Shadow Alliance

The Untold Story of the Death of Arthop

A creative frenzy has gripped Fresno. Arthop, a monthly street festival drawing up to 15,000 people into downtown Fresno, was abruptly put on pause this July. City leaders soon decided that Fresno’s marquee public event needed a radical change – split the party into two nights, the original night reserved for “fine art” gallery owners and a new night for outdoor street vendors called “Why Not Wednesday.”

This turned out to be extremely lame, and the combined crowds for both nights are dwarfed by Arthop’s original 15,000. Arthop is dead, at least as we knew it. If nothing is done very soon to get the old Arthop back, this network of community support for local businesses and artists of Tower District and Downtown Fresno will be permanently lost.

This cannot be allowed to happen, representing the collapse of a priceless tradition that has taken over a decade of autonomous, community-led support to nurture. Yet to be explained is the reason for displacing Fresno’s vendors and street artists, historically the overwhelming draw of Arthop, into a new and untested night. This is both the major cause of the split and whose suffering is why much of Fresno’s artistic traditions are on the brink of annihilation.

The record will show that every reason you have been told about why Arthop had to die is a lie. Politicos have outmaneuvered the capacities of media and artists in understanding the true stakes of what has occurred. The episode shows a profound failure of Fresno media to report the truth, propagating false narratives which have sustained this violence against ordinary people.

The reason for the split-up for Arthop has to do with one man’s attempt to take over Fresno’s parks and arts tax, Measure P, in its first year of funding. Eliot Balch, the CEO of the Downtown Fresno Partnership, worked behind the scenes with the Fresno Police Department to create a fake public safety crisis for Arthop this July which created key support from Fresno City Councilman Miguel Arias for the eventual split-up of the event into two nights.

The overall outcome is a power play to cement Balch’s decade-long effort to control Fulton Street and downtown city life. This began with his leading role in the destruction of the original Fulton Street pedestrian mall in the 2010s, which now has radically less greenspace after Balch plowed everything over for SUVs and made it inhospitable for everyone except for North Fresno office commuters. In recent years, Balch has begun the next step in his downtown gentrification scheme: spearheading luxury real estate projects on Fulton Street.

In July, the same month of his ArtHop takeover, Balch’s organization started a partnership with David Weinart, a mega-project advisor with experience from Las Vegas to La Jolla, to jumpstart a major commercial mall on Fulton Street. Weinart is organizing property owners on the old Fulton Mall, with Balch positioned to get 20% of Weinart’s finder’s fee for all real estate projects completed in the area in the coming years.¹

The forces behind ArtHop’s death show that the livelihoods of street vendors and artists are the first casualties in Fresno’s march to gentrify downtown. Taking over the downtown Fresno arts scene (Arthop) and its new major sources of funding (Measure P) is part of Balch’s political project to develop connections at all levels of government – from reactionary small property owners like John Ostlund to the Fresno PD – to control and displace propertyless black and brown people in ways that make downtown real estate more attractive for investors.

Artistic ideals do not concern us about this episode. It’s the outright violence against Arthop’s established community practices, in service of real estate development, that counts as the most appalling symptom of decisions made this summer by Fresno’s nonprofit leaders and politicians.

It’s early in this fight, and Measure P is the first flash point in whether public funds will continue to be instruments of this violent project in the coming years. Unless something is done, the Fresno Arts Council, which oversees Measure P funding, will become the foundation of this goal: financing the destruction and consolidation of downtown Fresno’s existing community of art and food culture.

The far-reaching effects of Balch’s move is that, combined with recent anti-homeless and street vendor laws, Fresno’s war on the poor and propertyless has arrived with full force. And it is coming to Fresno neighborhoods everywhere where Balch and his new allies of petty property owners and landlords feel that they can jack up rents as the prospect of High-Speed Rail gets closer and closer. Gentrification is the goal of this war; police violence and police-led policies are how this will be accomplished.

This brings us to the occasion for this communique. The real outcome, so far, has been profound silence over the causes of the death Arthop and its real-life implications. Our task is to tell people what’s happening, and then get the fuck out of the way so that they can reclaim Arthop themselves.

We at the Tule Research Collective dream of a future of what ordinary working people look like when they conduct themselves as owners of their lives, managers of their neighborhoods, artists of their communities – not as some wage slave delivering Uber Eats to assholes like Balch.

We hold land and its relationships with the highest possible meaning. This is our defining ethic. Resist all forms of bullshit from the government and other people that threaten our sense of place, the destruction of our communal bonds, the evictions of our neighborhoods and traditions, like Balch’s ArtHop split-up.

We will show that if Fresno is to have any livable future, the battle over Arthop is the start of the fight for Fresno in the 21st century. How you fight is up to you. The purpose of this manifesto is to know your enemies.

This brings us to our first horizon of analysis. If Balch gets his way with Arthop, Measure P will be used to destroy one of the only forms of Fresno’s communal artistic life that made art important and life in Fresno fun in the first place.

The first thing that must be done is Measure P cannot fund any of Balch’s projects in the future, nor the Downtown Partnership or its related nonprofit, the Downtown Fresno Foundation. Street vendors need to band together this May and be very clear to the Arts Council: no funding for Downtown Fresno Partnership, the Downtown Fresno Foundation, nor Eliot Balch in the future. An effort could also potentially be made to revoke Balch’s funding for his initial Measure P funding received this year.

Furthermore, Fresno Street Eats, the major vendor-run organization for Fulton Street, needs to step up and cut off all ties with Balch, the Downtown Fresno Partnership and the Downtown Fresno Foundation.

The reason for all this is simple: Measure P dollars can’t be used to help organizations that are actively invested in the destruction of existing artistic life to collect rents and fees and in the displacement of brown folks in search of real estate development deals.

How Balch killed Arthop using Fresno’s shadow government

The assault on Arthop is comprehensible if we analyze a sequence of events starting in June 2024. On June 17, it was first announced that the roll-out of Measure P funding was being delayed. During the stoppage, local media focused on brown people, alleging that the Arts Council was concerned of backlash over north Fresno and Tower zip codes getting disproportionate amounts of arts dollars. This was a smokescreen.

The arts council knew that nearly every south Fresno project that applied got Measure P funding. The North simply submitted more applications. As the delay ran on for weeks, the Arts Council was not worried about being seen as neglectful to South Fresno.­

Instead, the board was worried about getting sued by somebody not mentioned in any media stories leading up to the vote: Eliot Balch, the operator of the Downtown Fresno Partnership.

In the run-up to the delay, Balch had tried to take over Measure P. The program had $9 million to give out in its first year, and Balch wanted nearly $1 million of it. He submitted 6 Measure P applications, the biggest funding request being an odd request: Arthop’s security and operations. In mid-May, the Arts Council had notified Balch that this application was going to be rejected. His organization’s ambitious goals came up woefully short in its first crack at Measure P funding – receiving $77,000 to paint a mural in the new Fresno City College parking garage.²

Pissed off, Balch and his attorney wrote a letter to the Arts Council and Andrew Janz with all the implication of a threat to sue,³ scaring the Arts Council in the process. Balch also enlisted Jordan Sanchez, a city hall insider and downtown revitalization staffer, to exert pressure from within the Dyer administration.⁴ Soon, the Arts Council held up Measure P funding for everyone to make sure they were on solid ground in the case Balch did sue.

At the heart of the matter was that Measure P would not finance a new power center in Fresno. The politics were obvious: the Arts Council made clear that its overall ethic would be to enrich a decentralized group of artists to support their work. The Arts Council backed this up with a simple rule: each organization could only get 1 Measure P grant.⁵

To Balch, the existing relationships that have sustained art in Fresno needed to be disrupted in order for Measure P to become a slush fund for a new group of nonprofits, downtown grandaddys and gallery owners. “The Arts Council is gatekeeping,” Balch said, according to Downtown Partnership minutes.⁶

Splitting up Arthop fit the bill for destabilization perfectly. The monthly event was the core of the city’s artistic community – a local tradition that needed to be co-opted by power-hungry city leaders.

