By Tim Keller
Almost two years ago, I wrote an article here in the Vanguard attempting to ask the question: How big should our city be? ( That article can be found here).
My motivation for writing that article was a feeling (which I still hold), that, as a city, we lack perspective: We are too absorbed in debating individual development proposals, and we don’t spend enough time asking the big questions or trying to develop a large-scale vision for how we envision the development of our community.
I feel this is a fundamental oversight: If we don’t understand the scale of our unmet housing demand, we are fundamentally blind in our response to it.
- How much housing do we need?
- Do we need Palomino Place?
- Do we need Village Farms?
- Do we need both?
- Can we meet our needs just through infill?
- How tall do infill buildings need to be?
- Is it enough to meet our RHNA target?
- Could additional student housing on campus fix our problem?
These are topics that you see debated on the Vanguard and other places in our community, but I feel it is impossible to answer these questions in any effective way without some kind of high-level perspective and a shared vision for how much we want our city to grow.
In my first analysis, I used jobs multipliers as a way to try to deduce what the “natural” population of our city should be, based on the number of students and staff at the university, and how many jobs would rationally be created to provide a community work of services around such a population. The answer was pretty stark: about 120,000 people… almost twice our current population.
In the years since, I have realized that there is another way to try to answer that same question, and one that might strike people as less of a purely academic exercise: An analysis of comparable “University towns.”
In this case, we are looking for land-grant universities in geographically distinct towns (not part of a contiguous metro sprawl like Berkeley and Stanford) where the university is the primary industry of the town.
It turns out that there are a LOT of comparable cities in our nation that can be described this way, and, by analyzing them, we can start to see some trends which give us a general idea of how much unmet demand for housing likely exists in our city.
Here is the list that I came up with:
The trend that emerges immediately is that the population of a “university town” such as ours tends to be about 3x the size of its student body. The fact that there is a relationship between university size and city size makes inherent sense because, for any given amount of students, you will also need staff, faculty and staff at that university, and all of the above need additional members of the community to provide services such as retail shopping, police and fire, local government, parks, restaurants, and other entertainment… everything you need to comprise a balanced city with the normal complement of local services in its economy.
Looking at the ratio of students to city population, you can easily see that Davis is significantly behind most of its peers: 1.9 city population per student, compared to the average of 2.96.
Is it any wonder that we have a significant number of students staff, faculty, and supporting service workers driving here every day? Why we have traffic at 5 PM getting OUT of town? We are quite simply a city that is too small for the university it hosts.
Now, this analysis is somewhat simplistic, and I’m going to be diving into some very important additional analysis in a future column, but if you take the simple version of the math presented here to be prescriptive, it suggests that the natural demand for housing in this city is on the order of 105,000 people, 37,000 more than our last census total.
While this result is more conservative than my previous 125,000 person estimate, both numbers indicate a significant amount of growth being necessary in order to bring our housing market into balance with demand.
Compare this to the amount of growth we frequently talk about in the city which is the satisfaction of our RHNA allocation of 2070 additional housing units (or ~4000 people) and you can see why I think our housing debate lacks perspective: Even if we meet our RHNA allocation we won’t have even gotten close to actually solving our housing shortage!
Again, there is more to be learned from this analysis on comparable university towns, but I want to leave the high-level results here for the time being so that readers can digest the big picture analysis before I delve into the minutiae.
Until then, I’m interested to hear what readers think of this analytical approach. Is it helpful? Is it sobering? What elements of our current housing debate do you think change when you understand that the demand shortfall may be this bad? I’m genuinely interested to hear your thoughts.
UNIVERSITY TOWNS
What do other University Towns have to do with Davis? Are those other Universities within those cities’ limits (ie. to a significant degree responsible for municipal actions around the University)? Are those University activities exempt from local taxes? Are those other University towns located near other nearby growing and active metro areas (like Sacramento and the Bay Area…..at a brief glance….some yes, some no)?
