After Years of Delays, City’s $80 Million Downtown Apartment Project Set to Break Ground

An empty lot outside Chukchansi Park that’s sat waiting for more than a decade is finally about to see construction start. The Park at South Stadium apartments — an eight-story, 174-unit building the City Council first approved back in 2016 — is expected to break ground next week, according to city officials.

The $80 million project has become something of a cautionary tale about how hard it is to build housing downtown, where the math between what it costs to build and what people can afford to pay in rent often just doesn’t work. Getting this one to the starting line took three years of the city installing new infrastructure, then this year handing the developers $11.7 million in city loans to close the gap.

Mayor Jerry Dyer made this project a specific priority in his downtown plans. The city had actually killed an earlier version of it in 2022 after years of stalling, but brought it back last fall with new financing tools.

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The building will sit at Fulton and Inyo streets, across from Tioga-Sequoia Beer Garden. It’ll be mixed-income: 104 market-rate apartments and 70 priced for low-income households for the next 55 years. The ground floor will have community space, a fitness center, conference rooms, and about 1,568 square feet of retail space.

The Breakdown

• The city gave the developers an $8 million gap financing loan and a $3.7 million loan from the Local Housing Trust Fund — that’s $11.7 million in city money. The developers secured another $69.6 million in bond market financing.
• The city set an August 31 deadline for the developers to get their permits. Groundbreaking is expected next week, though the city hasn’t said exactly when.
• This is the same site where builders Mehmet Noyan and Terance Frazier first proposed a project. The City Council approved a version in 2016, but the project kept stalling as costs climbed. In 2022, Councilmember Mike Karbassi argued it had dragged on too long, and the council voted not to extend the deadlines — effectively killing it.
• The city revived the project last fall with a new development agreement. Noyan brought on a new partner, Jeff Isenstadt, and the project grew to 174 units at a cost of $80 million.

What This Means for You

Mayor Dyer and the City Council voted to spend $11.7 million in public money — plus three years of infrastructure work — to make this downtown housing project financially possible for developers. That’s a direct choice about how to use city resources: subsidize new construction in a specific downtown footprint, with most of the units priced at market rate and a portion set aside for low-income renters for 55 years. When the council voted to approve the new development agreement last fall and award the loans this year, they chose this approach over other uses of the same $11.7 million.

What to Watch

Start with the opportunity-cost question: why is $11.7 million in city money going toward subsidizing new construction — which still leaves 104 of 174 units priced at market rate — rather than toward programs that would lower the cost of the large amount of housing Fresno already has? That’s a real policy choice, not an automatic one, and it’s worth asking directly whether new downtown apartments or more affordable access to existing housing across the city does more for the families struggling with rent right now.

Then there’s the beneficiary question. This project is framed as a win for residents who’ll live there, and for the low-income households who’ll get 70 affordable units. But it’s also an $11.7 million public subsidy to the developers who’ll own and profit from the building, and it’s worth asking whether a project that still leaves most units priced at market rate is genuinely addressing Fresno’s affordability problem or simply making a development financially viable for its builders.

When public money fills a financing gap, who actually benefits?

Finally, this project has already missed deadlines and been killed once by the city before being revived. The developers now have until August 31 to get their permits and are expected to break ground next week. Whether construction actually starts on schedule — and whether it finishes — is worth watching. A decade of promises and a second development agreement don’t guarantee a completed building.