Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin spoke on at Fresno Ste as part of the Rethinking Downtown Fresno event on March 23, addressing the current problems with the area and how she plans to revive the city’s life by giving the city the downtown atmosphere that it has longed for.
Photos by Khlarissa Agee / The Collegian
The declining state of downtown Fresno has been a problem for the last 30-40 years, Swearengin said. Many Fresno residents feel that its downtown atmosphere is a lost cause that should not be revived. Businesses continue to build new developments in north Fresno, opposed to where the city’s life began. Now, though, Swearengin is trying to turn the focus back to downtown with the city’s ongoing revitalization effort.
“We are focused on downtown Fresno because it is a sense of place and the calling card for a city,” Swearengin said. “A city is like a body, and downtown is its heart. If you have a body part that is rotting and in a critical state of repair, then it hurts the entire body.”
Some citizens of Fresno believe reviving downtown Fresno is a vain attempt, but Swearengin believes that not having a downtown is the sole thing holding Fresno back from making that leap from a town to a city.
“Think about it, how many great cities that you have been to don’t have a strong downtown atmosphere?” Swearengin said. “Exactly, you can’t. If we want Fresno to grow, we must start downtown.”
If downtown does not matter, then you continue to expand the urban footprint of Fresno, she said, affecting the entire metropolitan area in Fresno. If downtown is not revived, the city of Fresno will move in the same direction it has been for the last 40 years. That direction is moving opposite of the problem, Swearengin said, which she believes has not worked yet and will not work in the future.
In 1999 when Mayor Alan Autry was in office, Fresno was known as the tale of two cities: everything north of Shaw Avenue and everything south of Shaw Avenue. Now, in 2013, it seems as if that division has moved even farther north, to Herndon Avenue. Swearengin believes that at this pace, in 30-40 years, Fresno will be in a place where we do not want to be as a city.
“We develop the mentality of running from the problem because it seems easier than fixing it, but you can only run so far,” Swearengin said. “As we continue to run, we begin to compromise farmland in which our export economy in that field is one of the best in the world.”
Swearengin thinks that in order for a city to grow, it must focus on the export businesses and industrial sector. That drives up income levels, which allows homes to be bought, she said, and essentially develops the economic process of a city. By developing north Fresno further, we are only hurting ourselves by limiting our resources, bringing export businesses down and allowing the industrial sector to become nonexistent, she said, ultimately hurting the economy in Fresno.
The best economic plan to make Fresno a better place is reviving downtown, the mayor argued: Create a dynamic city center, driving the export businesses, focusing on the industrial sector and realizing that the future of Fresno starts downtown.
“Where Fresno goes is where Central California goes,” Swearengin said. “Fresno is the last uncharted territory as a major city in California.”