How is it any different than anyone else driving to somewhere else to work (economically speaking)? These people work outside of the city and then go home outside of the city. But…but….but what about if those people lived here….their spending could spur the local economy! Yes, Davis’ MASSIVE retail offering would capture that potential sales tax revenue. It’s not really that big of a deal if people have to drive here to work. What’s a big deal is that they’re driving here AND NOT WORKING IN DAVIS AND CAN’T/DON’T SPEND MUCH MONEY HERE.
GROWTH
Growth comes down to two things. 1. What’s required. 2. Desired quality of life.
1. REQUIRED GROWTH falls into two categories:
A. RHNA Numbers. This part’s easy. It’s the required number of residential units the state forces local areas to plan for future construction. We don’t have much choice in this matter. I think the trick is to make economic plans that factor in having to provide services and maintenance for these new residences. This will have to come from increased retail growth and later business growth.
B. Growth to Balance the City’s Budget. The city for (I think) at least the past few years has been running a deficit. The very least the city can do is pay for it’s current expenses. That can come from increased taxes, cutting services/costs and from increasing tax revenue sources through growth. This kind of growth would likely come initially retail growth, then business growth and finally (if necessary) residential growth (to supplement and support the other areas of growth).
2. Desired Quality of Life. This part is trickier.
There is a trade off between wanting growth both in the city and outside of it that produces revenue for more services yet also takes away ag land and increases traffic. So if you want better bicycle paths, better roads (not just maintained) better mass transit, better social services in town….you gotta pay for it and to pay for it you need more/increased tax revenue. So there’s a trade off in terms of quality of life and what each of us desires.
I think required growth is something we should all focus on as a target. Let’s get that out of the way. And the hard part for many to accept is that it may impact their quality of life with traffic, loss of ag land…etc… But this is the hard reality Davis faces as it weather’s the region’s recent massive growth as well as it’s own past slow/no growth policies.
Keith E
The benefits to quality of life can be manifest from expanding. Two examples of improved quality of life from expansion of Davis are Village Homes and the North Greenbelts. Until the early 2000s when we stopped growth we had a vibrant downtown with new businesses opening. Now we’re fighting to keep retail shops and non-franchise restaurants open. The traffic impacts that we have arise almost entirely from the spillover from I-80 Tahoe tourists–a situation that Caltrans thinks it will solve. (We’ll see on that.) The assertion is that we need to save ag land for the world, not for local quality of life, yet we push worse development onto ag land elsewhere.
And you and I have already discussed the benefits that the taxpayers of California bestow on Davis through UCD. Meeting the needs of the campus is our obligation in return for that benefit.
The residential contraction correlates with decreased downtown business growth. But let’s get real. The real problem were the constraints placed on commercial growth in Davis. All the while the rest of the region grew and much faster rates than Davis. I remember back in the 80’s when we in the bay area used to call Sacramento: “Sacramentucky” because of how backwoods we thought it was. Davis looked good in comparison the rest of the region back then. There wasn’t anything going on in the Sac region other than it being the capitol. Now? Everyone is moving here and they’re moving to Roseville, Rocklin, Elk Grove…etc… where is all the nice retail shopping? There. Where are all the nice restaurants? There. As people continue to leave the bay area; those are the places they’re going because there’s more there. Heck…even Vacaville has more going on than Davis these days. So is it the residential growth that spurs the economic growth or the economic growth the spurs the residential growth? It’s sort of a chicken and egg question. But good planning would plan for economic growth and followed by necessary residential growth.
You know that I believe that’s horse manure and you’ve never given an actual tangible reason for this “obligation”. Sure Davis should do it’s best to work with UCD for mutual benefit. But obligation? I’m starting to think you’re the high priest of the cult of UCD in this silly town.
Your association of Richard’s sermons with religious fervor is an apt one Keith. Well said.
And you and I have already discussed the benefits that the taxpayers of California bestow on Davis through UCD. Meeting the needs of the campus is our obligation in return for that benefit.
Richard, you and Keith have never “discussed” that concept. You have simply gotten up in your pulpit and lectured/sermonized him. You believe in your heart that that is the case, but so far you have not provided any evidence of either the benefit, it’s quantifiable value, or the amount of money the state invests in that benefit in any year.
