Fresno council balks at sensible housing-streamlining proposal
by Sal Rodriguez | December 5, 2025
The answer to the housing shortage plaguing cities across the country isn’t really that hard – it’s to build more housing. But as a recent debate in Fresno, Calif., shows, it’s a lot easier said than done when city councilmembers feel they need to be involved in everything.
Throughout the year, the council has considered a proposal from Councilmember Annalisa Perea, professionally an urban planner, that called for allowing ministerial approval of office-to-housing conversions in the city’s office zone and multi-unit residential housing in multiple areas of the city, including within half a mile of bus stops.
This means projects that otherwise meet the city’s development code could go through a much more streamlined approval process at the city staff level rather than get dragged to City Hall to be harangued by council members and a handful of residents who don’t want anything built in their vicinity.
With the city projecting it needs about 37,000 new housing units by 2031 to keep up with demand, and the perennial problem of slow permitting processes adding significant costs to housing developments, it made perfect sense for Fresno to allow for a more streamlined approval process.
Perea’s colleagues, however, bristled at the idea of not dragging developers through the wringer and on June 19 a majority of the council struck down the idea of a ministerial approval process.
“The definition of ministerial is that if you meet abcxyz requirements that you will sail on through the bureaucratic process with a lesser level of public scrutiny,” explained Councilman Nelson Esparza, who argued strenuously in support of so-called public scrutiny.
“I know that these projects can be very difficult, and we do see some resistance from residents, but to me that’s democracy in action,” Esparza said. “It’s part of the process to get to the most optimal outcome for the community.”
Since when are city government meetings the best vehicle for figuring out the optimal outcome for the community?
Sure, some people will show up to such meetings, but not very many do – and not very many who are actually representative of the city. The process Esparza defends is one that injects personal grievances and political posturing into the market. That’s essentially how Fresno, and so many other cities across the country, ended up with broken markets.
Esparza wasn’t the only member of the council to stick up for the wrong way of doing things.
Councilmember Mike Karbassi complained that developers supported making it easier to build housing. “There’s a reason why developers are here today. There’s a reason why they’ve sent letters and they’re in support,” Karbassi said. “They want this because it makes it easier for them and that should be a big red flag.”
Of course, the red flag here is when council members have a generalized contempt for developers. How can you have sensible development policies when council members view developers as the problem?
Besides Perea, Councilman Tyler Maxwell seemed to understand the problem with this sort of thinking. “I’ve seen good housing projects not move forward because they’ve become politicized, and I don’t think that’s fair to a lot of folks who want housing,” he said.
Ben Granholm and Ethan Smith from Invest Fresno, a local business coalition, in a letter supporting the change, offered a very positive and solutions-oriented case for the change:
We have made real progress in increasing housing production and expanding opportunity, but that momentum is not guaranteed. Delays and uncertainty in the approval process only make it harder and more expensive to build the homes Fresno families need, and if we do not act, families will be forced to leave. We cannot afford to lose our workforce, our small business owners, and our next generation of leaders to neighboring cities that are moving faster to meet housing demand.
Yet with every regulatory barrier and every permitting holdup, cities like Fresno are choosing to make it harder and more expensive to build housing that real people need. Fresno’s City Council is certainly not unique in pushing back against ministerial approvals and trying to preserve discretionary powers.
When Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass issued Executive Directive 1 streamlining implementing a ministerial approval process for affordable housing developments, it worked very well in bringing housing units forward. It turns out developers like the idea of having a simpler, quicker and less unwieldy process to deal with. But then politics reared its ugly head and ever since Bass introduced her directive, she has systematically undermined it in the face of political pressure.
Yes, cutting red tape often means giving up power. But city council members losing some power is hardly a tragedy when it means allowing housing to actually get built.
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