Amazon will be operating in a mega-warehouse currently under construction on Marks and Nielsen avenues in west Fresno, making the online retail giant the first tenant named for a $100 million industrial project that broke ground last year. The announcement lands as Fresno keeps drawing attention as a landing spot for Californians priced out of Los Angeles and the Bay Area, where average home prices dwarf the roughly $400,000 price tag reported for Fresno.
Westgate Warehouse Takes Shape in West Fresno
The Scannell Westgate Industrial Center is described as a $100 million warehouse project, and Amazon is the first tenant named for the site, according to The Fresno Bee. By the time Scannell Properties broke ground on the project on July 30, 2025, the plan had been scaled back to three buildings totaling about 833,000 square feet, the newspaper reported. It is not yet clear how many jobs or what type of operation Amazon will bring to the Westgate site, the Bee reported, leaving the scope of the facility's local employment impact an open question for now.
Scannell Properties, described by The Business Journal as a national developer, broke ground on the industrial park Wednesday morning back in July 2025, more than four years after the project was first floated. Amazon is not new to the city — the company already runs at least two other warehouse campuses in Fresno, including an 855,000-square-foot fulfillment center in the southwest part of town, per the same Fresno Bee report.
Coastal Exodus Fuels Fresno's Housing Squeeze
The warehouse expansion comes as Fresno absorbs a wave of newcomers fleeing higher-cost parts of the state. Since 2021, the city has seen “a lot of relocation from the Bay Area and Los Angeles,” Fresno Mayor Jerry Dyer told the Los Angeles Times. Dyer also said new residents under 40 have been moving downtown, a shift he described as not having happened in decades.
That relocation boom has boosted demand for housing, with supply falling behind, according to the Los Angeles Times report — a dynamic that has pushed rents and home prices upward even as Fresno remains cheaper than the coast. U-Haul migration data covering June 2025 through June 2026 found Fresno among the top metro destinations for Gen Z movers, alongside San Francisco, Bakersfield, Houston and Dallas, the same report noted.
A Statewide Pattern Beyond One City
Fresno's growth fits into a broader statewide outflow. About 215,000 more people left California than arrived between July 1, 2024, and the following year, according to figures from the state Department of Finance cited by the Times, while nearly 100,000 more people left Los Angeles County for other states than arrived in 2025. Millennials leaving Los Angeles were more likely than older movers to stay within California, with San Francisco, Bakersfield, Sacramento and Riverside also ranking among their top destinations, per the same Times analysis.
Net domestic migration in San Francisco County was close to zero during the period examined, and the Times reported the same held true for Kern and Fresno counties — a nuance that complicates a simple narrative of Fresno booming purely off coastal flight. Industrial demand has been building for years regardless: ABC30 reported that Fresno had just a 1% vacancy rate for industrial space back in 2020, underscoring how tight the warehouse market already was before Westgate broke ground.
City Housing Rules Still a Work in Progress
Fresno has also been adjusting local housing policy in an effort to speed construction. A city legislative agenda item shows that at a June 19, 2025 adoption hearing, the Fresno City Council voted to remove ministerial-approval components from a proposed housing ordinance while retaining provisions allowing office-to-dwelling conversions and new residential uses on vacant or underused property, according to the city's own legislative record. The full scope of what survived that revision was not fully detailed in the available city documentation.
Data tracked by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis offers a longer view of the region's housing trajectory, hosting an all-transactions house price index for the Fresno metropolitan area. The Fed's companion data on median listing prices per square foot cautions that figures released since October 2022 are not directly comparable to earlier releases and that all the data remain subject to revision — a reminder that even well-sourced housing statistics carry some uncertainty as Fresno's growth story continues to unfold.
