Fresno Plows Under Farm Town Roots for Suburbia : Development: Nation’s richest agricultural area is giving way to tract homes and the ills of rapid growth.

FRESNO —  If Earl Rocca could wave a wand and stop this city from sprawling, he’d do it, even though he stands to make a hefty sum when his turn comes and developers offer big money for his 40-acre farm, as they surely will.

The money aside, Rocca knows that when his grapevines and almond trees at the northwestern edge of town give way to housing tracts, he will lose more than the ground his father once tilled, more than the home where he and his wife raised their three sons. The farm town that was Fresno will continue its fade into suburbia, too.

“In a small community, everybody knows one another. Now, we don’t have that,” Rocca said. “You get an element of unknown people. It threatens you. You’re uptight. You’re on guard more.”

Rocca, 64, can recall a time when the far edge of the city stood seven miles away. Just 20 years ago, its population was a comfortable 165,000. Now, tract homes crowd in on three sides of the Rocca family farm, Fresno sprawls over 100 square miles, and an estimated 370,000 people live here.

This city is the center of the nation’s richest farm county. Its harvest was worth nearly $3 billion last year. But the city also became bloated by a 63% population increase during the 1980s, and it is one of the country’s fastest-growing big cities.

In the frenzy, many people here have come to conclude that “there’s just too damned much growth in this town,” said City Councilman Tom Bohigian. Old-timers complain about the traffic, they worry about smog, and they grouse about a 25% rise in water and sewer bills.

Much of the increase pays to filter out the cancer-causing agricultural pesticide DBCP, which turned up in 43% of the wells tested in the county.

More and more, there are signs that the Fresno population boom is coming into conflict with agriculture. Not only is farmland plowed under for housing by developers who pay between $25,000 and $50,000 an acre, but ozone levels here are worse than in New York and Chicago. Crop losses blamed on air pollution exceed 20% in the San Joaquin Valley, University of California experts say.

“This has the potential to be the most polluted (air) basin in the world,” said Bill Allison, manager of the Fresno County Farm Bureau.

Time magazine, searching for something positive to say about this state, recently said Fresno represents the last real California, where housing is affordable and people are friendly. True though that may be, it is also true that what ails the rest of urban California has come to roost here, too.

In October, more than one drive-by shooting took place every day, on average. Downtown buildings stand empty. For all Fresno County’s wealth, one in six people here collects welfare--the highest rate in California, and twice the rate in Los Angeles.

In a recent study, Ernest E. Velasquez, Fresno County social services director, reported that over the past three years, the number of people collecting Aid to Families with Dependent Children benefits rose by 30%, far outpacing the population growth.

A simple reason is behind that. Rents are half what they are in Los Angeles or San Francisco, and in Fresno, a family of four gets roughly the same $788 monthly welfare check. Although Fresno has its crime and crowded classrooms, its inner-city streets are far less perilous than those of Los Angeles or San Francisco.

“There is no question that folks have come to Fresno because Fresno is a better place to survive and stretch their dollars. It’s alarming to us,” said Velasquez.

Fresno is the capital of Other California, a place whose appeal was that it was more Midwestern traditional than California glitzy, Mayor Karen Humphrey said.

In truth, Fresno County has had relatively high crime for years--eighth worst in the state in 1984. By 1990, the overall crime rate trailed only San Francisco, Los Angeles and Riverside counties, and its violent crime rate was the fifth worst in the state.

The number of murders is down from a record 66 last year. But the city also reported that major crimes in the first half of this year jumped 31% compared to the same period in 1990.

“The place is booming. People bring violence with them,” Fresno police spokesman Ron Hultz said.

Rick Martinez is one who recently pulled himself off welfare by finding a job as an auto parts salesman. He and his wife are raising their four kids in a $475 three-bedroom apartment southeast of downtown. Though he and Rocca live at opposite ends of town and in very different worlds, they share the view that their hometown has become a scarier place.

“A town can only grow so fast,” said Martinez, 29. He once witnessed a shooting near his home and in recent years he moved twice when his neighborhood got too mean. He spends his lunch hour picking up his kids from school, rather than risk them walking home alone.

“It gets to the point where you can’t trust anyone,” he said, his 2-year-old, Erica, in tow.

Fresno County’s growth of almost 30% in the 1980s mirrored what happened up and down California 99. The San Joaquin Valley’s population reached 2.7 million in 1990, up by 34% in the 1980s. In the process, thousands of farm acres--no one is sure how many--were converted to suburban tracts.

Fresno and a few other cities and counties are trying to limit development of farmland. But there is no statewide policy restricting building on agricultural land, nor any plan that considers how many people the valley might be able to support and stay agricultural.

“We haven’t gotten into the deeper discussions of the carrying capacity of a community, or of a state,” Humphrey said. In past decades, she said, officials across the San Joaquin Valley went out of their way to encourage growth.

