Poverty and immigration in Fresno

Evelyn Nieves:

This city at the heart of the richest farmland in the world has been poor for so long, no one can remember it otherwise. Last month, when the Brookings Institution issued a report that said a higher proportion of poor people in Fresno lived in areas of concentrated poverty than in any other major city in the country -- pre-Katrina New Orleans was number two -- no one here was surprised. "My goodness, that's why I ran," said Alan Autry, who became mayor in 2000. "I called it 'A Tale of Two Cities.' "

Nonetheless, the Brookings study has spurred a call to arms here. Using 2000 Census data, it found that 43.5 percent of Fresno's poor live in extremely poor neighborhoods (where more than 40 percent of the residents live below the federal poverty line -- $17,600 a year for a family of four).

While city and private organizations were already working on attracting more jobs and improving living conditions, poverty is now topic number one in and out of City Hall. On Oct. 25, the Fresno City Council unanimously approved the creation of a "poverty task force," its first, to tackle what the Brookings report said are the most pressing problems confronting high concentrations of poverty -- lack of quality education and health care, job training, substandard housing and crime.

"What we are going to do is involve all scales of government -- that's the only way this is going to work," said Cynthia Sterling, the council member who called for the task force and whose district includes the two poorest sections of the city, downtown and south Fresno.

Officials and community leaders say the city has made strides in the past five years. Unemployment is down from 15 percent to 7.3 percent, the lowest in 20 years. The crime rate has dropped, and $45 million is being invested in creating and repairing infrastructure in poor neighborhoods.

But fighting poverty in Fresno (which ranks 16th among the nation's largest cities in terms of its overall poverty rate) may prove more than daunting. Unlike the other cities the Brookings report found with the most concentrated poverty -- New Orleans, Louisville, Miami and Atlanta -- Fresno is still, in many ways, a farm town. The city's dominant industry, agriculture, depends on a cheap, seasonal work force that keeps renewing itself as successive new waves of immigrants arrive.

The city's high dropout rate leaves a workforce ill-prepared for higher-paying jobs that Fresno is trying to attract. Not least, a housing boom in the past few years has exacerbated the city's concentrated poverty. Real estate has skyrocketed, leaving south Fresno as the last refuge for poorer residents forced to move because of rising rents elsewhere.

With all the new housing, "no affordable units were built," said Chris Schneider, the executive director of Central California Legal Services, whose clients are the Central Valley's poorest residents.

A drive through south Fresno found streets with wilted, squat wooden and concrete houses, a handful of prostitutes standing dejectedly on corners, huddles of young men standing outside a weedy lot drinking beer and mothers with children, but few children playing on the streets. North Fresno appeared like a suburb, with gated communities, shopping centers and traffic heavy with late-model SUVs.

The mayor agreed that the lack of affordable housing and decent jobs are major issues confronting the city. But, he said, illegal immigration is perhaps the greatest challenge to Fresno. "We're going to have to secure the border, he said, "reform the illegal immigration system and create a plan that addresses the 4.5 million immigrants in California that doesn't involve amnesty or sending them back."

Autry said that although officials have no idea how many illegal immigrants live in Fresno (the city is about 45 percent Latino, mostly Mexican, with a rising number of Hmong refugees), 20 percent of the people in the county jails are illegal immigrants. About one quarter of emergency room visits are from illegal immigrants and the vast majority of the tenants in the worst housing in the worst neighborhoods are immigrants, presumably including illegal immigrants.

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