Arthop in Fresno has become a relatively autonomous and self-sufficient to a much greater degree than other comparatively privileged working-class activities, with its 15,000+ crowds providing a community of mostly Latino small business owners the capacity to survive and defend themselves with a stable, reliable income. As a result, the event has become a world unto itself, functionally and culturally autonomous from the city’s power centers. “It’s run by the artists, for the artists,” one Arthop member described it as.

The crux of Balch’s problem was that the politics of Measure P shared the same ground as Arthop. Measure P was funding something decentralized, just like Arthop was. This made perfect logical sense – the monthly event was the core of Measure P’s cultural significance.

Changing the structure of Arthop therefore became a way for Balch to opportunistically take over Measure P. Find a way to command this event, and you hold the key to the future of art funding and events in Downtown Fresno – from Measure P to other lucrative 501(c) funding from philanthropies.

Since 2022, Balch’s organization had struggled with money from time to time. Fulton Street’s property owners owed him $100,000 dollars in delinquent taxes, according to Downtown Partnership minutes.⁷ Property values in Downtown were not rising fast enough to match his ambitions, and Balch soon decided that other sources of funding needed to be found. The organization’s existing events revenues needed to be “fix[ed] up,” he told an Executive Committee.⁸ By June 2023, Balch told the Board of Directors that the organization was “trending below budget on event revenues” and that he was working on “develop[ing] other funding streams.”⁹

By the beginning of 2024, Balch discussed a massive change with the Downtown Partnership: to nearly quadruple events revenue. In previous years, roughly two-thirds of the Downtown Partnership’s budget was funded by property revenues from Fulton Street business owners, with grants and events revenues being the remaining one-third.¹⁰ In February 2024, Balch told the Board of Directors at a special meeting that, as part of a funding diversification strategy, events revenues needed to rise to 175% of existing property revenues.¹¹ Future Measure P grants, such as taking over Arthop, were part of this funding overhaul. By May, Balch’s funding needs grew critical when he learned that Weinart, his Downtown gentrification guru, would charge $30,000 a month for his services to develop a retail super-mall on Fulton.¹²

On July 16, the Arts Council held firm on their decision to reject Balch’s 5 other Measure P applications. With no more room to negotiate, Balch quickly mobilized to kill Arthop with the help of Fresno City Councilman Miguel Arias.

Three days after his final Measure P rejection, on July 19, Arias and Balch held a joint press conference announcing that Arthop would be put on pause. Going forward, Arias said Balch’s Downtown Partnership would potentially take over the event in the future – only if Balch’s organization got more funding.

Arias also announced that the city of Fresno would grant Balch new, extraordinary powers: absolute control over the space of Fulton and who could sell their art there. At the conference, according to a local media source, Balch said that going forward he would now draw up a “map showing exactly how Arthop goers can continue to enjoy the Fulton Street experience.” Balch would soon announce his new permitting system – perfect as a source of events revenue — for street vendors.

Balch’s takeover of Fulton Street was just what the doctor ordered: by any account, an attack on Arthop’s spaces of cultural identity and autonomy, an attack on the community institutions and infrastructure that people had built in order to survive in a world that is hostile to them. Destroying these bonds, cementing his organization as the broker for the future of Arthop – and nearly getting away with it – is indicative of Balch’s political genius.

At the press conference, the city of Fresno didn’t really have a good answer for its motivation behind what was clearly a power grab for Balch. The change was described by Arias as a “preventative measure” – although in defense of what threat no evidence was given. In the always-reliable, bulletproof excuse for media, the cost of police overtime was cited.

So how did Balch summon the political will for this massively unpopular change?

Behind closed doors, Balch was doing two things – negotiating unsuccessfully with the Arts Council to get his original Measure P applications approved, but also working to manufacture a fake crisis for Fresno’s art scene. In June, Balch assembled a so-called Security Panel which engineered a fake crisis for Arthop,¹³ ensuring his organization was positioned to provide relief for any supposed problems.

The seed of the crisis was an unrelated domestic disturbance dispute on the night of June’s Arthop. It was at Hotel Fresno, near Fulton Street, and sadly resulted in a fatal stabbing. The domestic dispute was the source of the violence, “not Arthop,”¹⁴ the Downtown Partnership’s board meeting minutes read.

But inside the board room in June, Balch honed the episode into campaign material for his back-up plan if negotiations with Arts Council chief Lilla Gonzales-Chavez failed. “Arthop needs more structure,” the Downtown Partnership’s security panel, filled up with police officers and Arias, concluded from the unrelated episode. “If we get control, we will…control vendors and what time they arrive and more.”¹⁵

On June 26 – weeks before the initial Balch/Arias press conference announcing the takeover – Balch put the plan to take over Arthop in motion. “All entities will deploy on August Arthop to let people know that there will be [police] enforcement from now on and after August they will be cited.”¹⁶

After the late June meeting, the plan to split up Arthop went forward in the coming weeks with little hiccups. More security was needed, city officials would later use an excuse in the middle of July. Up to 15-20 police officers, Arias later estimated, were needed as deterrence for “any preventable safety issues at Arthop.” Operational changes, with Balch’s Partnership at the center of it, were needed before Arthop could move forward, Arias, Balch and city officials told the public. The loot to be gained from seizing the event, Miguel Arias let slip, was enormous – $100,000 a month.

With a huge source of funding secure, Balch began his retail project on Fulton the same month, starting his Phase One by rounding up 18 property owners with his retail expert, the Vegas/La Jolla developer David Weinert. Reza Assemi, a downtown developer, announced 162 housing units at the abandoned J.C. Penney on Fulton Street – almost none of them affordable. “The biggest thing we need is market rate housing,” Balch’s organization concluded about Downtown Fresno’s needs. “So that is the thing [we] can support and promote.”¹⁷

By the end of July, Art Hop was split up, with Balch’s Downtown Partnership taking over the new Wednesday event. Using their new permitting system, Balch cut out the self-sufficient community that had for years run the outdoor celebration of art, beer and food safely and effectively.

In only three short weeks, the destruction of Arthop was complete. Balch had found his new stronghold for grants and events revenue and his retail project on Fulton was underway. With media being unable to tell the real story of the motivations behind the change, Arias, Balch and Dyer rammed through the split-up of the city’s most prized street festival with little real opposition.

The operation worked for everyone involved – except for the street vendors and artists whose existing lives Balch and Arias were ruining. Balch’s organization “wanted to own an essential symbol of the Fresno community that they did not have a hand in creating,” one artist told the Community Alliance.

Exactly right. Colonization is the only word that accurately fits what Balch did to Fresno’s arts scene. This summer was an incredible showing of Balch’s law-making violence alongside the law-preserving violence of the Fresno police department.

The scene has all the content of a modern colonial episode. Imagine it: Balch at the podium alongside Arias, unveiling his contingency plan and map to enable his organization and the police to swiftly occupy Fulton and exert control over Arthop. This is how urban frontiers are conquered in the 21st century with modern-day six guns. Only after the conquest, these cowboys hold their own press conferences and ride away in $150,000 Rivians.

Armed landowners have usually made the laws on this continent, having won those laws with letters of stolen land and enslavement. So to with stolen events and lost livelihoods of Fresno’s street vendors. Balch is asserting control over stolen resources, commanding a decades-old tradition in a matter of weeks through the violent imposition of social hierarchies – his nonprofit, the cops and the property owners – in the streets. Look at how disposable the street vendors livelihoods were – killed for some extra police overtime and the bottom line of a nonprofit hell-bent on gentrification!

He did not do this alone. We now turn to his collaborators.

Who were the accomplices?

The offensive against Arthop created a radical change for the future of art in Fresno. Under Balch’s new plan, administrators who write permits and people with guns could eat at the table for who would receive Fresno’s new arts funding in the coming years.

The basic assumption behind Balch’s operation was that by breaking art you can become a money broker and therefore a power broker. Balch, Arias, some gallery owners and the police were the guys who brought that model into the real world.

In economic terms, what happened to Arthop is called creative destruction – capitalism and its shock troopers destroying existing social relations and rearranging how people go about their lives in order to make more money for themselves.

In Fresno, Balch’s creative destruction would be aimed towards changing the on-the-ground conditions of the existing art scene to collect rents –– up to $100,000 a month, as Arias alluded – on the sort of artistic activity that, before his takeover, happened for free by willing community members! Fundamentally, the changes in Arthop are a big scam that Balch, Arias, and the police are in on.

