In a new feature called impact we demonstrate how intelligent fresnans are influencing change in this city, region, national, and world.
I met Danielle Thiesen Bergstrom while working on the Vernacular Architecture Forum hosted in Fresno in 2008. At that time Dani was working as a staff planner with the City of Fresno. She had just been accepted to Cornell University for graduate studies in regional planning.
While Dani is now deep in academic pursuits, Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley remain a basis for her studies. In a recent return trip to the valley, she scheduled a series of interviews with key Fresnans. The goal was to gather input, data and interpretations to feed her thesis.
Working title: The Influences of Land Use and Housing Policy
on Concentrated Poverty Patterns in Fresno, California
Completion date: April 2010
Primary research question: What has been the influence of local, state, and federal land use and housing policy on concentrated poverty patterns (where it’s going, who it’s affecting, how it is growing, etc.) over time, primarily from 1970-2000 (easiest data to acquire) but even up to the present? What makes Fresno so unique in this predicament? What is preventing the stemming of these trends that we’re seeing in Fresno (i.e. the suburbanization of concentrated poverty, filling the inner-ring suburbs)?
Dani says that the goal of this project is to present findings, not necessarily recommendations. She is continually asked for solutions. She humbly admitted “the solutions can not come from me, singlehandedly–it needs to be a collaborative effort.”
List of individuals interviewed thus far:
Amy Chubb, Redevelopment Agency of Fresno
Keith Bergthold, City of Fresno Planning & Development Department Assistant Director
Keith Kelley, Fresno West Coalition for Economic Development President & CEO
Craig Scharton, City of Fresno Downtown & Neighborhood Revitalization Department Director
Nick Yovino, former City of Fresno Planning & Development Department Director
Preston Prince, Housing Authority, Executive Director
Rollie Smith, HUD, Central Valley Field Office Director
Kiel Famellos-Schmidt, archop founder & curator
Greg Barfield, City of Fresno – Homeless Prevention and Policy Manager
as well as other scheduled interviews
When we met for an interview it actually when both ways. I was asking her questions about the Cornell experience and her research. She collected my input on: 1) role as a community activist–what we do, what our vision is 2) The 10 Year Plan to End Chronic Homelessness for Fresno as well as the process 3) Thoughts on the non-profit sector engaging citizens to combat concentrated poverty.
The goal on this round of interviews was to gather the insights of local policy-makers/implementers in the City of Fresno. In future visits she may include interviews with residents and other community leader. Below are some initial maps she drafted to demonstrate the pattern of concentration of poverty in Fresno.
The above charts are the main reason that there actually should not be regional planning at the governance level. There was plan after plan after plan and the net result was to actually increase the density of those living in poverty all into the same area.
Governmentally master-planned top-down solutions have a 40 year track record of failure.
Archop’s many themes of local revitalization, mostly at the site level, are exactly was are needed in a bottom-up fashion since they have few of the unintended results of impersonal large-scale regional planning.
Arnie,
While some larger forces have definitely been involved in the concentration of poverty, we cannot necessarily conclude that all government actions will produce this result. That’s why I’m conducting this research, to diagnose the problem so that our future solutions will have the greatest efficacy in attempting to solve this daunting challenge.
Even though planning in Fresno has not tended to be very participatory, this is by no means exemplary of the field of city and regional planning as a whole. Many planners can and have been actively involved in making sure that planning is a civic exercise, not limited to the domains of technocrats behind computers, isolated from the reality of many of our neighborhoods.
That’s why I love what archop is doing; the site really engages people to think and interact with the built environment in a way that I haven’t seen in Fresno before. It’s my hope that my research might be able to contribute to that conversation.
Dani