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Plan reveals need for affordable housing in Turlock
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Updated: May 8, 2015, 2:20 AM
Published: May 8, 2015, 2:21 AM

There are more than 600 families on the waiting list for a family unit at the Avena Bella affordable housing community, an indication that finding reliable housing is a problem faced by many in Turlock.

As the City of Turlock is in the process of updating their Housing Element, a mandated part of each city’s General Plan, housing statistics for all economic levels have been gathered in turn reflecting the local housing climate. The City of Turlock has contracted with the of San-Francisco based planning firm Dyett & Bhatia to update the Housing Element and firm representative Sophie Martin presented some statistics to the Turlock Planning Commission Thursday evening which reiterated what she called a substantial need for affordable housing in Turlock.  

“Over 50 percent of renter households are overpaying and over one-third of home owners are as well,” said Martin.

It is considered overpaying when an individual pays more than 30 percent of their income towards housing and utilities and if they exceed 50 percent it is considered severely overpaying.

“If we break that down into different income categories and take a look at the extremely low and low income residents, 85 percent of low income renter households are overpaying for housing and almost three-quarters of them are severely paying,” said Martin.

Eighty percent of female headed household in Turlock with children are also living below the poverty line, a statistic Marin said is “particularly sobering.”

Cities are required to update their Housing Element to address such issues. In an effort to encourage the provision of affordable and decent housing state-wide, the state department of Housing and Community Development works with regional council of governments to determine a number of units that must be available to be built in order for the cities to receive funding.

“We have to show that we have the capacity to build that amount,” explained Deputy Director of Development Services for the City of Turlock Debbie Whitmore.

Originally the HCD told the Stanislaus Council of Governments that 45,000 units in the county would need to be made available, an amount that STANCOG was able to reduce to 28,000 after a year of negotiations said Whitmore.   

“We still think the number is relatively high,” said Whitmore, who noted housing production is still very low compared to the early 2000s.

This Housing Element update is to account for years 2015 through 2023 and is a stepping stone to funding through the state department of Housing and Community Development. The Element requires cities to look at all segments of the community such as housing needs, inventory of land, and potential constraints for development.

The statistics revealed Thursday evening led Commission Chair Soraya Fregosi to lament the lack of affordable housing in Turlock, something she attributes to developers disinterest in building this type of housing.

“The sad reality however is that we don’t have enough housing for the low and very low and moderately low income people which is the majority of our population,” said Fregosi. “That is to me what I see as a kind of tragedy that the City might have the will but we certainly haven’t had the partnership with the development community.”

However, Commissioner Eric Gonsalves said he feels that there is interest in the development community to participate in affordable housing construction. However, multifamily dwellings require the developer to release a significant number of units onto the market at once which can not only influence the market, but become a burden.

“That’s part of the developer’s question. Are they going to sell within two or three months or are we going to be there two to three years carrying that cost for that period? I think there are some people out there that want to build and want to do it, it’s just the question in the market is how many of these homes can it support at one time.”

“There is a lot of risk to it,” echoed Whitmore, noting that constructing a multifamily building is more involved than single family homes due to site improvements such as expansive parking lots that must be incorporated.

Dyett & Bhatia will continue to work on the draft of Turlock’s Housing Element through June and there will be another planning commission workshop in either June or July to further solicit public input.

On Thursday, the Planning Comission also:

-          Discussed amendments to the City of Turlock’s Zoning Ordinance after the Turlock City Council pushed back three items to the commission for further consideration. The commissioners collectively agreed that amending the Zoning Ordinance to require double-striping of parking spaces for new development was permissible. They also felt that upgrading the permit process for drive through restaurant facilities in the Transitional Commercial Overlay District, or areas adjacent to the immediate downtown, from a staff level Minor Discretionary Permit to a Conditional Use Permit was advisable. This requires more scrutiny as the applicant is obligated to appear before the planning commission and a larger range of neighboring establishments are notified. Lastly, the commission discussed whether existing cargo containers should be grandfathered in as policy under the new Zoning Ordinance requires a permitting process. Collectively the commissioners said that for safety reasons, businesses and residents with existing containers, or those seeking permanent containers, must undergo the established permitting process. These items will be voted on at the June planning commission meeting before being sent back to council.

-          Whitmore also informed the commissioners of a letter she sent to the Stanislaus County Planning Commission regarding ongoing noise complaints at the Larsa Banquet Hall, which is county property, but within the city’s sphere of influence. The letter advised the county to consider limiting hours of activity at the hall on Saturday nights after the county stated that they found their noise policy to be unenforceable. Whitmore said she has fielded complaints for six years and limiting activity has proven successful within City Limits.

-          Whitmore spoke to the ongoing issue of abandoned shopping carts in town and said staff is preparing to send a letter to “re-educate” businesses about the city’s shopping cart ordinance.

-           Staff also anticipates having an update on the city’s Active Transportation Plan, which is to promote cycling and walking in Turlock, at the July planning commission meeting.
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.
Published: Apr 2, 2025, 4:48 AM

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.