What's at stake?
Following a successful legal challenge against them, the Clovis has been implementing policy changes to allow for more affordable housing to be built in the city.
The Clovis Planning Commission unanimously approved a new policy that aims to help the city build more affordable housing by leaning on developers of market-rate housing to include it in their developments.
Among the biggest commitments that the new Mixed Income Zoning Ordinance asks of Clovis developers will be in making at least 5%of new developments with 11 or more housing units be set aside for lower-income residents. The policy, also known as the MIZO, was approved in a 4-0 vote by the five-member planning commission on Thursday.
Commissioner Joe Hebert was absent.
“We’re the first city in the Central Valley that has this as a requirement,” said Chad McCollum, the city’s economic development and housing communications director, while fielding questions from the commission at Thursday’s meeting. The hearing to approve the policy only lasted about a half hour.
The MIZO is part of a package of concessions made by the city following their loss in the Martinez v. City Of Clovis case in 2024. The case was filed by local housing advocate Dez Martinez, who successfully argued in court that the city was not complying with its own commitments to build homes for lower-income residents.
Since then, the city has been slowly but surely implementing those new policies to help introduce more affordable housing to Clovis. McCollum said at Thursday’s meeting that the successful implementation of the MIZO would leave the city with only one more commitment to meet the case’s settlement agreement.
“It’s good to see Clovis leading the way to more housing, affordable to more of our Valley residents,” Patience Milrod, legal counsel for Martinez in the case, told Fresnoland on Friday morning. “The City of Fresno can learn from Clovis’ example.”
Martinez was not at Thursday’s meeting. They did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this story.
The MIZO is expected to come before the Clovis City Council for final approval in April, according to the presentation given at Thursday’s meeting.
In 2019, Martinez sued the city for violating state housing law, arguing that the city’s policies were discriminatory toward low-income residents and people of color.
A ruling by the California Fifth District Court of Appeals sided with Martinez in 2023, stating that Clovis needed to do more to create and preserve affordable housing. Clovis tried to appeal the ruling to the California Supreme Court, but the state’s high court refused to take up the case.
The five total concessions the city committed to deliver following the lawsuit aimed to increase affordable housing in Clovis by eliminating red tape and increasing financing options for local affordable housing developers.
This isn’t the first time Clovis has been taken to task in court to more closely align with state policies.
This year, Clovis will hold district-based elections for the first time ever, breaking from their century-old practice of at-large voting to elect political representation. The change comes following legal threats from a Malibu-based attorney who argued that Clovis was in violation of the California Voting Rights Act of 2002.