This rip-off, however, is backed up and paid in full with the city’s most powerful political force: the Fresno police department. Fresno PD is surely the Downtown Partnership’s most important accomplice, as anyone who attempts to undo Balch’s rip-off will have to confront the power of the police, who are getting more overtime because of Balch. This symbiosis is likely mission-critical for Balch in the short-term. When was the last time somebody in Fresno successfully defunded the police?

Anchored by a sort of qualified immunity, Balch is now positioned to fit the overall future of Fresno’s art scene to his design specifications – creating requirements on what types of vendors can do business on Fulton Street and collecting fees from them for years to come.

Measure P’s horizon will then become a sort of second Fresno State budget – its artistic mission and existing artists to be hollowed out like the University’s educational mission and underpaid adjuncts in recent years, part of the long march of each’s precious public tax dollars being taken over by administrative bloat, police funding and exorbitantly paid executive hacks. Let another Todd Suntrapak bloom! these sorts of idiots proclaim at every public funding resource that comes their way.

Where are Fresno’s so-called arts leaders? The certified geniuses and laureates of the city’s poetry scene – Juan Felipe Herrera and Lee Herrick – have been MIA, siloed with six-figure grants and salaries. Hey Juan: Where are the poets now?

Furthermore, there has been no answer from Fresno’s civil society groups. A potential ensemble of coordinating organizations that could wage an opposition against Balch— these did not arrive this summer. It is possible that this happened due to would-be art protectors being co-opted by other pieces of Balch’s coalition. Balch’s power grab therefore was not one of monomania but commonality with other nonprofits.

With Arias, Balch has a valuable ally and a key accomplice. A shrewd political operator, Arias will not have a job in politics soon due to terming out as councilman. Arias likely jumped on Balch’s bandwagon this summer after losing his race for county supervisor in March, with the understanding that all liberal politics in the city, in one form or another, revolve around Downtown resource battles to gentrify Fulton.

Arias also has the key political support of so-called “progressive” art galleries, like Art de Americas, who got millions in recent years from Arias and future Fresno Mayor Joaquin Arambula, who also talked over this operation with Balch in June.¹⁸ The Arias/Arambula-funded gallery, mostly larded up with MFA-Latino types, did nothing to resist the power grab, although it’s unclear how much they knew about the scheme.

The most tragic actor in all this is Lilla Gonzales-Chavez, Fresno Arts Council executive director. For whatever role good local journalism could have played in this episode, it was in providing timely information to Gonzalez-Chavez, who is the head of Arthop and Measure P.

Simply put, Gonzales-Chavez does not like Balch. During Balch’s tirades against the Arts Council, it appears that she was not supportive of him this Summer – not even accepting a meeting or phone call with him at the beginning of his power grab in early June. Balch has been so clear as to say, in an interview with Donald Munro, that he would have never split up Arthop if Gonzalez-Chavez’s Arts Council had let him have his way on his original Measure P application to take over Arthop. It’s likely that she saw his attempts for what it was – fundamentally changing art in Fresno for the worse. But without the local media being able to connect the dots between the Measure P and Arthop episodes, it’s likely she got out-organized by Balch and his police-led coalition.

Gonzalez-Chavez should either commit to getting Arthop back and cut Balch out from running things on Fulton – or resign so somebody else can. Leadership, for whatever the term is worth, calls in this moment for real risks to be made to bring the old Art Hop back.

Another key coalition member was the reactionary basket of petty property owners who hated the autonomous community of Arthop – people like John Ostlund, who have fancy rich-people-oriented galleries of “fine art” that don’t mean shit to most people. Ostlund, who has a gallery on Tuolumne and Fulton Street, despised the city’s existing art culture, calling Art Hop “tacos and trinkets.” Ostlund was Balch’s key on-the-ground blowhard to hold Arthop hostage to his pretentious conception of art.

With Ostlund, Balch had the always-reliable small business owner with a stake in property and real estate to use as a cudgel to the property-less street vendors. Balch used these guys to turn the major need of Measure P from supporting artists to funding operational costs for the hired guns enforcing two quasi-segregated nights.

The ultimate meaning of the death of Arthop: Fresno’s George Floyd moment

So finally – we have all the pieces to stop and survey the view. Rents, police, downtown nonprofits, petty business owners and reactionary “fine art” gallery idiots – these combined this summer to accomplish a stunning success. Why did they band together? This is a real mystery to solve.

We at the TRC believe that the death of Art Hop was a surface disturbance: crests of foam that the tides of history carry on their strong backs. We will now try to puzzle together and think about how the forces underlying the changes to Arthop this summer tell us a story about the future of Fresno as a whole.

Balch has started a chain reaction that admits of little modification or mitigation. His set of moves and real interests right now is basically the near-term process of proving there’s a market for building luxury condos once the bullet train comes to town. This is a goal shared by the Downtown Partnership, every city council member, mayor and governor administrative staff.

This project will involve profound violence, via the cops, against renters and unhoused brown, black and working-class folks in the existing neighborhoods around downtown Fresno. In his search for power and funding over Measure P, and eventually arriving at the combination of rents, police and various factions of real estate to take over Art Hop, Balch has set this train in motion.

Fulton Street and the fight over the space and time of Arthop is Balch’s testing ground of the forces of control needed to increase real estate values in the area. A lot more poor people will need to be cleared out and controlled to make these areas “attractive” for investment, and Balch has positioned himself at the heart of this movement.

This violence – which will arrive in the coming years as a vicious spiral of an ever-widening set of homeless sweeps and evictions and everyday threats of violence from Fresno PD – will do three things.

First, it will allow the existing class of landlords to jack up your rents, by making some new gentrifiers more comfortable in downtown. This proof-of-concept for gentrification then preps the ground for landlords to sell off their real estate to major developers in the next 8-10 years. The next play will be for these big developers to build the grandaddy condos, giving every nearby property owner the license to jack up rents even higher when the bullet train comes. In the coming years, the city government will flood the system with enough cash to keep the banks and landlords solvent until developers can pay for that grand vision. It really is that simple.

With all the pieces clear now, let us put forward the spectacular metaphor of the meaning of death of Arthop: it was, on a mass scale, Fresno’s George Floyd moment.

By comparing the two, we mean that the death of Floyd and Arthop share the same long-term material causes. Remember, the George Floyd Uprising starts not with his death, but with a fake 20-dollar bill. Floyd had his side-hustle, and the cops killed him for it. So with Balch killing a lot of hustles on Fulton.

This is not a mistake or fluke – they are rooted in how our modern economy works. Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin were also killed in suburbs in transition, hollowed out by the housing crisis. The cops killed these Black men on the false pretense that they presented a hazard; Balch and Arias killed Arthop on a similar false pretense – that TEC-9 gangbangers were lurking around the corner to undermine the “public safety” of Arthop, thus needing 15-20 more cops and a takeover of the community’s existing infrastructure. In each case, these lies support the same outcome towards the side-hustle; the cop on Floyd’s neck, Balch on the downtown street vendors.

The metaphor with George Floyd allows us to explain the linkage between Art Hop and gentrification. They retain a deep unity. The broader determination which sets the brown person’s side-hustle so close to the deadly force of a cop & planner comes down to economics. Simply put, police departments use their violence against residents to generate economic growth. The stagnation of cities in the last 40 years has meant that the best way to develop wealth and raise city revenues is to gentrify neighborhoods. These clearance projects are how cops prove themselves to city leaders.

The cop’s job as shock trooper to enforce this reconfiguration of the social landscape puts them in an increasingly colonial situation with minority neighborhoods suffering from high un- and under-employment. These neighborhoods, historically isolated from good jobs, rely on racialized informal economies to survive – this is exactly what Arthop and the city’s street vending community is.

As cops move in to clear out the neighborhoods, their close proximity with ordinary folks, cast aside by the formal economy and trying to survive with their side-hustle, means that existing residents’ lives are slowly and suddenly destroyed with a spectrum of bureaucratic fees, fines and raw force.

Ferguson, Missouri’s massive citation machine, and Michael Brown’s death, showed how these three can move as one in a city. The move to bureaucratize Art Hop and other new street vending laws with the power of the police is simply a different concatenation of these same forces of municipal politics that have emerged in the last three or four decades.

