To understand how patterns of development have changed over time in Fresno and the broader Central San Joaquin Valley, California (comprising Fresno, Madera, Kings, and Tulare Counties), we evaluate the location and density of housing across the four-county region between 1940 and 2019. We demonstrate that land development has occurred at a faster rate than population growth, resulting in an increasingly sprawling, low-density metropolitan area. This development has displaced agricultural land and destroyed natural areas; undermined the viability of city center–adjacent neighborhoods, whose residents are disproportionately people of color; and made it challenging to provide effective public transportation service. We compare the region with other metropolitan areas on the West Coast to show that these trends were not inevitable—and can be reversed.

Why This Matters

Urban areas in the United States have been developing outwardly for more than a century. This sprawling growth has been accompanied by disinvestment in city cores, increasing social and racial segregation, the degradation of natural ecosystems, and pollution and other environmental harms. But state investments in new infrastructure, including the forthcoming California high-speed rail system, offer Fresno a key opportunity to reverse its harmful development patterns and support denser and more equitable growth. Understanding past trends is critical to ensuring that this opportunity can be effectively leveraged to move the region toward an equitable and sustainable future.

What We Found

We find that urban sprawl has continued unabated for decades in the Central San Joaquin Valley:

• Overall, the region’s urbanized land area has grown by 226 percent since 1970, more than its population growth of 153 percent over the same period. Similarly, developed land in Fresno County has grown by 175 percent—while the county’s population has only grown 144 percent. This has meant, overall, a reduction in the average neighborhood density.
• Once developed into subdivisions of single-family homes, neighborhoods in the region rarely change their built form—less than 30 percent of new housing each decade has been in infill locations, meaning neighborhoods that are already developed. The region has primarily accommodated growth through greenfield development, meaning housing built on land that was previously used for natural or agricultural purposes, and which tends to be on the periphery of urban areas.
• The sprawling growth of the region’s urban areas has been associated with the loss of agricultural land. In response, new agricultural land has been added elsewhere in the region, displacing natural grasslands, forests, and other sensitive ecologies.

Our analysis also shows, however, that these sprawling development patterns were not inevitable. We compare the region with other parts of the US, showing that Fresno County could have accommodated its entire housing growth from 1990 to 2019 in central, already developed neighborhoods if it had adopted the patterns of infill construction that some other West Coast counties have pursued. If Fresno had chosen to invest in existing neighborhoods instead of creating new, sprawling subdivisions, it may have been able to avoid the racialized patterns of disinvestment and decay that we observe today. We estimate that such concentration of growth in infill areas would have not only substantially reduced the need to dislocate agricultural or natural areas, but also likely have reduced vehicle miles driven, carbon emissions, and public expenditures on infrastructure and services.