Fresno Community Capital Collaborative for Economic Mobility

Community development financial institutions (CDFIs) have long been essential change agents in low- to moderate-income communities in the U.S., providing affordable financing to help revitalize neighborhoods and create new economic opportunities for individuals and families. Collaboration between CDFIs can help tackle specific challenges around the crucial social and economic issues distressed neighborhoods face, including expanding and supporting local small businesses, ensuring access to healthy food, and creating sufficient affordable housing.

Fueled by a major grant from JPMorgan Chase, the Fresno Community Capital Collaborative for Economic Mobility will increase financing available to grow wealth and build or improve homes in Fresno’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. The Collaborative will keep partners connected to ensure that products are designed and marketed in ways that work for the population served. Through regular convenings, the Collaborative will discover and highlight opportunities to improve the community capital system in Fresno, as well as opportunities for additional local and outside investment.

From an overall, three-year grant of $5 million, $2.55 million will flow to Access Plus Capital (a subsidiary of the Fresno Economic Opportunities Commission) for lending. Access Plus Capital has further committed an additional $6 million in available lending capital to support the goals of the project. Meanwhile, two partner CDFIs, Northern California Community Loan Fund (NCCLF) and Opportunity Fund (OF), have committed an additional $3 million and $1 million, respectively. NCCLF and OF are both past grantees of the PRO Neighborhoods program.

The balance of $2.45 million from the grant will be used to augment the access-to-capital work of a cohort of eleven place-based and person-centered community-based organizations in Fresno. Grant

funding, administered by the Central Valley Community Foundation as the project’s coordinator and fiscal sponsor, will enable these CBOs to participate as members of the Community Capital Collaborative alongside the CDFI partners.

The grantees include:

Fresno — California’s fifth-largest city — anchors one of the fastest growing regions in the United States. During the period from 2000 to the present, while the US population has grown by 16%, and California’s by 18%, Fresno County’s population has grown by 26%, mostly due to a surplus of births over deaths. The ongoing boom of young people is behind Fresno’s low median age of 30.2 years, substantially younger than California’s 36.0 years.

Fresno’s youth largely find themselves in households and neighborhoods that face a severe paucity of resources — adult mentors, safe parks, banks, grocery stores, job opportunities, and the modes of transportation to reach them. Concentrated poverty underlies all of these deficiencies, driving basic services away from entire communities. Alarmed by the lack of services in poor neighborhoods, and their devastation in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the Brookings Institution studied poverty in major American cities in the wake of the storm and found, to their surprise, that only one city surpassed New Orleans in the rate of concentrated poverty: Fresno.

Unfortunately, it is kids who suffer worst from the concentration of poverty. It is normal everywhere to find that lower-income residents are having a greater share of the kids, and in Fresno this is also the case: about 27% of the overall population is below the federal poverty level, but about 40% of children live in poverty. But in Fresno, because poverty correlates so strongly with location, the neighborhoods where Fresno’s poverty is concentrated are largely the same neighborhoods where the birth boom is occurring, such that 46% of children live in areas of concentrated poverty. Far too many of Fresno’s kids are growing up in environments that seemed designed to keep them trapped in intergenerational cycles of poverty and the attendant symptoms of addiction and abuse, rather than offering ways out.

Combined with high poverty, Fresno’s young and booming population has strained the supply of housing. Because of low rents relative to construction costs, housing development in disadvantaged neighborhoods has languished. In 2017 the citywide rental vacancy rate of 3.1% was the lowest among the nation’s 75 largest cities. Proposed transit-oriented, multifamily housing projects in urban Fresno have stalled for years, and even failed to proceed, because of gaps in financing. A housing shortage has persisted despite Fresno’s surprisingly tight housing market.