This is enough to sum up one of our points in this story – namely, that the death of Art Hop signals a shift of the city’s center of gravity towards landlords and a new linkage with cops. Today, police and land are the most relevant factors in understanding the relationship between money and power in the making of our city. Set against low economic growth in the city, we now proffer our second horizon of analysis: going forward, all existing city politics is landlord politics and cop politics. We will show what this means, why this is the case historically and what is needed to resist this in the next few sections.

We hope that it is now clear that the street vendors were the first victims of Fresno’s 21st century gentrification project – evicting all these street vendors of the prime-time spot in the month in order to appease property owners like John Ostlund. The vendors may survive without taking on Balch, like how displaced residents from newly gentrified neighborhoods try to remake themselves in shittier conditions across America: in different lines of work, on the outskirts of their old neighborhoods. They will face a worse-off life, lower incomes and more taxes and fees. Nobody wins in this economy except gentrifiers, landowners, the police and the government collecting the taxes, fees and fines.

The far-reaching effect of Balch’s move is that Fresno’s war on the poor has arrived with full force. If nothing is done, there will be more Travon Martins and Michael Browns and Arthop disasters, which is to say that the development of downtown and the actions of City Hall will become increasingly more focused on using the cops to enforce the control and reorganization of folks South of McKinley to make real estate more valuable. The appearance of “safety” for gentrifiers in market-rate housing is the public relations wing of this overall project.

The major thing we want to get across is that Balch’s project is only valuable insofar as people submit to it. Balch’s project could be stopped, but only through a profound process of destabilization of the ground he is trying to make: a giant real estate speculation project. The more disruptive the city’s renters, homeless and street vendors are to this – occupations, rent strikes, and protests – the less valuable Balch’s project becomes.

Such a task will need a similar mobilization of at least as many forms as Balch has mobilized. This will require destabilization of many sites of class – from college campuses to the unhoused to the street vendors. The horizon of these struggles, we put forward, is to make Fresno ungentrifiable.

To be clear: this is the fight for Fresno. Because sooner or later, everyone will need to make their neighborhood ungentrifiable, to keep rents low, to avoid displacement, if only for the practical reason that we need to remain close to the ones we live near, love with and care for.

The events over the last year show that defending existing community practices against landlords and takeovers has become the deepest source of meaning of nearly every political struggle in the city. Bringing Arthop back and saving Measure P, then, means stopping Balch’s overall project. Balch’s project needs to be opposed at every level, if only in defense of existing communities everywhere. This sort of resistance will break down any distinction between living in Fresno and defending it.

How the landlord became the king of capitalism in Fresno

We believe there is a deep transformation of Fresno at work right now. People need to be aware of it. Residents need to know what they could be fighting – the beast they are already up against. It is as elusive as it is immanent. It is the ascension of the landlord as the king of capitalism.

Fresno’s war on the poor is still early; the provisional start day is July 16, 2024 – the day Balch declared the old Art Hop dead. The signs of this war are everywhere. New homeless sweeping ordinances and the sweeping off of Arthop are signals that the city has shifted gears in a profound way. Another crackdown for street vendors follow similar lines – basically beaner-proofing the city’s streets on behalf of property owners by excluding them from most sidewalks. The function of this new city ordinance is much like the bum-proof city benches which have metal bars running down the middle so as to make them impossible for the homeless to rest on: In both cases, they serve no other purpose than to humiliate and exclude.

Explanations for these new initiatives shift moment to moment, a whirlpool of political bullshit and media spectacles.¹⁹ All outcomes are uncertain. The question at hand is: Toward what objective future are the leaders of Fresno trying to make?

Balch reveals everything, not because he is a uniquely bad guy for his profession, but because he’s smart enough to conjure all at once the necessary forces who are building this future. We take it as fact that these forces are everywhere, all the time; Balch’s hands touching more pies than is normal for his class is what makes this story significant. He has simply condensed broader historical trends and the personal relationships needed for how Fresno will be transformed according to the needs of capitalism in the coming years.

To understand this, it is important to speak clearly about the relationship between the tactics and goals played by Balch. Up until now, we have showed his main tactics, their progression across time and their striking resemblance to other towns like Ferguson. The next three sections will show the goals and ends that these tactics converge on.

Think of our task like trying to explain the meaning of a car engine. We’ve seen a still photo of the engine block: its basic parts and make-up. Finding out the goals is a bit like this machine’s grand mechanics – why the gears are positioned just so, how it all works together towards the goal of basic propulsion. We will do the same thing with Balch and Fresno, leading us to the discovery of what propels the city right now, its underlying logic, and why other “blueprints” are off the table, thereby showing Balch’s historical context and his policies as an absolute inevitability for modern capitalism.

Basically, we will show that opposing the forces of Balch’s politics within Measure P and Arthop will not be easy, just as you just can’t swap out parts of a car engine and expect it to chug along as it did before. In Fresno, the engine of capitalism has become so fragile, any change or compromise is off the table for these leaders.

Insofar as capitalism exists, the only guys the city will help out from here on out is Balch, landlords, existing property owners and the cops. There will never be rent control, no large amounts of affordable housing built – only evictions, homeless sweeps and subsidies to landlords and gentrification.

The intuition you need to understand this is that the way money is made – the way profits are generated for people with property – has shifted over time. These shifts have introduced hard constraints on profit-making which determine what capitalism and the government can and cannot do.

To explain this, we start where everything starts, with money. A capitalist has only three roles he can play when it comes to making money: boss, banker, or landlord. For regular people, these roles appear in their lives as the wage, debt, and rent, respectively.

All three can exist at the same time, obviously. But their relative importance in exploiting people and creating profit has shifted over time. It used to be the boss, then the banker, and now it’s the landlord. We call this changing center of gravity within capitalism the boss-banker-landlord sequence. The boss and banker eras passed away a long time ago. Most of us live literally under the roof of the landlord’s world today.

First, wage-labor. This was the center of gravity when factories were a big deal – 1830-1973. A capitalist, playing the role of the boss, gave wages to working folks and bought very complex machines to sell cars and steel and other things to make his profit.

The capitalist’s basic logic in this era was to buy the fancy machines to increase the productivity of the worker and therefore reduce prices and compete with the other capitalists. With falling prices, the boss had less profit per widget to make; with less profit per widget, he simply made more widgets.

The capitalist in this era survived by making sure that he increased his output at a rate faster than the worker’s rate of productivity growth. So long as demand for cars and other widgets kept increasing, it all worked out – workers’ wages went up because they were more productive using the machines, and more people got employed in the factories because output was growing faster than productivity. And the combination of both allowed the capitalist to turn bigger and bigger profits to keep the factories humming.

This was known as capitalism’s golden years – in America, 1948-1973. This was a time when the economy’s growth could provide rising wages and rising profits all at the same time. The government could redistribute some of that money too, funding big social and infrastructure projects like healthcare, railroads and highways.

These golden days of capitalism are not coming back. This wage/factory nexus of exploitation declined starting in 1973, never to return again. It turns out we couldn’t sell an infinite amount of cars. After ‘73, industrial markets saturated, and the growth in demand for the industrial goods started teetering while productivity continued to rise. The combination of saturation and innovation was a catastrophic, fatal combination for the boss.

When productivity rises faster than output growth, fewer workers are needed to meet production needs; the boss therefore lays off some workers. As a result, there are fewer industrial workers with high wages to buy the widgets; as a result, demand for the widgets rises even more slowly. Soon, fewer workers are required to produce the same mass of widgets. Demand weakens further, prices fall more quickly than costs, leading to a period of falling profitability.

It’s at this moment that the boss era begins its terminal shift. Bigger loads of people get laid off as output and productivity diverge. Eventually there’s no more people to cut to stay alive, and the factory closes up shop. As a percentage of total employment, manufacturing jobs fell 50% between 1970 and 2000.

