Planning commission recommends city council consider multi‑jurisdiction housing element update amid calls for stronger fair‑housing measures

The Fresno City Planning Commission voted to recommend that the City Council consider adoption of the city’s update to the multi‑jurisdictional housing element, the element of the general plan that shows how the city will accommodate its Regional Housing Needs Allocation (RHNA) over the next planning cycle.

City staff and the consultant team told the commission the element documents the city’s sites inventory, assigns the city a local housing target derived from the regional RHNA, and contains an action plan of ordinances and programs intended to implement the plan over the next eight years. Chelsea Payne, director of urban planning at Ascent, said Fresno’s assigned housing target is “just under 37,000” units (the Fresno County region’s RHNA is about 58,000), with roughly 15,000 of those units in the lower‑income (very low and low) categories. Payne said the housing element shows a surplus of capacity at all income levels based on the detailed sites inventory and associated capacity assumptions.

The draft element pairs an inventory with 50 policies and 37 implementation programs organized around seven goal areas, Payne said. The presentation highlighted several programs commissioners asked about: Program 2 (create multifamily capacity and “missing middle” units in higher‑resource areas), Program 4 (streamline development review and…