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New homes could be on the way
Planning Commission to discuss proposed residential lots on West Avenue South
West Avenue South homes
RBK Development, Inc. is proposing to build 30 single-family homes in the 2.67-acre parcel at 337 West Avenue South in Turlock’s westside (KRISTINA HACKER/The Journal).

New, low-income housing could be coming to Turlock’s westside neighborhoods in the near future, pending a vote by the Turlock Planning Commission.

The planning commission will consider at their next regularly scheduled meeting, set for 6 p.m. Thursday at city hall, whether the 2.67-acre parcel at 337 West Avenue South can be subdivided to accommodate 30 single-family residential lots. The site is zoned Medium Density Residential (RM), but the applicant (Ron Katakis of RBK Development, Inc.) has requested a Planned Development to allow deviations from the development standard in terms of lot size, setbacks and the internal roadway being a private road that would not been developed to city standards.

The proposed lots will be both single- and two-story homes — each with two-car garages — and will range in size from 2,500 square feet to 4,352 square feet. The houses will each have a two-car garage, with a few three-car garage options proposed. The property is a long narrow lot approximately 639 feet long and 188 feet wide and abutting the long, non-operational Union Pacific railroad along the southern property line. The constraints of the lot size and the railroad make it difficult to develop the parcel without requesting deviations from the development standards.

The minimum lot size in the RM zoning district is 6,000 square feet. At the minimum lot size of 6,000 square feet, the project would barely meet the minimum density at approximately 20-units, but would not be able to meet standards such as setbacks and public improvements, e.g. standard roadway widths and sidewalks.

The proposed setbacks for the development are as follows for single-story homes: 

  • 10-foot front yard
  • 25-foot garage
  • 3-foot interior side yard
  • 10-foot rear livable area
  • 3-foot rear yard garage

 

Two-story home setbacks would be:

  • 25-foot front yard
  • 15-foot front yard porch
  • 18-foot front yard garage
  • 3-foot interior side yard
  • 10-foot rear yard habitable area 

As proposed, the subdivision will be accessed from a private street off of West Avenue South. The interior street is proposed to have a rolled curb, measured 36 feet, curb to curb with no sidewalks. However, the developers would install a 5-foot wide sidewalk along the West Avenue South frontage road with vertical curb, but none along the interior street. Because the interior street will not be built to city standards it will be a private street and not maintained by the city. A Homeowners Association (HOA) will be required to be formed for ongoing maintenance of the private facilities. A vehicle turnaround has been provided and would be designated as a fire lane, red curbed and signed “No Parking.”

There is not a timeline on when the homes would be completed if approved by the planning commission.

The proposed homes would be the latest of a resurgence of housing development in Turlock. Earlier this year, the construction of 65 new homes, tabbed as the Legends North III from JKB Living, was completed. Last month, affordable housing options in the community increased  when the second and final phase of the Avena Bella apartment complex at 500 Linwood Ave. was completed, adding 61 units to the existing 80 apartment spaces built in 2014.

 

 

Costa, Gray propose congressional bill to address critical physician shortage in rural areas
Costa and Gray
San Joaquin Valley congressional members Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, left, and Rep. Adam Gray, D-Merced, are shown discussing their bill H.R. 2106 in a virtual press conference on Tuesday.

BY TIM SHEEHAN

CV Journalism Collaborative

Two San Joaquin Valley congressional representatives have introduced a bill that could help address the vast shortage of doctors in the region, particularly in underserved areas. 

Rep. Jim Costa, D-Fresno, and Rep. Adam Gray, D-Merced, say the Medical Education Act would, if passed, establish a program of grants to support expanded medical education programs in underserved areas of the nation.

The Valley could be one of the key areas that would benefit from the legislation. California has about 90 primary care doctors per 100,000 residents statewide, the federal Health Resources & Services Administration reported in November 2024. 

That’s more than the ratio in some states, and less than some others. The nationwide ratio is about 84 doctors per 100,000 residents.

But in the San Joaquin Valley, home to about 4.3 million people, doctors are much more scarce – about 47 primary care physicians per 100,000 residents, according to Dr. Tom Utecht, chief medical officer at the Fresno-based Community Health System.

That number is “a little over half of what is necessary to take care of a population,” Utecht said Tuesday in a video press conference. “We have the lowest physicians-per-capita rate in all of California, in the San Joaquin Valley.”

Introduced last month, the Medical Education Act is something of a placeholder for the time being until the Congressional Research Service can weigh in with financial estimates of what is needed in different parts of the country, Costa said. 