Since 1973, the world has been unable to get out of this problem. Capitalists moved the factories overseas to places where the wages were cheap and they could compete in a zero-sum game for market share – mainly Brazil, Russia, India and China. These countries found out that they couldn’t replicate the American magic of the golden years, due to a key fact: their manufacturing base starts out at a higher level of overall productivity to compete on the global market. Being too damn productive out of the gates, they hit the same limits on demand as America did, only earlier. The periods of real growth in those countries get shorter and shorter, recession and permanent stagnation hitting sooner and harder: Brazil in the 90s, India in the 00s, and China in the 10s.

The factory is not coming back as a major source of employment – and certainly not in America. Since then, other sectors of wage-labor here, like the service sector, have absorbed more and more people. The service industry doesn’t get more productive over time like factory work, and so have stagnant wages. Think of a nurse or a barista. They basically make the same amount of coffee and help per hour as 40 years ago. And output growth in these sectors is very difficult except for healthcare (This is why in the service sector, overwork is how the boss steals bigger profit nowadays. Unionization is hard too because these jobs are deskilled and spread out relative to industrial work back in the day).

In the final analysis for the power of the boss, the decline of the factory meant the decline of the boss in making big profits. After 1973, wage-labor has disappeared as capitalism’s center of gravity for exploitation.

Next, the rise of the Banker and debt. This was The Next Big Thing after the factories got shipped overseas – its era is dated 1973-2008. During that span, the financial sector’s share of the US economy grew 200%. Why the Banker took the helm of the ship is a long story, but basically because of the factory problem America went off the gold standard in ‘73 in a last-ditch attempt to keep our factories humming. This made the US dollar cheaper, making our goods price-competitive on the international market to steal market shares from overseas rivals like Germany and Japan. As Japan and Germany’s market power suddenly declined – because the new US floating exchange rates made their industrial goods more expensive – these two countries needed a place to park their cash.

They parked a lot of it in US banks. Because the factories were only being shuffled around at this time, with the pie not really growing worldwide, more and more people across the world also started doing what Japan and Germany had done – dumping their cash into the US Treasury.

What was the banker to do with all that overseas and domestic cash? Because a bank’s job is to push this money out the door, all sorts of loans got signed. This included a lot of mortgages – bad ones. Alan Greenspan juiced the consumer debt market to create demand for all that debt; some people like Goldman Sachs even made bets that these mortgages would be paid off – so-called Mortgage-Backed Securities.

What happens when everyone realizes that there aren’t enough wages from the boss to pay off all this debt? The banker’s bubble pops.

After the subprime mortgage went bust in 2008, the banker and his sidekick, the developer, disappeared off the map as the city’s top capitalist. Debt went out of fashion for capitalism in cities as cheap credit disappeared. In the new loan-averse banking context, where most people with modest means and stagnant wages have a hard time getting a home loan, household debt has become out of reach.

Almost by process of elimination, it’s recently become the landlord to take on the central role for capitalism’s terrain of exploitation in cities. The difficulty of making rent, of finding a place to live, is now the dominant experience of capitalism; it is homelessness today that characterizes poverty, that defines the the threat of wageless life and increasingly to one’s biological life.

Now, a clarification: it’s not that the boss and banker have disappeared. The point of this analysis is to show that only one can take the main role; the others draw their source of power at any given time from the central, operative form of exploitation. The three work to articulate each other as a total system of capitalism; at any given point, they work to attenuate their respective forms of control on people’s lives towards the basic law of capitalism: the maximum extraction of profit.

The most obvious feature of landlord capitalism today is that the new American Dream is to have a large source of passive income, be it via being a landlord, stocks, crypto, a trust fund or owning a weed shop. Today, the boss can exploit you harder because you need to make more rent. The same relation holds for debt: Despite miserable wage growth, stagnant for decades, people still have a demand for the Banker’s debt primarily because being a renter is even more miserable; households take on debt mostly to avoid the exploitation of the landlord.

So a preliminary point for us to hold onto to: the ordering of boss-banker-landlord matters here; the decline of one enables the relative rise of the other, material conditions foreclosing off the former from rising again. The collapse of the Boss and then the Banker has enabled the permanent reign of the Landlord and rent as the dominant experience of capitalism in Fresno.

The upshot is that for so long as capitalism exists, the logic and constraints of the landlord will determine how decisions are made in the economy and the government. Quite simply, there’s no other central role left for capitalists to play.

In Fresno, all politics are landlord politics.

Stuck with the landlord, there’s nowhere else for capitalism to go. No more wages from the Boss rising above inflation; no more cheap household debt doled out from the Banker to defer the system’s overall needs of higher profits. Today, Fresno’s experience of modern capitalism is defined by raw extraction – a feudal dynamic.

Fresno renter’s incomes have only risen 20% since 1980, adjusted for inflation; Fresno’s Landlords have jacked up rents by 71% over the same span, according to the US Census. In other words, rent is rising in Fresno more than three times faster than wages. In the long downturn of American capitalism since 1973, it is now up to renters to provide rising payments to local capitalists.

In Fresno, according to the US Census, renting became the most common form of housing in – you guessed it – 2008. The total amount of money going to mortgages peaked in Fresno in 2008, declining by over 40% since then. With Boss and Banker gone, and more people renting at jacked-up rates, Mr. Landlord’s total share of the city’s wages is up 500% since 1980, adjusted for inflation. Today, renters generate $2.4 billion each year for landlords in Fresno County, according to the American Community Survey.

Who is exposed to this rising extraction is a racialized phenomena. The percentage of white people in Fresno who are renting are at 45-year lows, according to the US Census. The fraction of brown people at the front-lines of landlord extraction is an almost exact inverse fraction of white people. Today, it is as rare to find a white person renting as a brown person who owns a home. It’s as common to find a brown person renting as a white person with a mortgage.

College education has not been a corrector for this. For college degree holders, their home-ownership rates have been in decline since 2008.

Stagnant wages, rising rents, racialized property ownership: Combined, this is how racial capitalism operates in Fresno today. Racialized exposure to the extraction of the landlord is how capitalism has stabilized itself after the ‘08 crash.²⁰

During the pandemic, a new opportunity emerged for the landlord. Fresno’s college-educated people, increasingly locked out of the social benefits of home ownership since 2008, are being pushed into the rental market. Because these degree-holders generate household incomes roughly two times higher than non-college educated households, according to the US census, a new rent-jacking horizon has emerged for the landlord – one that Balch is priming the pump for.

The proof for this new stage in rent extraction emerged during the pandemic. For decades, the rent burden for college-educated people in Fresno was 50% lower than the non-college educated. Today, after a massive rent increase during the pandemic for the college-educated, they are now the same.

The most alluring detail to ever emerge for Fresno Landlords, one that caused the economy to fundamentally shift gears during the pandemic, is the following: White renters, despite a 50% income jump during the pandemic, now have a higher rent burden than nonwhite renters. This shift, coming out of nowhere, was an incredible success for the landlord. Rents rose faster in Fresno than anywhere else in the US during this time span.

So then: Our current moment, in 2024, the year of Balch, let’s just say, is a historical convergence of all the trends discussed above – one that Balch is trying to capitalize on. For a new generation of white and/or college-educated folks, owning a home is out of reach due to the death of the Banker era. The pandemic pushed many of these folks into closer competition on the rental market than ever before, hinting at a new long-term business opportunity for landlords.

In Fresno, a massive amount of new wealth for a tiny few is waiting to be realized: for property owners and developers who can capitalize on this flow of high-income earners locked out of home ownership. The only thing the landlord needs to do is push out the brown and non-college-educated people out to shittier places, to bring in the white and college-educated into rentals with jacked-up prices.

This is where landlord politics meet cop politics. This is the ground upon which gentrification is made.

Why the city government will become less like Parks and Recreation and more like Search and Destroy.

Capitalism’s permanent shift towards the landlord has serious consequences. People have not thought through its full meaning seriously. We will attempt to sketch out what this means for ordinary folks in Fresno.

First, there will be no return to normal under capitalism – to the benefits of the boss and banker era. Everyone can see it. The city government has become less like Parks and Recreation and more like Search and Destroy. The city’s slide towards this fact is near-absolute: even Measure P, Fresno’s new parks and arts tax, became dominated by a patrol, control and cop logic via Balch in a matter of weeks. Under landlord capitalism, all politics is cop politics and landlord politics. Under these conditions, market development for housing always increases inequality.

