The traffic concerns that have emerged along Mace – whether part of the overall traffic problems along the I-80 corridor or generated by structural changes along the southern part of Mace – have led some people (probably already inclined to oppose an innovation center) to speculate that any thought of a Mace Ranch Innovation Center should be shelved due to the traffic problems.
Given what we know about Davis politics, the traffic problems along Mace Boulevard, whatever their cause, are a cause for concern and will impact the likelihood of a successful Measure R vote.
One needs to look no further than the vote in 2016 on Nishi, where concerns about traffic along Richards Boulevard, even with a viable plan to mitigate those traffic concerns, led in part to the narrow defeat of the project at that time. Going back further, one can see that traffic concerns at Pole Line and Covell were among the chief causes of the large defeat for Covell Village in 2005.
Does that mean that we should forget about MRIC? If only it were that easy. As I will argue here, we really can’t forget about MRIC – and that behooves us to address the current traffic situation on Mace, as well as address future impacts.
The first problem here is that the city is in grave need of new revenue sources. A bit of irony here is that one of the reasons the city has sought out grant funding like the funding for this roadway is that we simply lack the funds to be able to afford to maintain our roads. While I believe that the main factor here is external to the city, the extent to which Mace Blvd.’s re-design is contributing to this problem is emblematic of a city that lacks revenue sources.
We could walk through a variety of statistics from the infrastructure needs and funding gap to the lack of per capita sales tax revenue and come to the conclusion that the city needs economic development as a key additional means for revenue generation.
The second problem, as we have analyzed here, is that the city has limited available commercial space – and once we analyze those 100 to 140 acres of nominally available space, the functional amount of space in the near term shrinks to less than 50 acres.
Of course if we intend to continue with business as usual, that might be enough to last us a few decades, but if our intent is to expand our economic development to build a new revenue base, we need more space.
Third and finally, there just are not alternative locations for an innovation center at this time. Some will point out that there was a proposal for an innovation center along Highway 113. That is true, but the developers for that site have since taken their project to Woodland, a few miles up the road.
Going beyond that, it is not clear where you would even locate an innovation center, given the constraints of land ownership, the realities of land use policies in Davis, and the need for locating the center along transit lines and near major highways.
Is there a realistic alternative to the MRIC site at this point? It is something that the council is clearly going to need to consider, for a whole host of reasons. Given traffic problems in general throughout the city on Friday afternoons, and to a lesser extent on Thursdays, it is not clear that any location in the city would be free of such concerns.
At this point, MRIC seems to be the most likely location, assuming the developers come forward with another project – and if that is the case, planning is going to become really important.
The first thing that needs to clearly happen is we need to figure out a way to reduce the current impacts. Again, it seems clear that not all of the problems here are caused by the redesign. That fact actually does not really help with concerns about a new project along Mace.
The Waze problem is really, but also probably, part of the story as well. Another problem is that there simply is not sufficient capacity along I-80 to accommodate additional traffic, especially when some of that traffic late in the week is not simply commuting home from work, but traveling to go skiing or otherwise going to the mountains.
Is this even something we can fix, without a regional solution that either reconfigures I-80 so that it doesn’t expand to five lanes and then contract down to three lanes right in the middle of Davis? Or expand the causeway to four lanes to avoid the bottleneck effect?
The second factor is addressing the impact of MRIC. It is easy to look at MRIC as adding a ton of traffic, but it is important to remember that the build out for such projects would be over a 20- to 50-year period, so it is not like a housing development where the traffic impacts would be early in the process. This would slowly ramp up traffic over time, but we might not feel the effects for five to ten years at least – hopefully giving us time to address other concerns.
Second, I know there is an assumption that there will be housing on the site, but the last time I talked with the developers and city officials, that did not seem likely. I, of course, would and have argued that having housing on the site, if structured properly, would reduce the need for off-site commuting and reduce the need for employees to drive on I-80 after work, but those arguments seem to fall on deaf ears of those who argue there is no way to ensure that the employees will live on site and that the real purpose of this project is to build housing under the guise of economic development.
Given the complicating factor of housing, it seemed at least before this issue arose that housing would not be part of this proposal.
