are transitioned into permanent housing.
“We just want the community to understand that we are taking these issues seriously and that moving forward, this council is going to be a very action-oriented council when it comes to addressing these issues,” Perea said.
Fresno and Madera counties last year reported more than 4,000 people were homeless, living in shelters and on the streets.
The three councilmembers also have ideas on how to increase the city’s shelter space and affordable housing stock quickly and long term.
They want to turn the Fresno Convention Center into an emergency homeless shelter; make changes to the city’s planning and development process that will speed up construction of affordable housing units; and they want to grandfather in any unit additions to single-family homes that were built illegally.
Technically, the city manager and their boss, the mayor, have the authority to declare an emergency. The councilmembers are working with the city attorney to determine the correct legal language for their intentions with the proposal.
“We’ve made a lot of progress in housing hundreds of homeless residents into temporary shelters and semi-permanent housing,” Arias said in a phone interview with The Bee. “But the general public inaccurately believes that because they’re not seeing them (unhoused people) on freeways, as it used to be, that the crisis is over.
“In actuality, the crisis simply moved into our residential neighborhoods, our neighborhood parks and our vacant buildings,” he said.
Policy ideas
Each of the three council members have policy proposals they hope to bring forward.
Perea also wants to work with Dyer’s team to declare a shelter emergency for the city’s lack of shelter beds as soon as this month. She hopes the proposal will be ready for the next council meeting.
Arias said his district carries the burden of sheltering the most unhoused residents throughout the city. but the district is running out of hotels the city can purchase for temporary shelter. That’s why he wants to turn the convention center into a shelter.
Arias said the city recently learned Fresno County’s main homeless shelter soon will be converted to permanent housing. The police department and hospitals already transport unhoused people to the Poverello House in downtown. Continuing to add to the homeless population downtown isn’t sustainable since both downtown and Chinatown are on the path to revitalization, he said.
“The conversation I want to have with my colleagues and the administration is, in the city as a whole, if we’re going to continue to solely rely on District 3 to house the county’s homeless population, then we might as well do so in the biggest public facility that we have, which is the Selland Arena and the convention center, both of which have been prepared for these kinds of emergencies,” Arias said.
Fresno allows people to build what’s called an “accessory dwelling unit” on their single-family home properties, but many, if not most, are built without the proper permits and essentially are illegal. Chavez wants to work with those homeowners to bring the add-on units into compliance and then grandfather them into the city’s rental registry to boost the city’s affordable housing stock. He hopes that will also incentivize homeowners to rent the units out rather than use them for additional living space.
The councilmembers also want to fast track affordable housing developments by expediting the permitting process. It currently takes anywhere from 18-24 months to build an apartment complex in Fresno, they said. To spur growth of affordable housing, they want to create a quick template in the planning process for affordable housing developments so construction can be done in as little as eight months.
Dyer’s office was not available to comment Wednesday.