A companion version was introduced in March in the U.S. Senate by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-West Virginia, and Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Los Angeles.

At this point, the legislation does not specify how much money will ultimately be sought or how grants would be structured.

Costa said the shortage of doctors in the region “is combined with language barriers, cultural barriers and distances … and that would really go for rural parts of our country regardless where folks live.”

“If you live in rural areas, it’s just more difficult to have access to good quality health care,” he added.

Costa said the legislation, if it can survive a Republican-controlled House and Senate and a Republican president, “would be transformative because it would invest expanded resources to minority-serving institutions and colleges located in rural and underserved areas to establish schools of medicine and osteopathic medicine.”

The bill would also create an avenue for more historically Black colleges and universities, as well as Hispanic-serving institutions, to establish medical education programs, Costa said.

Gray noted that when he was in the state Legislature, he and colleagues “worked to get hundreds of millions of dollars in funding to expand the UC Merced campus, to ultimately secure the funding to put the first medical education building up on campus.”

Gray added that the UC San Francisco’s medical education program in Fresno “is an important part of creating the (medical) workforce of the future for the valley, but more importantly, solving this access to care issue that plagues Valley communities.”

At UC Merced, director of medical education Dr. Margo Vener said there has been a surge of interest in the university’s program that funnels students through an undergraduate program for their bachelor of science degree through a medical school degree in collaboration with UC San Francisco.

“All the students that we are enrolling are from the Valley and for the Valley, because they want to really make a difference in promoting health in their communities,” Vener said. That, she added, is likely to eventually translate to those would-be doctors to stay in the Valley to practice medicine.

“The data suggests that two factors really strongly influence where physicians stay to practice,” Vener said. “One of them is where they’re from, which, of course, is why we’re recruiting students from the Valley for the Valley just to stay (and) be doctors for their community. And the other factor is where you went to residency. Those are the two biggest drivers.”

That’s something that was underscored by Dr. Kenny Banh, assistant dean of undergraduate education at UCSF Fresno. “Regional campuses such as UC Merced and UCSF Fresno not only grow doctors, but they take those doctors, physicians and medical students from their communities in the region, and train them in those regions to go back to be physicians in those areas,” he said.

While the costs of the Costa-Gray legislation are yet to be determined, Banh said there are also costs associated with doing nothing to expand medical education.

“There’s health care costs, regardless of how we work it, if we don’t invest in having an adequate supply of physicians,” Banh said. “There’s a cost on the human that can’t access care” and doesn’t get to a doctor until a condition is not treatable “or with significantly worse morbidity and mortality outcomes.”

“And that cost is borne by health systems taxpayers, one way or the other,” Banh added.

But even if the Costa-Gray bill were to pass in this congressional session, the payoff of home-grown medical schools producing a bumper crop of physicians in the Valley or other deprived parts of the country would be years down the road.

“I think it’s really important to understand why we need to invest now for our future, because it takes so darn long” for a student to go from being a college freshman to a practicing doctor, surgeon or specialist, UC Merced’s Vener said. 

After a four-year bachelor’s degree, a student must then complete four years of medical school, which in turn is followed by a residency of three to five years.

“Then often people will do a fellowship to become, for example, a cardiologist or a gastroenterologist or something like that,” she added.

“If you start investing in just one student now, it’s going to take such a long time before they really are there to take care of you at that moment when you need them to be your gastroenterologist, your cardiologist, your emergency physician, or, dare I say, your family doctor,” Vener said.

That, she said, is why it’s also necessary to expand residency programs that can attract would-be physicians into the region in hopes that they will remain once they complete their training. “We need those doctors now, and that’s why this effort is important,” Vener said, “because this is what will both inspire people to stay, but also inspire people to really come and embrace the communities and serve them.”

In a related development, state Assemblymember Esmeralda Soria, D-Fresno, recently introduced a bill for the University of California system to develop a comprehensive funding plan for expanding the current SJV Prime+ BS-to-MD partnership between UC San Francisco and UC Merced, with the goal of transitioning the program to a fully independent medical school operated by UC Merced.

“We have seen firsthand the impacts of medical workforce shortages throughout the Central Valley,” Soria said in a prepared statement. “AB 58 would help ensure the Legislature is equipped with the information needed to secure appropriate funding for the medical education provided for our community at UC Merced.”

— Tim Sheehan is the Health Care Reporting Fellow at the nonprofit Central Valley Journalism Collaborative. The fellowship is supported by a grant from the Fresno State Institute for Media and Public Trust. Contact Sheehan at tim@cvlocaljournalism.org.