But, if not housing, how do we address traffic impacts? This is the challenge that we had with Nishi and will be a key challenge here. Clearly this project needs to be heavily transit-oriented to work and that will be complicated.
The current situation along Mace Blvd., whatever the cause, is going to make it far more difficult for MRIC to come forward. One of the keys for successful Measure R votes is limited impacts on near neighbors and overall traffic flow. Even with a $10 million pledge by the developers of Nishi, it was not enough to overcome concerns with the traffic impact.
What it does mean is that any proposal is going to require a very good transportation plan and regional buy-in from SACOG (Sacramento Area Council of Governments) and other agencies to make it work. There is no guarantee that even a good plan will be enough to overcome traffic concerns.
This is going to make a challenging proposal even more challenging, but my argument here is that we really lack a lot of good alternatives. If we allow our concerns about additional traffic impacts to drive our public policy here, we are then stuck in a position where we have no clear outlet for economic development and thus no clear fix for revenue generation.
In the long run, I think that is a bigger problem than the current traffic impacts.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
To the substance of the article … What is the extent of the “mess”? Other than during peak hours on Thursday/ Friday, is there a problem? I get uncomfortable when we use terms like “mess” apparently that are so profound that the word needs to be CAPITALIZED, without defining or quantifying the problem.
I don’t expect the voters will trust that the City has a “viable plan” to solve Mace traffic while they are sitting in Mace gridlock anymore then they did on Nishi when you said the City had a viable plan while drivers wre stuck on Richards Blvd traffic trying to get through the tunnel.
It doesn’t matter if someone says the city has a viable plan, it matters if the voters think there is a viable plan. David’s opinion is that it was viable. I tend to agree. You disagree clearly.
What I have provided is simply a observation that voters do not trust the Vanguard’s prognostications of “proposed” traffic improvements. Why would they? The Vanguard has never offered a shred of objective evidence to substantiate its opinions.
Let’s just discuss the issues. It doesn’t matter if it’s the Vanguard’s point or the developer’s point or the city’s point – the thing that matters is whether you agree or disagree with it. Bottom line here – can we design an innovation park that addresses traffic concerns or is any proposal going to be doomed?
Unless the City can solve the traffic MESS (intentionally all capitalized) on Mace they admittedly at least partially created themselves, I believe any attempt to get MRIC passed will fail at the polls
Huh? WTF? So are you saying if the City just had more tax money they could have solved the Mace traffic problem they created by their own lousy design. This defies logic. Vanguard readers and Davis voters do see that, don’t they?
You missed Greg Rowe’s point that the city was bound on design by the need for grant money?
Alan: If the “unstated goal” of obtaining the SACOG-administered grant was primarily to get the road repaved, I wonder if that would be a misuse of funds?
It would be interesting to know what portion of the cost is due to road repaving (vs. “improvements”), and whether or not the city could have used the funds that it contributed toward this project directly for road repaving, instead. (Thereby leaving out the unpopular “improvements”.)
Ron: The goal of rehabilitating the roads was a stated goal: “First, they wished to rehabilitate the street. Staff noted in their 2016 report: “PCI score varies from 16 to 45 as of 2013 and deteriorates at a rate of 2‐3 points per year.””
Thanks. Whether or not its “stated” on a staff report would not necessarily negate my question. Are the SACOG-distributed funds intended to be used for road maintenance?
Also, what stipulations are attached to the funds that the city itself contributed?
It’s important to remember that research parks like The Vanguard is pushing are just “fields of schemes” that don’t deliver what they promise.
From the Chronicle of Higher Education, 11/18/2018, “Enough With All the Innovation”
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Enough-With-All-the-Innovation/245044
“Marc Levine, an economic historian at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, has studied the economic effects of university investment in innovation and entrepreneurship programs and found that there is little data to justify all the spending. Outside of the few examples of academe-to-industry synergy that most institutions dutifully cite as aspirations — Silicon Valley and Stanford, Boston’s Route 128 tech corridor and Harvard and MIT, and North Carolina’s Research Triangle — there’s scant evidence to connect these investments with local job growth or even increased university revenue.
