I Was in the Rooms Where Fresno’s Housing Wins Got Built. My Opponent Wasn’t

What the public record shows

On May 13, 2021, the Fresno City Council adopted Resolution 2021-132, creating the Eviction Protection Program. The votes in favor came from councilmembers Arias, Esparza, Karbassi, Maxwell, Soria, and Chavez. Councilmember Bredefeld recused. City Clerk Yvonne Spence certified the vote.

My opponent was not on the City Council on May 13, 2021. She was a Trustee at the State Center Community College District.

The program officially launched on July 27, 2021, funded with an initial $750,000 from the City’s federal rent-assistance allocation. Local reporting at the time credited Council Vice President Nelson Esparza and Councilmember Tyler Maxwell as the lead sponsors. My opponent was not on the City Council.

On September 29, 2022, the Council adopted Resolution 2022-218 to reaffirm the program’s continuance. The votes in favor came from councilmembers Soria, Karbassi, Arias, Maxwell, Chavez, Bredefeld, and Esparza. My opponent was not on the City Council.

My opponent was appointed to fill the district 1 seat on December 9, 2022, and sworn in on December 14, 2022—eighteen months after the Eviction Protection Program she now claims to have “passed” was already up and running.

The vote rolls are public. The City Clerk’s records are public. The City of Fresno’s own records of council membership are public.

How the Eviction Protection Program actually got built

Here’s the part that doesn’t show up in a campaign mailer.

For years before May 13, 2021, a coalition of working Fresno families, faith leaders, tenant advocates, legal services attorneys, and community organizers built the Eviction Protection Program from the ground up. I helped establish that coalition and co-led its efforts as President and CEO of Fresno Building Healthy Communities.

The coalition was powered by dedicated organizations including Faith in the Valley, Central California Legal Services, the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel, and many others.

We knocked on doors in the South Fresno neighborhoods hit hardest by unlawful evictions. We sat in living rooms with families being threatened with displacement for simply reporting code violations. We documented testimonies from people too scared to speak in public. We organized tenants, prepared them, drove them downtown to City Hall, and watched them tell their stories to a council chamber full of people who had never set foot inside a single-room occupancy hotel.

We did the research, drafted proposals, met with city attorneys, and spent months debating the structure of the program. We pushed back when the City wanted to make it smaller. We pushed back again when the City wanted to means-test it into irrelevance. We won a program that protects any tenant in the City of Fresno facing an unlawful eviction — regardless of income, regardless of immigration status.

And the Eviction Protection Program was one of five

The EPP wasn’t a one-off. It was one of at least five major housing-policy wins that coalition organizing delivered in the City of Fresno during my tenure leading Fresno Building Healthy Communities. Every one of them predates my opponent’s appointment to the Fresno City Council.

• 2015 — Blighted Vacant Building Ordinance. We pushed the City to require absentee owners of boarded-up properties to register them—to restore Fresno’s older neighborhoods by encouraging property owners to improve their properties and improve property values in surrounding neighborhoods.
• 2017 — Rental Housing Improvement Act. After the Fresno Bee’s “Living in Misery” investigation documented decades of inhumane conditions at Summerset Apartments and across our city’s rental stock, we organized to hold negligent landlords accountable. The City Council passed it.
• 2021 — Local Housing Trust Fund. We helped establish the dedicated fund that today supports first-time homebuyer assistance, senior housing, and multi-family housing development across the city.
• 2021 — Emergency Rental Assistance Program. We secured $15.8 million of City of Fresno COVID-19 relief funding for direct rental assistance to families impacted by the pandemic.
• 2021 — Eviction Protection Program. The one my opponent now claims as her own.

Alongside the policy work, we put something else in working families’ hands. Between 2020 and 2024, through Fresno Building Healthy Communities, our COVID-19 Equity Project delivered $2.5 million in direct financial assistance to Fresno County families—to pay rent, mortgages, utilities, groceries, and the bills that didn’t stop when the pandemic stopped people from going to work.

That’s the difference between attending a ribbon-cutting and doing the work.

The questions my opponent hasn’t answered

Voters deserve a fair accounting. And the public record raises questions her campaign mailer doesn’t answer:

Where was Councilmember Perea on Item 26-277? When the City of Fresno’s 2025 Housing Element Annual Progress Report came before the Council—showing that roughly four out of every five new homes built in Fresno last year were priced for above-moderate-income households, and only about one in five was affordable to working families—the Councilmember had no questions and no comments during the staff presentation. Why?

Where was Councilmember Perea on rent affordability? While she has been in office, Fresno has led the nation in the fastest-rising rent. A March 2025 study reported by The Business Journal ranked Fresno first among 80 U.S. cities, with rental costs rising 32.6 percent in 2024—more than double the increase of the second-ranked city. Her response on the dais was Item 2CC: a motion to study corporate ownership of homes. A study? Our family budgets are being squeezed by rising costs. We need solutions.

Whose interests is Councilmember Perea actually delivering for? Every voter in District 31 can pull up my opponent’s campaign-finance filings on the Fair Political Practices Commission website and see for themselves who is funding her run. Then ask the question the mailer doesn’t: whose priorities show up first when the votes are counted?

The contrast is the answer.