What’s at stake?
Over 100 apartments could be coming to downtown Fresno soon, following the commitment and acquisition of funding needed to get a long-planned housing development off the ground.
A long-stalled downtown housing project is one step closer to finally breaking ground after securing the tens of millions of dollars needed from the bond market to begin construction.
Pending approval from the Fresno City Council, The Park at South Stadium Apartments at Fulton and Inyo Streets is expected to begin construction this year, after more than a decade of false starts, with the addition of nearly $70 million in funding.
The 174-unit apartment project has been stuck in finance hell since 2016. But Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer, a long-time proponent of the project, cheered the recent burst of good luck through a Friday news release.
“The Park at South Stadium Apartments represents everything we have been working toward — quality infill housing, affordability, and a vibrant urban core,” Dyer said in the news release.
It’s a breakthrough for a city that has struggled for years to attract financiers to support its goal to build another 10,000 homes downtown, despite years of streamlined permitting processes and more relaxed zoning.
Construction of the project is expected to begin in August. The project is the brainchild of Jeff Isenstadt and Mehmet Noyan, co-managers of The Park Partners LLC.
Plans to start development date back as early as 2015. Though it’s gone through multiple changes since then, the downtown Fresno hosuing project has consistently been planned to be around Chuckchansi Park.
The project’s total sticker cost comes in at around $80 million, with the remaining funding coming from the city through its own money and its downtown housing loan program.
Isenstadt said on Friday’s news release that the announcement was “monumental,” adding that the project is expected to open around the summer of 2028.
Noyan said the support they’ve received from city leaders was “unprecedented.”
Like many city leaders before them, Dyer and the Fresno City Council have long dreamed about reinvigorating the city’s downtown corridors, with many of those plans involving the reintroduction of hundreds of homes for city residents to move into.
The nearly $300 million state investment the city has seen this decade has been, in large part, used to update infrastructure in the city’s downtown and Chinatown districts — a factor seen as one of the biggest hurdles to getting developers to want to build in the heart of the city.
“These state-supported infrastructure improvements were intended to catalyze housing, and that is exactly what this project demonstrates,” Dyer said in the news release.
The City Council is expected to vote on the downtown Fresno housing project at their June 18 meeting.
