What's at stake?
The Fresno City Council voted 6-1 to spend an additional $153,636 on environmental planning for the Southeast Development Area (SEDA) — a proposed 45,000-home development spanning 9,000 acres of farmland. The vote comes as mounting evidence shows Fresno's traditional approach to housing isn't working.
The heir to one of Fresno’s most storied home-building empires delivered a stark message to city officials Thursday: his company won’t build a single house in Fresno next year.
John A. Bonadelle — the third generation of a family that began building entry-level homes in Fresno shortly after World War II and whose grandfather later was convicted in the FBI’s Operation Rezone corruption probe of the 1990s — told the Fresno City Council his company would pull no building permits in 2025, citing a “lack of feasible development land” in the city.
“We will be building in Bakersfield, Madera County, Clovis,” Bonadelle said. “Looking at the industry at large, most builders face the same situation we do: Single-family residential housing investment within Fresno is declining, while investment in housing increases in surrounding valley cities and counties.”
Bonadelle urged the council to move forward with a massive new development project in southeast Fresno, presenting it as the city’s path back to restore competitiveness with other cities.
“SEDA is an opportunity for Fresno to provide potential homebuyers with critical housing supply.”
The Fresno City Council voted 6-1 to spend an additional $153,636 on environmental planning for the Southeast Development Area (SEDA) — a proposed 45,000-home development spanning 9,000 acres of farmland. The vote comes as mounting evidence shows Fresno’s traditional approach to housing isn’t working.
Building rates in Fresno have declined four straight years, according to California HCD’s Annual Progress Reports data, with 2024 on pace to be among the bottom 10 years for housing construction over the last 45 years. The city has also overbuilt single-family homes by almost 30,000 units above what households need, according to Mayor Jerry Dyer’s housing strategy.
However, the Valley’s housing challenges run deeper than Bonadelle’s claims about Fresno’s lack of buildable land, California HCD’s data suggests.
Between 2020 and 2024, Fresno and Bakersfield — which Bonadelle cited as a destination for his company’s future projects — saw nearly identical construction levels, with Fresno averaging 1,449 permits annually to Bakersfield’s 1,420. Total housing investment in both cities differed by just $200 million over that period, with Fresno at $2.4 billion overall and Bakersfield at $2.2 billion.
On Thursday, questions emerged about what work to plan for SEDA has actually been completed under the original $625,000 contract with FCS International from 2020. The consultant never completed required infrastructure evaluations, cost analyses, funding matrices, improvement cost allocations, project financial feasibility studies, or financing strategies for SEDA, according to a letter from Fresno attorney Patience Milrod submitted to the council.
When questioned about this at Thursday’s meeting, Development and Planning Director Jennifer Clark acknowledged that final documents “still need to be done, and yes, they were paid in advance for those items.”
Clark said planners aim to release the revision of SEDA’s environmental impact report “in early 2025,” hopefully “by the beginning of February.” The city would then bring the project back to council “before the end of June” for a definitive vote, she said.
The city has still not disclosed an infrastructure cost estimate for SEDA. “When is the council going to receive that?” Councilmember Miguel Arias asked. “You’re asking us to extend a contract without even receiving the work product of the initial contract.
“In my tenure, I’ve never seen an extended contract without the vendor having to provide their work product,” said Arias, who cast the lone dissenting vote. “I’m not comfortable until first seeing their work product.”
The project faces mounting challenges beyond its incomplete planning documents. Each new wave of suburban expansion since the 1970s has yielded progressively lower densities in Fresno: from 2,000 units per square mile in the 1970s to just 1,100 in the 2010s, according to an Urban Institute analysis. This could lead to infrastructure funding problems, Fresnoland reported in May.
Despite these trends, Bonadelle insisted SEDA’s infrastructure challenges “will get sorted out.”
The council’s vote extends the contract with FCS International for environmental planning services through June 2025.
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