As we wait to see if there will be an application for a peripheral innovation center in Davis, one thing the city is doing at the next council meeting is creating an inventory of existing space for economic development.
Staff explains that at the September 15, 2018 Goal Setting workshop, “one of the focus items selected was the preparation of an inventory of space for economic development.” These sites are undeveloped and commercially zoned. With the exception of a few cites owned by the city, by the university, most of the sites are privately owned.
There are current applications with the city for converting two of the sites. One is at 2555 Research Park Drive – Plaza 2555 – which would rezone the property from commercial to a multifamily 
apartment.
The other is located at 1770 Research Park Drive and is the application by the University Research Park and Fulcrum to take the vacant property there, retain the commercial ground floor and apply for a mixed-use development with multifamily residential uses over the office on the ground floor.
Staff writes: “The City has discussed various sites with property owners and interested parties but has no control over any parcels with the exception of the City owned parcel mentioned above. Staff learns of potential development of vacant commercial parcels by way of ownership/potential user inquiry, development applications, and through periodic staff outreach to landowners.”
Staff notes that a number of the parcels are quite limited in size – two acres or less. Some are held by companies with the expectation of using the parcels for future business expansion needs.
They write, “not all properties on the inventory are actively being marketed as available.”
The inventory totals 124.22 acres of vacant and privately held commercially zoned land within the city limits.
This would not include the property at 3820 Chiles Road which has a current building but seeks to demolish and redevelop the parcel as residential. It also does not include city owned property, commercially viable property outside of the city limits, or those properties that may be zoned commercially but underutilized and therefore pose potential redevelopment opportunities like the PG&E corporation yard for example.
The analysis here is viewed as “the starting point for preparing analysis of what vacant commercially designated lands offer in potential commercial square footage available for economic development. Staff would like to return to Council with an in-depth discussion of this vacant commercial land inventory in the context of the City and the region, the potential uses and theoretic commercial square footage capacity of the undeveloped land, and recommendations for next steps on using this and other key information to build an economic development strategy that aligns with the goals of the Council.”
Looking at the inventory of 124.51 acres, the largest property is just north of Sutter Davis Hospital on John Jones Rd – near where the Davis Innovation Center would have gone. That is 27.48 acres, take that out and there are less than 100 available acres.
The next largest is the property along Chiles and Cowell where there was briefly talk of a business or small R&D park. That is 14.81 acres.
As you can see on the map – a lot of the available spots line up with the Innovation Corridor identified in a previous article on the Vanguard – a number of properties that are aligned across Second St that could be still have some build out and a number of properties along the frontage road south of I-80 include some near the University Research Park.
However, size is a problem. Only ten of the properties are larger than six acres.
As we pointed out in December, with our analysis of Commercial versus housing needs, with respect to 3820 Chiles Road, which is not included in the 124 acres, “one reason the site is not viable for office/R&D/Flex development is that it is not located in a larger innovation or research park or district, such as the Interland Research Park (Now University Research Park) or along 2nd Street. The City will be better able to attract new office/R&D/Flex users in available space in these existing or new innovation park/ districts.”
The developer at Chiles found that most commercial interests “are simply not interested in developing a 5 to 7 acre site for R&D.”
Instead they found “R&D and office tenants prefer to co-locate with similar uses and with service providers in a “campus” environment.”
Therein lies the problem. According to this account, there are just four properties in town that are larger than eight acres and zoned commercial: the John Jones Road location, the Chiles and Cowell Location, one of the lots on Second St, and one on Faraday which is right behind Second Street.
There is a fifth property that is 7.81 acres on Faraday as well.
It is worth noting that five of the properties right along Second St are adjacent to each other (20-24) – that is roughly 27 acres total, but that land will be difficult to develop as it is behind Target and contains the Frontier Fertilizer Superfund Site.
The bottom line – the map really paints the accurate picture. We are really looking at some potential development along Second Street, we could argue that there are three, maybe four larger properties in town that could develop some sort of Commercial and Economic Development – but there are still small and one of them at least has serious challenges to overcome (superfund site) in order to do so.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
Clarification on the 27 acres on John Jones – I’m told that that site is reserved for Sutter-Davis expansion and would likely not be available for development. So the real commercial possibilities are smaller than my initial analysis even suggested.
Assembling the parcels along Second St. have added costs compared to a single large parcel. I previously summarized a study showing that the cost of assembling parcels adds 15-40% to land costs. (I’m still not listed as an author in the Archives, so I can’t find the article easily.) That would be a significant impediment to developing that stretch as a campus.
Interesting. So it really looks like there is exactly one parcel in town that could be an innovation park of sorts. And it’s only 15 acres – so marginal at best.
An unanswered question is which of these parcels, as well at those on Research Park Dr, are owned separately or by a single owner. The latter situation would make combining them less costly.
The point about aggregation of use is good – the largest you claim has that caveat, yes – but there’s also the issue of its transport impacts: I’d really like to know where everyone goes to lunch, and how they get to work, but based on sparse if regular bus service to many of these areas and lack of parked bikes, I’m not really sure what’s really left to learn.
That said, another layer of this image with further aggregation including existing developed and under-developed would be useful. It’s also easy to see that nearly all of these places are very close to I-80 and its mostly missing Linear Urban Forest, i.e. the trees-and-shrubs-as-bread sandwich starting with Nishi 2.0, or other progressive ideas such as a partial cover for the highway.