Good morning! It’s Thursday, Aug. 7. This is Rob, wishing you a happy National IPA Day to those who celebrate and a happy National Berries ’n’ Cream Day to those who don’t!
🥵 Gross: Expect 101 today and triple-digit heat until at least Tuesday.
📸 You still have six days left to submit your entries for a local photography contest dubbed “Focus on Downtown,” an annual contest that takes place within the “downtown triangle” between Highways 41, 180, and 99. It is open to all cameras and skill levels with four categories to submit photos in: (1) Architecture, (2) Culture & Events, (3) Portraits: People & Pets and (4) Black & White. Submissions can be accepted until 10 a.m. Wednesday, Aug. 13. Downtown Fresno
🎧 Listen up: When I don’t know what I want to hear, I’ve been turning a website called “What The F*ck Should I Listen To?” It helps me and it can help you, too. (If you can handle “bad language.” And here’s another song-recommendation site if you don’t like it!)
1. Who funded the controversial Fresno Future Forward PAC?
A company called Blue Horsehoe (sic) Agency, according to the PAC’s latest filing.
The company, which has the same business address as three companies run by Alex Tavlian, loaned the PAC $4,439.51, the exact cost of the disparaging mailers attacking Brandon Vang.
Fresnoland’s Omar S. Rashad didn’t find any trace of Blue Horsehoe Agency in city, county and state public business records.
Fresno State Professor Thomas Holyoke: “What it suggests is that this is one individual who owns, manages all these companies and is moving money between them. Whether it’s for the purpose of making it hard to track that money as it enters the political process — I couldn’t specifically say.”
2. Is this the future for Fresno housing?
Fresno’s first community land trust-owned home landed on the market Wednesday in a South Tower neighborhood with a price tag well below the neighborhood’s standard market rate, Fresnoland’s Julianna Morano reported.
Now it’s listed for sale at $215,000 in a neighborhood where the median home price this summer comes in around $345,000.
How’d this happen? The single-family home, on Farris Avenue north of Belmont, was purchased and renovated by the South Tower Community Land Trust over the past year and a half.
The land trust model aims to keep homes affordable and also in the hands of local residents, instead of investment firms and speculators, partly by selling homes while maintaining ownership of the land they’re built on.
Fresno realtor Joe Haydock: “Our only concern is home ownership that’s affordable for real-life human beings,” — as opposed to speculators that “may or may not do a good job of renovating the home.”
3. What can Fresno learn from Portland’s rail revolution?
On this week’s Fresnolandia, Jordan and Danielle speak with Rick Gustafson, a Portland-based transit expert and former legislator and regional planning executive who helped Portland get its first regional light rail system.
He was instrumental in developing Portland’s streetcar system as well. As an advisor with Shiels, Obletz, and Johnsen, he advises cities across the United States on streetcar development.
They dive into the history of Portland’s light rail and streetcar, the importance of density for transit, and how cities with deeply ingrained car cultures can, or could ever, shift toward more transit use.