If the evidence for the economic value of entrepreneurship initiatives is so scant, and the crises of tuition, student debt, and class size so urgent, why do so many universities keep throwing money at the innovation chimera? One answer is that administrators, like most people, aren’t particularly innovative. They respond to trends. Think about it: What could be less innovative now than founding yet another academic center for innovation and entrepreneurship?”
Marc Levine who is the director of the Center for Economic Development at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is the foremost expert on research/business/“innovation” parks who has done the most comprehensive studies of them and their lack of economic development impact. It is interesting that The Vanguard —- which has recently proclaimed the need to pay attention to “science” when it comes to public policy —- ignores these studies.
The Vanguard also fails to mention that a very large proportion of the projected tax revenue for MRIC would come from the very small proportion of unrelated retail uses and hotel development on the site. Realistic projections for actual research park/“innovation” center tax revenues are low, and the amount of such development would have to be massive to make any kind of impact on the City budget.
On what basis do define “the foremost expert”? I believe you posted Levine’s “The False Promise of the Entrepreneurial University” previously, and I reviewed it, finding a number of serious methodological issues. It’s not possible to draw any conclusions from that study as it has a number of selectivity biases and fails to account for key econometric issues. We can’t put any stock into that study.
Richard: tell me somebody else who has studied the (lack of) economic development inpact of research parks more than Levine.
Your earlier comments on his work were not credible Simply citing yourself now is not credible either .
I reviewed a different article of that period, but I have a comment on the 2009 article separately in this thread.
Richard McCann: does this soumd familiar to you?
https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Better-Formula-for-Economic/125441/
“Build a magnificent technology park next to a research university; provide incentives for chosen businesses to locate there; add some venture capital. That is the common recipe for harnessing higher education and industry to spur economic growth as prescribed by management consultants touting the “cluster theory” developed by Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter.
…Regional planners and some academics get very defensive when asked to produce evidence of cluster theory’s success.“
If you really want to dig into the literature on the subject, the following relates to research on whether the supposed “synergy” in research parks actually provides a boost to the firms that locate within them. (This is, of course, a different matter than analysis about whether research parks are a viable economic development engine for communities. But it is still interesting).
“The academic literature on science parks has grown substantially over recent decades but offers very mixed results in relation to their effects on innovation, growth and job creation, partly because of the theoretical and methodological difficulties of assessing this ( Hobbs, Link, & Scott, 2016). In summarising this evidence, we drew in particular on the recent annotated literature review produced by Hobbs et al. (2016) and which reviewed more than 80 empirical, theoretical and case study research studies on science parks between the late 1980s and 2016. This literature suggests mixed evidence from matched pairs of firms located on and off science parks in terms of growth, with some finding positive effects ( Siegel, Westhead, & Wright, 2003;Westhead & Batstone, 1999) while others find no effects ( Ferguson & Olofsson, 2004;Lamperti, Mavilia, & Castellini, 2017;Liberati, Marinucci, & Tanzi, 2016). …”
The last paragraph in the 2nd article Rik cited (https://www.chronicle.com/article/A-Better-Formula-for-Economic/125441/) is a very good summary of the article
“There is nothing to prevent there being many Silicon Valleys and nothing to stop most regions in the world from innovating. The focus just has to change from investing in real estate to investing in people.“
So everyone agrees with Marc Levine in the field?
Why would anyone care about the University’s revenue? The purpose of expanding our commercial space in town is to improve the City’s revenue. Any claim that new businesses won’t create new jobs is beyond silly.
The Chronicle of Higher Education is a University focused newspaper, not a peer-reviewed journal.
Mark West: you are missing the point and have not followed up on the actual findings of the literature on the subject. . Research parks/“innovation” centers are overhyped in terms of their actual economic development impact. Many are reliant on the largesse of educational institutions to remain viable. The private ones are even less viable.
Rik Keller: I am not missing the point, you oppose development and will say anything to support your position. UCD is a virtual goldmine of commercial opportunity for the City, yet we consistently fail to capture that opportunity due to a lack of commercial space. There is nothing ‘overhyped’ about that reality.
Mark West: I oppose field of schemes pie-in-the sky plans that are not connected to reality. Look at what the studies and data show.
