anielle Bergstrom couldn’t stay away from Fresno. She had lived and worked there as a city planner after college before enrolling at Cornell University to pursue a master’s in regional planning. After earning her degree, even as the city and its pressing inequities kept a grip on her imagination, the 25-year-old landed a job with the Oakland-based social justice nonprofit PolicyLink. For the next three-plus years, she crisscrossed the country—analyzing the community impact of a new light-rail line in Minnesota’s Twin Cities, lobbying Capitol Hill for better housing protections for low-income renters, jetting from Seattle to Providence to Detroit. But the whole time, Fresno, a city often
