What happened to this place? Can it be fixed?
Ask someone in Fresno where the bad part of town is, and they’ll probably tell you the east side of town, or more likely the city’s west side. West Fresno is far more rundown and dangerous than most other parts of town. And that’s saying a lot, cause Fresno is a very dangerous and drug riddled city overall.
My goal was to find the worst part of Fresno, a very complicated place in California's central valley. So I drove around on a day in late October of 2021 - asking people where to go and seeing what parts of town looked the worst.
Several people I talked to told me the worst part of Fresno is the city’s southwest side right off of MLK, so I went there. Here’s what it looks like there. This part of town has a lot of gang activity and shootings every night. Honestly, it’s bad, but not BAD bad. At least visually. And I have a duty to my KZfaq audience to show as honest a look at a city that I can. So I wasn’t settling for just kinda bad. Plus, you guys see gang infested ghettos all the time on this channel.
Now, if you looked hard enough in the greater Fresno area, you’d find just about anything. There’s a bunch of homeless people. There are nice fancy neighborhoods. Downtown is rundown, but there are some nice pockets around. Fresno has large areas with college kids and sort of a cultural diversity to it. Fresno has lots of ghettos and farms and…ghetto farms. Aha.
By the end of the day, I had found what I was looking for. Off to the far west end of town off of a road called Brawley Avenue, I discovered a community in disrepair. It’s where the farms meet the drug abusers. We’re here because this is what a poor neglected community looks like in california’s central valley. And there are many many more just like it.
Fresno is a very poor and dangerous place. If you look at the latest charts on cities with the highest poverty rates, you’ll find cities you’re familiar with - places like Detroit and Cleveland and Buffalo. But right there at number 8, even ahead of Memphis, is Fresno, population 550,000. It’s California’s 5th largest city, and a place with a complicated past. On one hand, it’s very poor and dangerous - some have called Fresno one of the most dangerous cities in the country -a place where there’s shootings and stabbings, car thefts and meth abuse. But on the other hand, it’s a very affordable place to live and one that’s been ruled by conservative politics for a long time. In fact, in my opinion, Fresno is pretty much the last affordable somewhat conservative place you can live in California anymore.
Because of its relative affordability, Fresno is growing fast. You have all these people leaving the Bay Area and southern california, looking for homes they can actually buy. But it’s not a very BOOMING place by any stretch. There aren’t a lot of good jobs here, and Fresno’s downtown certainly needs a big makeover and some attention, something I showed in another video I did.
In addition to the high crime and large homeless population, meth has really taken hold in Fresno. In areas like this, meth has become a tragic part of life, and it’s not showing signs of letting up. CNN once called Fresno the meth capital of the nation once. In case you didn’t know, the Central Valley of California is where meth labs first became a thing in the mid 1980s. While Columbia became known as the hub of the cocaine industry, pockets of the central valley like where we are right now were our version of that, but for meth production and distribution.
Clearly this part of Fresno is very poor and somewhat isolated from the rest of the community. Visually, it’s a very interesting place. It reminds me of parts of Mexico, and I’m not the only person to say that.
#moving #california
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