It is fascinating to me how someone who has been provided an opportunity to have a career and find an appropriate place to live is so willing to work to prevent others from having those same opportunities. The reality here, Rik, is that you use the ‘pie-in-the-sky’ descriptor (among many other examples) to push your agenda against creating opportunities for others. There is nothing pie-in-the-sky about the City’s shortage of commercial space and the resulting lack of business development, they are both simple realities that we need to address.
Mark West: it is fascinating to me that you are pushing an economic development strategy that has been a failure in most places. And that you characterize someone opposed to snake oil schemes as being against jobs for other people.
What ‘snake-oil’ scheme am I pushing, Rik?
I’m calling for expanding our commercial sector in order to create opportunities for residents, not pushing any particular scheme. Contrary to your rhetoric, you have not presented a single bit of evidence that demonstrates that economic development doesn’t work, or that expanding our commercial sector won’t bring in new revenues to the City while at the same time creating jobs. You can’t present that evidence because it is contrary to economic reality. The real question then is not ‘if we should do it,’ but rather, ‘how we should do it?’ MRIC may not be the best approach, but it may well be the only approach available to us thanks to the false promise known as Measure J/R. Past decisions have consequences, in this case, by limiting our options for the future. Yet, you oppose even those few opportunities while never presenting alternatives.
Mark West: for some reason you are ignoring the literature I’ve cited that shows that research parks are a boondoggle. That’s the economic reality.
Mark West: Have you read Levine? Dud you come across this conclusion?:
”Local economic development is a public policy field with a checkered history, prone to fad chasing and a “herd mentality” among decision-makers and often dominated by powerful business interests. Over the past three decades, for example, despite overwhelming evidence from academic studies that such projects yield little community economic benefit, cities and states have invested billions in convention centers and sports stadiums as “engines” of local economic development. In many ways, the entrepreneurial university is the “next new thing” in this long line of oversold economic development fixes.”
MRIC is being pitched to us by failed snake oil salesmen like Barry Broome (who left Phoenix after a terrible track record of delivering actual economic development) as this exact kind of university/private business enterprise.
Have you read the Brookings Institute studies: https://www.brookings.edu/innovation-districts/
Once again, this is an argument against tax subsidies, not economic development.
We have businesses that want to build and/or expand here but have no room for them to do so. No need for tax subsidies just appropriately zoned land.
Mark West: the research consistently shows the same thing regardless if subsidies are involved are not (and even research parks that are propped up by subsidies don’t have economic development impacts.)
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/46454449_Do_Science_Parks_Generate_Regional_Economic_Growth_An_Empirical_Analysis_of_their_Effects_on_Job_Growth_and_Venture_Capital
“Agglomerations, or “clusters” of industries, and especially of high-technology industries, can be major sources of economic growth. Policy makers therefore often search for ways to catalyze such clusters. A popular approach is to establish a science or research park in the hopes that it will attract companies and fuel regional economic growth. In this paper I assemble a county-level panel dataset to explore the effects of science parks on job growth and on venture capital. Non-parametric and econometric analysis reveals no positive effect of science parks on regional development overall. In other words, while success stories do exist, the analysis suggests that successes are the exception rather than the rule. Thus, policies intended to promote cluster development by subsidizing science or research parks are unlikely to be effective.”
And https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2015/08/the-faux-field-of-dreams-if-you-build-a-university-research-park-they-may-not-come/
“These assertions, by the way, are not based on conjecture. They’re backed up by academic studies and empirical evidence that show no causal link between a university’s “entrepreneurial” activity and local economic development. Examples of failed research campuses include Innovista at the University of South Carolina, UT-San Antonio’s Texas Research Park, and the Maryland Science and Technology Center in Bowie, Maryland.
Officials in those cases promised thousands of jobs and economic stimulation. Instead, the projects failed to grow their local economies. Hundreds of millions of dollars were wasted on what ultimately turned out to be glorified office space.”
ANOTHER 2004 study!!!
“Examples of failed research campuses include Innovista at the University of South Carolina, UT-San Antonio’s Texas Research Park, and the Maryland Science and Technology Center in Bowie, Maryland.”
