Business View Magazine | August 2020

208 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE AUGUST 2020 who want to have an urban lifestyle don’t have to move to Portland, New York, or Austin to get it. They can do it right here in Fresno. There’s a tech scene, a night life, and a brewery scene. So, it’s the kind of thing that’s good for our municipal budget and good for retaining young talent who want the urban lifestyle.” “It’s good for our air quality too,” he adds. “Any person who chooses to live above a coffee shop downtown and walks or rides their bike everywhere isn’t driving a car and adding more to our air quality challenges. So, it’s the kind of thing we see as a win-win all around. “The goal is to get 10,000 housing units into our downtown over the next couple of decades and another 10,000 on transportation corridors where we have enhanced bus service, and really focus some of our growth in these areas to offer some options to folks. Downtown is a little farther along than the transit corridors. In downtown, there have been about 600 everything has been processed within those stated timelines.” A major priority of Fresno’s General Plan is to foster a better balance in the city’s growth. “The goal is for half of the future growth to continue to be in the conventional fashion on the outskirts of the city,” Zack explains. “We want to encourage the other half of our growth to go back into central areas, particularly downtown, a few key transit corridors, and other central neighborhoods, and we want to create more options for how folks can live. We want to create walkable environments at certain key nodes; areas where public transportation can really be effective and useful; and try to make a development pattern that’s as diverse as our population.” “So ideally, folks who may be low income and need to be relieved of car expenses now can live by the BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) and take it to all the jobs downtown,” Zack continues. “And the younger, more cosmopolitan types of folks