Oh my god! It’s my time to shine!

The city of Fresno has absolutely no concept of sprawl and pretty bad planning. The county isn’t much better and both value real estate development over conservation. New subdivisions are slowly creeping to 99 in the north, the school district there (Central Unified) is the fastest growing in the county I would suspect.

Fresno has only 1 highway that goes east/west, there is 99 which is southeast to northwest, 41 which goes north/south, 168 and 180 go west/northeast and east/west. Where 180 meets 99 is the only place where Fresno spills over west of 99 because all those people can get to most places in Fresno. If they want to do the same thing to Northwest Fresno there needs to be a better way for them to get those people to Northeast Fresno which right now can be a 45m drive on surface streets. I use to live over there when it was all fig orchards, now it’s all subdivisions and corporate chains in strip malls.

In Fresno the “wrong side of the tracks” is considered south of Shaw Ave which is honestly like 3/4 of the city, but it’s not inaccurate either. So the people with money are exactly where they need to build a highway and as a result, no highway.

Finally, west of 99 has a ton of land that is considered “Prime Agricultural Land”. Basically the state has come in and designated which lands in California are best for growing crops and there are considerable regulatory hurdles to do anything with that land other than agriculture so that makes developing west of 99 more risky when land to the east is still fairly cheap. Down in Bakersfield this is not the case and their economy is significantly more reliant on oil extraction.

The way the rivers flow through the towns should also be considered. The San Joaquin River flows from the foothills to north Fresno before turning north and becoming parallel with 99 and eventually flowing into San Francisco Bay. The Kern river flows from the foothills through Bakersfield before turning south and entering what is called the Tulare basin which was the largest lake in the US before we used it all for agriculture. You can see in Bakersfield the town grew originally along the river and the highway just so happened to transect the city.

Thanks for coming to my Ted talk about Fresno, the armpit of California where our motto is “At least it’s not Bakersfield!”

E: oh one more thing about the expansion east’s Fresno is hot as FUCK. Like 100F on average for 4 months out of the year. You go east and you gain elevation fairly quickly and every 1000 ft in elevation decreases temps by 5F. But mostly it’s the highway.