Guest Commentary: Fact Check of DiSC Affordable Housing Article

By Matt WilliamsMay 15, 20223 comments

By Matt Williams

Yesterday at 8:58am David Greenwald posted the following comment in my article Guest Commentary: Writer Argues Affordable Housing at DiSC does not Comply with City of Davis Municipal Code

Since this has been published several people (five so far) have written to me illustrating a number of factual problems with this piece.

David also directly sent me a text with a similar message.  Given the fact that yesterday was David’s day off, I saved him some time and effort by creating a Fact Check document in Word and sent him the following e-mail.

David, I created the attached document as a fact check of the article.  My plan is to post it as a response to your comment once you have had a chance to review it.

His response to that e-mail caused me to decide to wait until today to post the Fact Check information you see below.  Everybody deserves a day off.  I also took the time to circle back with David Thompson to double check with him on both the article content and the Fact Check assessment.  His e-mail response was “Excellent synopsis.”

So, at this point I share the Fact Check assessment below with you the Vanguard readers and Davis voters.  I’m really rather curious to hear both your feedback, as well as what the Vanguard and the “several people” indicate are the factual problems with the article. The structure of the Fact Check is that the individual paragraphs or subparagraphs appear in the left column and the Fact Check assessment of that individual component appears in the right column.

 

Author

  • Matt Williams

    Matt Williams has been a resident of Davis/El Macero since 1998. Matt is a past member of the City's Utilities Commission, as well as a former Chair of the Finance and Budget Commission (FBC), former member of the Downtown Plan Advisory Committee (DPAC), former member of the Broadband Advisory Task Force (BATF), as well as Treasurer of Davis Community Network (DCN). He is a past Treasurer of the Senior Citizens of Davis, and past member of the Finance Committee of the Davis Art Center, the Editorial Board of the Davis Vanguard, Yolo County's South Davis General Plan Citizens Advisory Committee, the Davis School District's 7-11 Committee for Nugget Fields, the Yolo County Health Council and the City of Davis Water Advisory Committee and Natural Resources Commission. His undergraduate degree is from Cornell University and his MBA is from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He spent over 30 years planning, developing, delivering and leading bottom-line focused strategies in the management of healthcare practice, healthcare finance, and healthcare technology, as well municipal finance.

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Breaking News City of Davis Land Use/Open Space Opinion

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3 comments

  1. The logic of the argument that “the only choice is to vote “No” on Measure H” because of a perceived reduction in an imagined percentage of affordable housing units is baffling. Voting yes on H creates at least 85 units of Affordable Housing. Voting no creates zero. [edited]

    1. ” Voting yes on H creates at least 85 units of Affordable Housing. Voting no creates zero.”

      Critical point. Stated another way – the perfect is the enemy of the good.

    2. The logic of the argument that “the only choice is to vote “No” on Measure H” because of a perceived reduction in an imagined percentage of affordable housing units is baffling. Voting yes on H creates at least 85 units of Affordable Housing. Voting no creates zero. Even an affordable housing developer who gets paid fat fees of public dollars should be able to do that math.

      .
      In his argument above, wesley is using a “the ends justify the means” argument.  The alternative is using a “have the integrity to comply with the law” argument.  wesley is being a pragmatic capitalist.  I personally expect more than self-interest.

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