There was a time when a particular form of housing ruled the day under capitalism: plentiful, dense housing. The Boss Era was a time in which states and capitalists felt constrained to make cities affordable for people, if not livable, to produce infrastructure that would facilitate the reproduction of a working class.

This stemmed from a simple fact: back then, the big money was located in the worker in the factory. So the government helped make sure these people were in the right place at the right time – ensuring workers got into factories easily and quickly with dense, affordable housing.

After 1973, after the fall of the factory and Boss, money found a different way to build housing. While dealing with disappearing factories and deindustrialized cities, the Banker financed suburban homes in places like Fresno; such a product became attractive due to the relatively privileged white worker wanting to hold onto some of their wealth via segregated suburbs. Strip malls also became a lucrative investment instrument for the banker during this time due to favorable capital depreciation schedules from the IRS that kept taxes low.

As we have shown, the factories aren’t returning, the Boss not coming back. During Biden’s so-called American industrial renaissance of the last four years, backed by roughly a trillion dollars in tax subsidies, total manufacturing employment increased by 150,000 jobs nationwide – in a country of 170 million jobs. Basically all that money to get the factories back produced a rounding error of a rounding error in overall employment.

Nor is the Banker coming back to the city, reversing its 40% decline in mortgages since 2008 in Fresno. The Banker’s cheap mortgage was a way to stabilize capitalism and domestic demand after 1973, eventually creating a real estate bubble so big that no amount of stagnant wages over a 30-year span could ever hope to pay off that ever-greater buildup of debt. This realization hit in 2008.

Since then, Bankers have found new ways to profit. Increasingly, they help corporations who, having nowhere else to invest, take on debt to buy back their own property in the form of stocks. Between 2009 and 2018, according to the Harvard Business Review, 91% of all private sector net income on the S&P 500 – roughly $8 trillion – was spent on stock buybacks and dividends. 30% of buybacks during this time was financed with US government-backed debt. After 2020, this rate of government-funded buybacks more than doubled.²¹

With Boss and Banker gone, today homes are built on a much more brutal logic centered on the landlord. The significance of Balch lies in how he is mobilizing local capitalists and city hall leaders, who both want to increase profit and property values by helping the landlord become more like a capitalist.

This shared interest in profit shouldn’t be controversial: the government has always funded itself by capturing a fraction of capitalism’s profits – that’s what taxes are, after all. During the Boss era, the government’s role in increasing profits was managing the Boss’s inputs at scales that individual capitalists couldn’t undertake themselves. Think railroads and highways.

After the end of the Boss era, the government added more capabilities – violent capabilities which are the tools most readily on hand for Balch and landlords to use today. These tools were forged when the profit rate of factories tumbled downhill and the economic pie stopped growing at the end of the Boss era.

Between 1969 and 1976, factory shutdowns in the US eliminated 22 million jobs. Between 1979 and 1985, the US shed another 10 million jobs. Expelled from factory work, a lot of people couldn’t find a similar-quality gig: a significant portion of them didn’t have a time and place available for them in capitalism to be productive. Basically, once the Boss era died, Banker capitalism had fewer “spots” than Boss capitalism, and most of those seats were reserved for white people and a small tincture of middle class black and brown folk.

When this happened, the government expanded its input-management role. Starting in the 1970s, the government started taking on the logistics of stuff that capitalists both did need and increasingly didn’t need. The first people it turned its attention to were the first people fired from the factory: Black and brown folks.

Many Black people, excluded from the wage, locked out of the segregated suburbs, were unable to find a right place and right time for themselves within Banker capitalism. Because homes were more valuable when Black people were excluded, the Banker got invested in segregation, and the government didn’t stop this – it would have hurt profits and therefore government revenues from property taxes, after all.

If you weren’t employed, marooned in an underemployed ghetto, the government had a place for you: Prison. A whole ideology was created to rationalize this: an updated anti-Black racism. A whole government program – mass incarceration, hysteria over Black “super predators” – was jump started to create support for the lockdown. This is what the prison-industrial complex was: new laws and programs created to shuttle Black, brown infrequently employed folk out of ghettos and into the prisons based on petty crimes.

Need proof? The US prison population explodes starting in – you guessed it – 1973, smack-dead in the middle of the collapse of the factory wage and the end of the Boss era. Basically, the fall of the Boss and the rise of the Banker created a responsibility for the state to manage the literal idled human capacities leftover from the Boss era.

Mass incarceration was a revolution for the government, one of the biggest atrocities we live with every day. City police forces expanded and militarized across the country during this time, taking over the majority of city budgets, including Fresno.

In California, we built the world’s most concentrated prison system – a top-notch network of golden gulags across the San Joaquin Valley. Getting the black and brown people out of the nice Bay Area and LA cities also helped prop up the most lucrative property market in the world. And tax cuts on that property via Prop. 13 in 1978 made sure the remaining seats of capitalism, growing in value by the day, would not be taxed and redistributed to the “wrong” places.

By the 1990s, this transformation was complete. At the time, Tupac, one of the great intellectuals ever produced by California, understood this very clearly. Fresh out of prison, he called the state in California Love a “lean mean money-making machine serving fiends … Yo’ city is the bomb if yo’ city makin’ pay.” He was probably speaking of these two features: California capitalism at the turn of the millennium shed the fat as fiends; pools of hard-bodied police and pockets of valuable property were all that’s left.

The truth of Pac’s lines has only grown stronger since then. If there is a treasure to hold onto today from the last decade of social struggle, it comes here, via the Black Lives Matter movement. BLM made clear that the position of the black working class within the wage hierarchy made them vulnerable to policing and mass incarceration since the 1970s, resulting in their over-representation in the criminal legal system.

If there is something which could unite us, it is in bringing this insight into why these same police forces are now being pointed at everyone in Fresno who can’t make rent or isn’t a homeowner, or why Fresno leaders allowed the police to stomp onto the arts scene this summer. Any movement that seeks to fundamentally transform inequality in Fresno will have to transform this widening spiral of police violence into a politics of resistance.

Balch, an ex-city planner, is a testament to why this problem is Fresno’s definitive flash point. The relationship between police and property has grown stronger, the strength of one impossible without the other. Police power is now oriented on behalf of landlords who want to jack up rents and make their property more valuable. In city hall, the lines have blurred between spreadsheets and guns; the planner’s spreadsheet is filled with guns and mace orders. Heck, that’s half of the city’s budget already, right?

These hard-earned facts point to a simple reality: the police and prison system is now City Hall’s most powerful weapon to raise government revenues. It’s a much weaker tool than the factory or bank, but it’s all we got. We use all this theory to say that Balch’s takeover of Art Hop using the cops is not some glitch, nor an expression of some unique persona expressing a will to power. It was a deep act of necessity on the part of capitalists in Fresno, even if he doesn’t recognize it as such.²²

Balch, even if he thought that all this was fucked up and decided to renounce everything, could not separate all this. More generally, the planner can’t undermine the cop. The city needs the landlord to become a capitalist with the help of the cop – there’s no other option for both the government and capitalists to raise their revenues, as we’ve shown. There’s no other major source of dynamism, no other type of input-management strategy, left on hand for either of them.

A full-scale reform that did away with the present function of the police as repressive, last-resort social mediation would require a revival of the social democratic project. Maybe we could do economic growth differently, a reformer might say, so that the city could utilize the police department’s capabilities in more progressive ways, instead of homeless sweeps, evictions and other bad stuff.

Nope. With capitalism’s diminished economic resources, the government lacks the key to that door. With the Boss and Banker gone, cities have less fucks to give: there is less economic surplus on which preferences and prerogatives can be implemented, for humane homelessness policy or building adequate amounts of affordable housing, for example. Less Parks and Recreation, more Search and Destroy.²³

Once upon a time, it paid for the government and capitalists to build more housing, when a worker’s time in a factory was valuable. Whereas previously, rent was a necessary weapon to ensure that workers showed up to work the next day, needing to earn something in order to pay for the roof over their heads, today rent is used not to keep workers in cities but to push them out.