Humphrey and other Fresno city officials recognize the importance of farmland, and have a “strong policy commitment to discourage sprawl.” But over the years, the city has been “gobbling up productive agriculture land at a great rate.”

“We’ve been a little schizoid about planning,” Humphrey said.

Within the Fresno city limits are 25,000 acres of vacant land. Roughly 100,000 people could be absorbed without annexing another square foot of ground, planning division manager Nick Yovino said. But even in this recession, bulldozers level orchards for new tracts at the edges of the city, where land is cheaper or for sale in bigger chunks.

“The growth is really unhampered,” said Russell Fey, professor of planning at Cal State Fresno. “As a consequence, we have this low-density city, which is spreading across the landscape.”

He, too, recalls the time when people could regularly see the Sierra peaks to the east. Now, more often than not, they are obscured by smog. Such examples of the decline in the quality of life have created an anti-growth attitude here, and voters look at City Hall with disdain. Last year, all three incumbent council members up for reelection were ousted.

Former Councilman Craig Scharton, who was voted out despite his slow-growth views, recalled how the campaign drained him--not by long hours but because of what he heard from constituents. He would come home at the end of the day, his shoulders slumped, feeling as if he had “been dumped on.”

“People were frustrated about everything,” he said. “Water. Air. ‘Why are there so many people? Why is there so much crime?’ ” They felt “that there’s no way to stop” the growth, or control it.

Too often, he said, that feeling is grounded in reality. Scharton finds that the city provides services to fast-developing and wealthier areas to the north, near the San Joaquin River, and neglects older parts of town. In his neighborhood, the Tower district, one of charming California bungalows that still sell for around $75,000, there are dirt streets spread with oil.

The neglect of old Fresno is even more evident downtown. The Fulton Street Mall, an outdoor promenade with sculptures and fountains, was touted as the future of urban planning in the 1960s. Now, with its discount clothing and jewelry stores, many locals view it as the city’s greatest failure.

Its last department store, Gottschalk’s, has pulled out. The hulking shell of a building is now the “Swap Mall,” a maze of dozens of screened booths, where entrepreneurs peddle everything from baseball cards to psychic readings.

The angst Scharton encountered in the campaign is borne out by soundings taken by the sociology department at Cal State Fresno. In 1983, 41% of those polled were “very satisfied” with the city. Now, that number hovers at 25%.

People worry that “things are happening that are beyond their control,” said Prof. Edward Nelson, who directed the poll. But he also found that people have faith in their own future and their neighborhoods. “There still seems to be optimism,” he said.

Some civic leaders do find cause for optimism. The city is about to open a new $30-million City Hall as part of a Civic Center redevelopment effort. The City Council voted 4 to 3 last week to spend $800,000 to persuade Fresno’s largest law firm to remain downtown, rather than move out to one of the office parks sprouting to the north.

“If the city is willing to saw off downtown, my constituents are next,” said Bohigian, who backs the downtown redevelopment project in part because his district abuts downtown.

Perhaps most important, Humphrey said, the city is beginning a general planning process to try to direct the city’s growth for the next decade, and perhaps limit the sprawl.

Planning manager Yovino assumes that Fresno will add population at about 3% a year, which translates to more than 100,000 people over the next decade.

Some of those people will move onto the 40 acres that are now the Rocca family farm. Other farmers will sell, too. The Roccas already sold 40 acres for housing and a new high school.

Like her husband, Sandy Rocca is resigned to leaving her dream home and moving farther west if they want to keep farming. “Our way of life is changing and I don’t like it,” she said, and then, with a sharp edge to her voice, she added: “This is what the real estate people call progress.”

Fresno at a Glance Fresno, Calif., was incorporated in 1885. Here are some facts and figures about the city and the county of Fresno:

CATEGORY 1980 1990 City population 217,491 354,202 City size ranking (nation) 65 47 City size ranking (state) 8 8 City’s ethnic breakdown White non-Hispanic 137,351 174,893 Black 20,943 27,653 Hispanic* 51,271 105,787 Asian 6,046 42,211 Fresno County population 514,621 667,490

* Hispanic can be of any race. FARMING * Crop value: Value of crops in Fresno County has risen from $2 billion in 1980 to $2.95 billion in 1990. * Crop value ranking: First in the state and in the nation. * Main crops: Grapes, cotton, tomatoes, turkeys, milk, cattle, plums, oranges, peaches, cantaloupe. * Number of farms: 5,169 countywide. CRIME * For major crimes in Fresno County, the rate is 3,989 per 100,000 population or the fourth worst in state; for property crimes, the rate is 2,980 per 100,000 population or the second worst in state. WELFARE * There are 111,891 individuals in the county who collect Aid to Families with Dependent Children; 120,095 collect food stamps. SOURCES: U.S. Census, state Department of Food and Agriculture, 1987 census of agriculture by the U.S. Department of Commerce, state Department of Justice.