Which parts of Fresno had most, least housing built in past decade? See the data
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Most multifamily housing (66%) clustered north of Shaw, east of Highway 99.
- Single-family growth concentrated on the city’s eastern edge, near SEDA border.
- Southwest Fresno lagged in 2012–2024 development but saw new homes on market in 2025.
Over the past decade or so, Fresno’s housing story has been one you might expect: Areas historically favored by the city have boomed with new homes while those historically neglected have been working to catch up.
A study presented to the City Council last year showed the area north of Shaw Avenue was the site of most of Fresno’s new multifamily housing, such as apartments, from 2012-2024. New single-family homes, such as traditional houses, concentrated in the city’s eastern edge.
But the land next to existing neighborhoods in southwest Fresno languished, producing no new single-family homes and less than 1% of new multifamily housing on Fresno in that time span.
“Builders will go where the land and infrastructure is,” the study says. “In this case mostly on the outer perimeter of the City of Fresno, Clovis, and Madera County.”
That helps explain why southwest Fresno, an area with a history of racial segregation and concentrated poverty, fell so far behind the rest of the eight city areas measured in the study. The area has no shortage of potential housing space, but it has dealt with land contamination from industrial activity, continued farming on land once promised for homes and a lack of infrastructure, all while other parts of town grew, said southwest City Councilmember Miguel Arias.
Allysunn Walker, president and CEO of the Southwest Fresno Development corporation, said the area’s history with racial redlining caused it to be labeled “undesirable for investment.”
“The city has to incentivize developers,” Walker said. “They weren’t incentivizing them to develop in southwest Fresno ... because the march of progress was considered to be northward.”
But she and Arias said the southwest Fresno in 2025 was the site of dozens of new homes. Larger residential developments are also advancing, they said, as the area’s infrastructure has grown in recent years with the arrival of a Fresno City College campus.
“I’m more hopeful than I’ve ever been,” Walker said.
Multifamily housing booms in north Fresno, single-family in east Fresno
The city’s study intended to identify the demand for housing in the proposed Southeast Development Area — a controversial plan known as “SEDA” that would extend the Fresno’s infrastructure in that direction to accommodate close to 45,000 new homes at a cost of billions of dollars to the city.
But the study also analyzed how much housing hit the market from 2012-2024 across eight other existing areas in and around the city. It found that 5,275 new multifamily housing units and 11,747 new single-family homes hit the Fresno housing market in that time period.
About 66% of the new multifamily housing happened in the area “north of Shaw” and east of Highway 99. Downtown Fresno, which for this study extended slightly west of Highway 99 and east of Highway 41, had about 14% of the city’s new multifamily housing.
The area “south of Shaw” had 4,092 single-family homes hit the market, which is about one-third of the city’s total, and more than any other part of town. But these “south of Shaw” single-family homes were actually concentrated on the area’s far eastern edge, where it borders the proposed SEDA area, not in the city’s core.
Other neighborhoods near SEDA also boomed with single-family homes, as did northwest Fresno — the area north of Clinton Avenue and west of Highway 99.
Southwest Fresno struggled to catch up, but has ‘ton of potential’
Most of southwest Fresno’s existing neighborhoods were considered part of the downtown area in the study. But the space next to that, which is the city’s southwestern corner, had no new single-family homes and less than 1% of new multifamily homes.
Arias, the area’s city councilmember, said southwest Fresno was intentionally concentrated with poverty through government subsidized housing. The city installed the “bare minimum” of infrastructure there while building out sewer and water mains in other parts of town, he said.
After a large residential development failed on hundreds of acres once used as a dumping ground in southwest Fresno, local development firm Granville Homes bought the land and was allowed by the city in 2013 to plant orchards. Granville Homes, owned by the Fresno’s Assemi family, indicated at the time that the land — known as Mission Ranch — would still one day be used for housing.
Today, it is still farmland and is now listed for sale at $16.6 million as the Assemi family in recent years defaulted on loans worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Arias said the ranch’s use for farming took a huge part of southwest Fresno’s potential housing space away.
But in 2025 the area saw the construction and opening of dozens of new mixed-income and affordable homes developed by the Fresno Housing Authority and the nonprofit builder Self-Help Enterprises.
Arias said the developer of the planned 120-acre West Creek Village, which intends to add more than 400 total units in the area, has secured a builder. The development will include the existing Fresno City College campus.
Another development called Oasis intends to add almost 600 market-rate single-family homes. And Allysunn, the southwest development corporation CEO, said she expects the organization to break ground on 21 small affordable homes for seniors this year on one acre leased from the Westside Church of God.
“There is a ton of potential here,” she said. “If we do build housing here, I believe middle income folks will move back because this will be a place where they can afford.”
This story was originally published January 16, 2026 at 2:11 PM.