This fits into capitalism’s overall collapse era, where the capitalist world revolves less and less by providing you a living (a job) and more so by denying you a place to live (evictions, wildfires, flood), denying you a place to make a living (Balch, ICE in farmfields), and increasingly denying either life itself (health insurance, climate collapse) or entire humanities of people (the genocide in Gaza). These are where the mega-profits are made. Overall, the government’s only job in the collapse era is to make sure there are enough cops to keep the property owners and CEOs safe as they profit off this mess (like LA landlords jacking up rents as we speak).

Our intuition on why cops are a necessary tool is that cities, unable to generate economic growth at the metropolitan level like during the Boss and Banker era, must now coordinate profits at the level of neighborhoods by a beggar-thy-neighbor, zero-sum game of redistribution. This is how economic expansion in a part of a neighborhood can exist with low overall growth: layers upon layers of evictions and homeless sweeps. Today, it’s increasingly one of theft of land, of its spaces and all the existing relationships within it, that drives profit under landlord capitalism. This is what Arthop makes clear. This is what the disaster capitalism going on in LA makes clear.

For the landlord to create a nice profit in Fresno, three things need to happen, back-to-back-to-back. These are the flows that the government needs to facilitate – and what Balch is required, by history, to do. We call them the flight to safety, the flight to liquidity and the flight to quality.

Safety for new gentrifiers, via the police. This creates a potential social reservoir from which the gentrifier demand grows, allowing for near-term rents to go up. With higher rents come increased land prices at which real estate can be sold, creating more liquidity for existing property owners. This entails more quality investment opportunities for new developers to buy that land, build luxury units on it, and make rents even higher.

The three flights work at different time scales, one enabling the other: a boot-strapping of Police, Land, and Rent. The final “quality” of a neighborhood merely stands as an objectified shorthand for the compound fortifications accumulated through a chain of evictions, homeless sweeps and concentrated policing. This is the reality which traffics underneath the white-washed buzzword of making a neighborhood “investable.”

This is Fresno’s spiral of capitalism. Each era of capitalism in cities has relied on its own circuit of capitalism, a specific form of the general formula for capitalism Money-Commodity-Money Prime. The Boss used Factory-Car-Factory Prime; the Banker Money-Debt-Money Prime.

The Landlord works by a formula we’ll call Rent-Land-Rent Prime: Each stage in this formula proceeding to the next through interactions between the police and developers. Get the police to jack up rents, sell the land to developers who hope they can make rents even higher. Safety. Liquidity. Quality.

We can see this play out in the concrete operations employed by Balch after his Measure P application got rejected. It was gentrification in miniature. The public space of Art Hop, occupied as a massive public body of 15,000, was not the right kind of people for Balch’s ivory real estate dreams on Fulton. Too many tacos and trinkets, as his buddy Ostlund candidly said. Balch needs whiter, more college-educated people in Downtown. So he evicted almost everyone on Fresno’s key night, put the vendors in a shittier location on Wednesday, waiting for his pay-off.

The displaced vendors understand this logic quite clearly. Balch and the police department are pushing artists into “dilapidated, underserved areas. [These artists] then revitalize the areas with their art before people with money come in and say ‘love what you did with the place’ and then take it for themselves,” one artist told the Community Alliance. More Rent-Land-Rent-Prime, anyone?

High-Speed Rail is a weapon against the people.

Fresno’s move away, in the last 15 years, from wage-labor and debt as the foundation of the city economy to rents is decisive. Today, the market and the government are incapable of providing necessities like housing, healthcare or healthy food, capitalism surviving elsewhere by producing things that kill us and the basic habitability of the planet.

Pandemics, climate collapse, war, housing shortages, record oil profits, stock price bonanzas and gentrification exist all at once. For most city residents, they exist to be managed: swept off the streets, segregated into prisons, marginalized in ghettos and camps, extracted by landlords, denied by health insurance companies, disciplined by the police. State-supported wealth lives cheek-by-jowl with state-funded violence. The rising tide of despair serves as the driver for more police to protect property owners.

People struggle where they are, and if there’s one insight to take away from the above theoretical section, it’s to make clear that the people who exist in spaces to be rent-jacked exert a power over capitalists in this era, namely renters, street vendors and the homeless. All of Fresno’s habitable futures run through defending them from the City Hall/Balch/Police nexus.

The initiatives currently at the forefront of Fresno’s war on the poor – Balch’s move around Art Hop and Measure P, street vending ordinances and the homelessness ordinance – show that Landlord capitalism is increasingly oriented towards tightly regulating space and the flows of these people between contested neighborhoods. We analyzed the boss-banker-landlord sequence to show why this has become a necessity in a zero-sum capitalism.

We put forward as the final horizon of this manifesto that struggles which strengthen solidarity between neighborhoods in defense against rent-jacking is the horizon of social struggles for Fresno in the 21st century. Blocks of renters, camps of homeless and associations of street vendors will be the building blocks. In the near-term, a slice of these forces could align themselves to end “Why Not Wednesday”, get the old Art Hop back and cut out Balch, the Downtown Fresno Partnership and the Downtown Fresno Foundation from Measure P funding in the future.

Such efforts can’t stop there, however. It would not stop the source of this problem: the self-reproduction of landlord capitalism. The landlord can only reproduce himself within capitalism by jacking up rents, and rent-jacking will surely continue with or without Balch.

But Balch does offer one last insight for us: the landlord can’t jack up rents in a long-term way in Fresno without High-Speed Rail. More expansive forms of these struggles against rent-jacking, for example, will be rent strikes at the neighborhood level and stopping High-Speed Rail.

Simply put, whether or not High-Speed Rail gets built in Fresno will be a litmus test for the balance of forces between landlords, cops and ordinary city residents. Building it will require the disturbance of basically everything in a 2-mile radius – evictions for rent-jacking, homeless sweeping, ordinances annihilating every street vendor who stands in the way.

This is the political horizon which “Why Not Wednesday” makes clear. The agenda for city leaders is to catch up the racial make-up of their downtown with other California cities as best one can – by clearing out the brown people, along with the “tacos and trinkets,” as Ostlund put it. There is no doubt that with $250 million in state funding, there is implicit or explicit pressure on Fresno leaders from Sacramento to “clean up” the streets up so that gentrifiers can feel safe and at-home – thus attracting developers to the area.

“Let us prove therefore to the world and ourselves that we are capable of the same achievements,” anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon said about colonial governance methods. It might as well be what the Fresno City Council is ready to declare to anyone willing to listen about how their new vendor and homeless laws, as the prospect of High-Speed Rail draws near, will make the neighborhood more “investable.” “The political leader of an underdeveloped country is terror-stricken at the prospect of the long road that lies ahead. He appeals to the people and tells them: ‘Let us roll up our sleeves and get to work.’”

To be clear: we are not against the technology of High-Speed Rail. We are against the world that High-Speed Rail will create. The people who are building High-Speed rail want a downtown that is inhospitable for nearly everyone who exists there currently. TRC will not stand for projects like this, basically on first-principles of not being assholes.

Why is the politics of High-Speed Rail so unpopular? The politics of High-Speed Rail replicates the problems of landlord capitalism at a state-wide level – its rate of building coming at the the speed of stagnation itself.

California has been an effective zero-sum economy at least since 2008, funneling value from peripheral states in China and Tawain to its core cities in the Bay Area and Los Angeles via global value chains and intellectual property laws. The primacy of tech stocks and a small class of uber-workers – software engineers and product managers – for increasing wealth in the state means California is limited in its capacity to absorb immigration and service workers in ways conducive to capital, just as the end of the Boss era would predict.

Consequently, housing is not being built in the state and the pressures on the regional borders where service workers live have intensified. Since roughly 2005, lots of service workers have been pushed out of the Bay Area due to successful rent-jacking initiatives. Where Fresno meets this history is in the historically unique situation wherein the superstate of California – core for a trans-Pacific capitalist network – is differentiated with a core & periphery of its own: coastal cities and the San Joaquin Valley.

Fresno has become the fantasied resolution of a California restabilization featuring a broader recovery since 2008, lifting Fresno along with it. High-Speed Rail attempts to solve California’s immigration problem of landlord capitalism: the rail line acting as a conduit for unabsorbed workers from California’s core (the Bay Area) to arrive at the shores of California’s periphery. Fresno has become an the example of the state’s dysfunction: unable to absorb in the Bay, California is compelling Fresno to function as an absorption zone. This is what all the local real estate speculation – led by Balch, potentially funded with cash from the Qatari royal family via Dyer – is trying to capitalize on: call it the hope of a renewed, urban Caliphery. The hope of a dense bedroom community in Fresno.

