Fresno is now the largest city in California’s Central Valley, the lifeblood of California, whose fertile fields feed the country. But in the majority-minority city of half a million, those riches are not equally divided. Eighty years after Helming published his report, the gulf between white, black, and brown residents remains embedded in the city’s geography. “Once you have a group of people segregated into a place you can take resources from that place,” said Amber Crowell, a Fresno State sociologist. “It creates a monster of social inequality that falls along racial lines, then it recreates itself. The boundaries are put in place and it automates itself from there.”

In the exclusive enclaves of north Fresno, life expectancy is 90 years. The neighborhoods are some of California’s richest, on par with parts of Silicon Valley and Beverly Hills. In the city’s south and southwest, Fresnans live, on average, 20 years less. There’s more concentrated poverty there than nearly anywhere else in America.

“We’ve done a very good job at sectioning off the poor,” said Matthew Jendian, chair of Fresno State’s sociology department. “We do that better than almost any other place in the country. And it’s not by accident.”

Segregation here is older than the city itself, dating to its post-Gold Rush-era founding.

Settled by homesteaders and land speculators, Fresno developed around a railroad station in a pattern so common in the rapidly industrializing country that it has since become a cliché: the poorest residents, and residents who were not white, were forced to live, literally, on the other side of the tracks. At an 1873 town meeting, Fresno’s white residents agreed not to rent, sell or lease any land east of the railroad tracks, where they and their families lived, to Chinese immigrants—many of whom built the very tracks that cut them off from the rest of Fresno.

This set in motion “the creation of a segregated ghetto that has lasted to the present day,” according to a paper by Ramón Chacón, a historian who grew up in west Fresno and researched racism and segregation in his hometown. Chacón, who died in 2017, wrote about the early, and often violent, segregation of the Chinese population to neighborhoods in southwest Fresno. In one essay, Chacón reported that, in 1893, white rioters chased 300 Chinese workers from Fresno farms back to the city’s Chinatown, using “blows and pistol shots.”

Over the next 25 years, the city grew quickly and attracted Mexican, Japanese, Armenian, and Italian immigrants, who were also forced to live in southwest Fresno. In 1918, a California state commission report titled “Fresno’s Immigration Problem” said that nearly all of the city’s “foreign born” lived in the “Foreign Quarter” on the west side. That same year, Fresno’s first-ever general plan formalized existing residential segregation by reserving the southern quadrants of the city for polluting, foul-smelling industrial businesses, and affordable housing. The zoning rules established a pattern that persists today: Fresno’s poorest and most vulnerable residents were consigned to the same neighborhoods as the city’s dirtiest factories.