Examples of successful ones: Atlanta, North Carolina, Boston, Seattle, St Louis and many others.
Rik Keller: How does anything you have posted relate to the need to expand our local commercial tax base? How does it relate to the lack of properly zoned land needed to allow our local companies to expand?
You are using data from large, subsidized projects located elsewhere to argue against our local reality. Your ‘evidence’ is not relevant as it says nothing about our local conditions and the small size of the proposed projects. The only nexus is the use of similar marketing terms…woohoo!
Please, Rik Keller, tell us your proposal for making Davis fiscally sustainable. What are your alternatives to commercial development?
Mark West:
The first step is to not listen to the snake oil salespeople. Your idea that we should essentially just do anything that has the faint whiff of “economic development” is irresponsible.
As fur your other questions: Davis already has a housing deficiency for current workers. Why do we want to provide “economic development” for commuters from other areas? We should focus on providing actual workforce housing rather than projects for rich students & seniors that have a pittance thrown in for a small percentage of low-income units.
Do we actually have a lack of commercially-zoned land? You provide no evidence to support this claim. And indeed, the data we do have shows the opposite: there is a multiple-decade supply.
Finally, I presented detailed documentation showing that research/business parks don’t provide the economic development benefits that their supporters claim. Much of the literature even shows no substantial performance benefit to business co-locating in parks.
This is true even of the ones that are subsidized, much less the ones that aren’t. What we will likely see is a proposal that includes hotel and retail uses (if not housing also) which will be needed to make a project financially viable.
Incidentally, the hotel/retail uses will also produce a large proportion of the city tax revenue for the project because the office/research center uses are weak tax revenue generators. The size of the research/office component will have to be astronomical to even make a reasonable dent in the City’s budget.
Rik Keller: You made a number of statements about what we should not do, but you have yet to describe an alternative to economic development for meeting the City’s fiscal needs. You are, however, quite adept at sayin’ ‘no.’ It is good to have at least one talent…
Davis does have a housing deficiency and the way to address that is to build more housing, which you oppose. I want to expand our commercial sector in part to create good jobs for our residents. Doing so will reduce VMT, not increase it.
This claim has been debunked as utter nonsense so I won’t waste time on it. I’m confident that Jim Gray can provide you with the details if you are truly interested.
You linked to a couple of old studies and quoted conclusions that didn’t even match your own claims, let alone address our local issues. Show us a study that says that economic development doesn’t create revenues for the city…You can’t…
Appropriately designed business parks following current ‘best practices’ include hotels, workforce housing, and local retail. All aspects will add to the revenues of the City.
‘Back of the envelope’ calculation done a few years ago suggested that we needed roughly 1000 acres of commercial development to meet the current needs of the City. It will take a few decades before we reach that level, but only if we start now. You have provided no alternatives…other than to say ‘no.’
Mark: you don’t seem to understand the nature of the research I posted (including a 2018 study on research parks). Indeed you have been able to post any studies that contradict. these findings.
I have been a strong proponent of affordable workforce housing. Your only proposal is to build more housing in general, which ignores the problem .
Go ahead and post your back of the envelope analysis of the 1,000 acres of commercial development you say are “needed to meet” the needs of Davis. How many jobs is that? What is the City’s fiscal net from this type of development? How much housing and population growth would be required to maintain a jobs/housing balance? What is the fiscal net of this development in turn?
A more careful reading of Levine’s 2009 article here https://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1025&context=ced_pubs reveals that he is against willy-nilly investment in innovation parks. He points out the need to create agglomeration economies and to retain the newly trained workforce locally. UCD, due in part to its prime location, offers the elements that Levine says are too often ignored when a research university is in a location that is losing workforce and investment. Instead, we are looking to capture all of the necessary elements that are flowing right by us. That’s a very different story.
Richard McCann: it’s amusing that your earlier response a couple months ago was that Levine’s research was not adequately peer-reviewed, and that your immediate response today was to question whether Levibe is an expert in this subject.
Then you turn around and point to one part of Levine’s conclusions, yet ignore the broader research he has done and conclusions he has drawn regarding the general failures of the business park/“innovation park” model. You have demonstrated the very definition of “cherry-picking.”