This will not happen, for economic reasons. A build-out in which Fresno could be successfully reinternalized presumes not just stability but healthy capitalist accumulation for the California economic bloc: growth at a rate high enough to sustain and expand the mega-city of the Bay Area into the Valley. In the European context, Fresno would become less like Cottbus and more like Stuttgart.

Climbing out of the mud, we’ve shown, is not in the cards for Fresno. It would require the dynamism of the Boss and money spigots of the Banker. Sadly, they’ve both fled the scene. The state economy is so weak, not even a single job was added statewide over the past year-and-a-half outside of healthcare and the government, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office. All the California economy has got left in itself is sputters of bubbles and busts, its propertied elite riding the unruly waves of NVIDIA stock.

Fresno then stands on the same ground as many other powerful social movements. A new political sensibility has emerged from attempting to block large, imposed and useless infrastructural projects. People across the world have realized, much like California High-Speed Rail, that the logic of development and the basic stability of their existing lives is the primary contradiction ruling their lives. Refusing a definition of value that will never include themselves is their defining ethic. Blocking these massive infrastructures projects has thereby become a way to stop the extension of their own exclusion, and along with it a new political grasp on managing common community affairs.

In France, rural people have blocked an international airport from being built. And in Italy, thousands of residents in the Susa Valley have rose up to stop High Speed Rail from being built there as well. These residents are not tree huggers, motivated by preserving a supposedly pristine nature. The Susa Valley is just as much an altered landscape as the San Joaquin Valley; so is the inland France area being defended. These residents bring an opposition against the world that these air and rail projects are trying to create – one dictated by luxury consumption, the same genre Balch is trying to leverage with his mega-retail strip on Fulton. From France to Fresno, these projects dream of a world that has almost no place for residents already living in these key zones.

Surely a more thorough-going crisis in Fresno will be needed for the levee to break on the oppositional forces unleashed by landlord capitalism and High-Speed Rail. Maybe a recession in the next 5 years, high unemployment and inflation coupled with High-Speed Rail becoming more imminent. Rents in neighborhoods near downtown get jacked up, the rail station nearing completion alongside massive amounts of evictions and homeless sweeps for new condos and other developments led by Balch.

So, finally, one last thing. We at the TRC believe that all beautiful things have two qualities: they should be simple and true. We hope that this manifesto has made clear two beautiful things about Fresno.

First, all things must come to an end, including capitalism. The landlord lives on borrowed time in this city. The defining question of our lives will be whether or not we can bring an end to this system before it burns down the planet and any future of humanity left. We have about 10 years. Stopping High-Speed Rail would almost certainly to mark the beginning of the end of capitalism in our city.

That’s the first beautiful thing. That capitalism will die someday, and we could write in its end date, collectively. The second, related one is as follows: every one of you can say fuck you to your landlord and not pay rent.

The point of politics in Fresno seems to be how to make it so that you and your friend and everybody else you love can also flip the bird to your landlord. And then find a way to do it again and again, night after night, month after month until the landlord is run out of town and there’s nobody to ask the police to evict our neighbors anymore. Then we can call our communities truly our own.

How to do that, we don’t know yet. It’s something for everyone to take on: day by day, Balch by Balch.

How to use this

1. Send to all your friends. Also use our pamphlet which condenses this material to get people interested. Print this story out and distribute as zines or pamphlets at shops and schools. Here’s the complete version. Here’s the pamphlet.

2.

Send us documents. Especially if you have City Hall stuff, Fresno Police Department, Fresno State and its auxiliary, Fresno/Clovis Unified, minutes for hospital boards like Valley Childrens or Community Regional Medical center, or financial documents on what assets/real estate any of these leaders/institutions are invested in. Or anything else you think TRC should know about.

To do this while keeping yourself and your data safe, you need to use encryption. We use a type of encryption that allows you to publicly post encrypted messages/documents that can only be unlocked by us, who has a super-secret password to open up the messages. For now, put the documents on reddit r/Fresno. If the moderator shuts that down, we full expect Root Access Fresno to find a way to get a message board where people can anonymously post encrypted messages/documents publicly for TRC safely. To learn how to send us encrypted info that we can read, see this guide for messages here and pdfs here.

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Our next story will give the following key for this SHA256 hash:
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ID: 39b3660daf754090a03adf826e344edb091f07d664ac035c25b9394aa94552d1

Footnotes

1. Downtown Partnership Board of Directors, Minutes, June 26, 2024, pg 3.↩
2. One minor point for the Arts Council in the future – we need you to fund culture that enriches us, not use our art tax dollars to create scenery for parked cars. We at the TRC prefer our parking garages ugly and our art beautiful, not the other way around. In fact, we would prefer for parking garages, a tool of commuter gentrification, to not exist at all.↩
3. Downtown Partnership Executive Committee, Minutes, May 30, 2024, pg 3.↩
4. Ibid. (shorthand for “in the same place as the last citation”)↩
5. Ibid.↩
6. Ibid.↩
7. Downtown Partnership Board of Directors, Minutes, April 19, 2023, pg 2.↩
8. Downtown Partnership Executive Committee, Minutes, July 13, 2024, pg 2.↩
9. Downtown Partnership Board of Directors, Minutes, June 21, 2023, pg 2.↩
10. Downtown Partnership Board of Directors, Minutes, December 13, 2023, pg 3.↩
11. Downtown Partnership Annual Meeting/Board of Directors, February 21, 2024, pg 2.↩
12. Downtown Partnership Board of Directors, Minutes, April 17, 2024, pg 2.↩
13. Downtown Partnership Board of Directors, Minutes, June 26, 2024, pg 1.↩
14. Ibid.↩
15. Ibid.↩
16. Downtown Partnership Board of Directors, Minutes, June 26, 2024, pg 2. Balch also got more neutral property owners on Fulton by promising them a better street-parking system, according to DFP minutes. Downtown Partnership Executive Committee, June 11, 2024: “His tenants have told him that there is traffic congestions and other issues that he feels could be alleviated if someone was organizing the event.”↩
17. Downtown Partnership Executive Committee, Minutes, July 13, 2023, pg 4.↩
18. Downtown Partnership Executive Committee, Minutes, June 11, 2024, pg 2.↩
19. The media playbook for Fresno’s War on the Poor is straight from the Nixon Administration’s War on Drugs. Per John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s top architect of the War on Drugs: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the [Vietnam] war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” Read that quote with every new “public safety” initiative put forward by the city around street vending, Arthop, and the homeless laws. Does City Hall know they are lying about the danger? Of course they do.↩
20. Racial capitalism hit overdrive in Fresno during the pandemic. In 2019, for the first time in Fresno’s history, the percentage of white and non-white folks holding mortgages was identical. After the pandemic, they diverged by 20%, according to the US Census.

    This follows a stunning change: white and nonwhite incomes were identical before the pandemic, in 2018 and 2019. But by 2021, brown people’s wages were roughly the same. White people’s average and median shot up by 52%.

    This comes despite average incomes from college and non-college people being roughly stable. In fact, non-college people’s incomes rose faster during the pandemic than college-degree holders. Fresno has become more polarized by race since the pandemic, with existing gaps in income by education not budging. In sum, it pays increasing dividends to be white in Fresno, but not college-educated. The ramifications of this for gentrification remain to be seen.↩

21. During the pandemic, the US government bailed out $6.3 trillion worth of corporate debt via the CARES Act. Banks have a new, smaller unity with American households today. Households making over $200,000 own 93% of the stock market as of 2024. This top 10% slice of America was the major beneficiary under Biden: it accounted for 60% of new household wealth generated since 2019.↩
22. Journalists: heed this word at your own risk. If all you do is reify the denials of politicians and the press conferences from their PR departments, you are nothing but the lapdogs of the government. This is exactly what your failures to understand the death of Art Hop shows.↩
23. Again, Pac understood this issue: “Only in Cali where we riot, not rally, to live and die.” There is no amount of rallying which will yield adequate reforms in this era of mass death within capitalism.↩