Driving Through Fresno

On Thursday the FUI team took a driving tour of Fresno - these are observations from Glenda, a second year from UCSB:

"Today all the FUI team went on a tour of downtown Fresno. By observing the buildings and the type of people there, I was able to get a better understanding of what the city needed and what life was like for the people in these communities. The first thing I noticed were the many closed down businesses and empty plots of land. It was like this for most of the tour. I observed that there was only one bank and instead a lot of bail bond businesses. I found that the area had a lot of businesses that weren’t needed by the general public in their everyday lives. They didn’t have a lot of grocery stores and supermarkets so the people around could go shopping for healthier food options rather than buy food from mini marts on the corner of their blocks that don’t have a variety of foods to choose from. There was an unequal distribution of development in downtown. The places around the convention center (areas more for the middle class) had better restaurants and had more businesses open. Some areas like Chinatown didn’t even have any Chinese restaurants or Chinese businesses. It was all empty plots of land. After we passed tents that had homeless people living in them, I thought that there were already a lot of tents in just that block. The next block, however, had the Poverello House, a camp that housed many more homeless people. The downtown area was just filled with many apartments that housed the homeless temporarily but the Motel Drive seemed to be the largest. Some people in these motels have lived more than five years in these apartments and even consider them their homes. This is all because they find themselves returning to these motels because they can’t find affordable housing. There doesn’t seem to be many job opportunities for these people with all the closed businesses either. Everything just makes it difficult for the poor to live comfortably with their families. If it weren’t for the various charities and ministries that help house the homeless and give them hope by giving them advice and training them for jobs and other helpful life skills, the city would not be making the progress that it has made with dealing with all this poverty and homelessness."