Photo via Mayor Jerry Dyer | Manzanilla Commons took a former Parkway Drive hotel and transformed it into a 63-unit affordable housing complex.

Fresno’s Parkway Drive corridor, long known for crime and neglect, celebrated a milestone on June 16 with the grand opening of the Manzanilla Commons, a 63-unit “deeply” affordable permanent housing community in west Fresno off of Highway 99.

Deeply affordable is generally defined as being within reach of a household earning below 30% of area median income.

Fresno Housing developed Manzanilla Commons with the help of the state of California’s Homekey program and the help of numerous partners.

The $25 million project involved several public and private partners, including the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the City and County of Fresno, HUD, TMC Financing, the California Endowment and the Kraske Foundation. Architectural and construction partners included RL Incorporated and Pro-Path Constructors.

The development was built through a mix of adaptive reuse and new construction. The site was transformed from a 98-room motel into affordable homes for low-income individuals and families.

The units range from studios to three-bedroom apartments and include energy-efficient upgrades. Amenities include a community room, playground, dog park, basketball court and community garden.

“It’s truly exciting to celebrate the transformation of a site that once symbolized instability into a place of permanence, purpose and pride,” said Brandy Woodard, the chief of housing programs & initiatives with Fresno Housing. “Manzanilla Commons is more than a new development — it’s part of a broader vision that reimagines the Parkway Drive corridor, not as a forgotten stretch of highway, but as a neighborhood worthy of investment, care and community.”

Fresno Housing CEO Tyrone Roderick Williams called the development a mission in action.

“This project is about bringing resources to a long disinvested neighborhood,” he said. “It’s about creating access, creating housing for people who need it, and it’s about transformation of land, of systems and lives.”

Fresno County Supervisor Brian Pacheco highlighted some of the amenities that Manzanilla Commons offers, including a community room, playground, dog park, basketball court and community garden.

The City of Fresno contributed $3.5 million to the project. Mayor Jerry Dyer, once Fresno’s police chief, noted the dramatic turnaround for the site, which had previously been a hotspot for criminal activity and which he visited frequently as chief.

Dyer said the $3.5 million investment isn’t necessarily for the buildings or the development, but in the people who will live there.

“It’s an investment in the lives of people and their future because we know their lives will be transformed as a result of having stability in housing,” Dyer said.

Councilmember Miguel Arias, who represents the district, said the property was long a source of frustration and community harm without much help from the county.

“In 2019, we nicely requested and asked the motel owners to stop renting their spaces to human and drug trafficking, and they didn’t,” Arias said. “We nicely asked them to fix their facilities and they didn’t. We asked the police department to start arresting and enforcing drug crimes and human trafficking rights more aggressively, and they couldn’t.”

Eventually, Arias, who represents District 1, said the city and its partners shifted from asking to taking action.

“If you won’t fix it, then we’ll take the property and we’ll fix it,” Arias said. “Over the last few years, the city and the housing authority, with the support of the county, have actively acquired most of these motel properties and one by one used them to house the unsheltered, but also convert them to permanent housing.”

He pointed to a new sound wall nearby that will reduce the noise of Highway 99, which is another example of community-driven progress.

A few weeks ago, Arias celebrated the groundbreaking of another motel-turned housing development with the Mosaic at The Mural District.

Sharon Williams, the Fresno Housing City Board Chair, delivered a powerful speech to prospective new residents about what goes through the minds of people who are often unable to afford homes but now can with the several new affordable housing developments in the city.

“(Manzanilla Commons) is reviving communities that look like this, and it’s for people like me and people like you that said, ‘You want me to get a job? I can’t think about a job—I don’t have a place to live,” She said. “Some of them have come out of cars. Some of them are sleeping on sidewalks. Some of them come out of drugs. Who cares where they come from? What they’re saying to the city is, ‘Do you see me? Do you hear me? Will you answer me?’ Today—there’s an answer.”