You have identified the key variable that in my research immedialty poked its head up as needing attention discussion in the second part of this analysis… I discarded research universities that were consumed by larger metros, and places like Madison WI which is also a state capitol… but the automobile is ubiquitous and has a huge impact here…. I’ll be getting to that in part 2, and I think it raises a core question we really need to ask ourselves as a community.
I want this on a t-shirt… or on billboards… It’s such a fundamental truth that I think is fundamentally absent in our collective decision making. Davis is in a state of decay economically and will be unless we make some adult choices.
UC Davis is one of the largest employers in the state of California. It is a major state and regional institution that greatly benefits the state and the region. It is completely natural that the impacts are spread across the region. It makes sense that people associated with UCD live throughout the region and not just in Davis. What doesn’t make sense is how utterly lacking the campus is in public transportation connecting it to the rest of the region.
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/08/20/californias-5-largest-employers.aspx
Colin,
I’m not sure where you’re going with your comment. On one hand I believe UCD does provide UniTrans bus service inside the city of Davis (it pretty much mostly provides public transport too and from school and less so across the city….but then it is UCD’s bus system and not the city or county’s). On the other hand UCD has spread across the region but I’m not sure if you’re saying they should bare the burden of public transport across the region too? I wouldn’t be surprised if they did proved some transportation from the Davis campus to the med center area in Sacramento.
But in terms of housing and transportation and UCD, it’s the same issue; the city’s ability to capture tax revenue from UCD business and professionals and students. The first part is hard because UC is mostly exempt from local taxation. The second part is on the local municipalities to make work for them. That means having enough retail to service those professionals and students to generate sales tax revenue; otherwise those professionals and students become drains on the local economy and not benefits. The other part (Tim are you listening?) is to continue to develop more local businesses who’s employees can then spend their money here (once there is enough retail to capture their spending).
Tim,
I think you missed the bigger part of my comment about University towns. It makes a huge difference where those city boundaries are drawn. It has to do with who has authority over what and whom and control of taxes as well as to what degree one is obligated to work with the other). It’s the difference between Palo Alto and Berkeley. UCB/Cal is located within city limits so those two have to (obligated) work together. Stanford is located outside of the city of Palo Alto. Those two can work together (it’s generally in their best interests) but they don’t have to. UCD and Davis are latter example.
As for giving up thing to get things. Here’s my personal example. I like the open space at the corners of Pole Line and Covell; where Village Farms has been proposed. I would hate to see construction there. Traffic at Pole Line and Covell already gets congested at times so more homes in that area aren’t going to make things better. But here’s the problem, my kids play soccer and they often have to go to Nugget Fields off of Pole Line north of Covell. From North Davis that bicycle ride isn’t easy. They have to ether ride along Covell and up and over the overpass or go a little out of the way and ride under the rail road tracks through the tunnel (in a sketch area) and then make to and cross a very busy Pole Line and Covell intersection. It’s certainly possible to make that bike ride but I don’t like it for my elementary school aged children; I end up driving my kids to soccer games and practices. So the idea of a pathway that connects North Davis that goes through or around the Cannery and all the way out to Pole Line (which I believe is included in the Village Farms proposal) seems appealing to me.
On a related but totally side note: I think there should be a company that builds prefabricated modular (almost like legos) elevated bike/pedestrian paths. The biggest need for this I see in Davis is on Anderson. There are kids that bike to Chavez, Willet and the High School but the most bicycle traffic I see is by UCD students. Parents are busy dropping their kids off at Chavez and I have seen countless near miss accidents with bicycles and probably a handful of actual accidents.
Keith E
Your missing the big difference between Stanford and UCD. The former is a private institution supported entirely by private individuals who have no expectations of Palo Alto. UCD is a public institution largely funded by taxpayers who expect the local community to support that campus in return for the rather lucrative economic benefits each of those communities realize. Just look at the financial premium households in community housing a UC campus enjoys over neighboring ones.
I’m well aware that Stanford is private and the UCs aren’t….so what? What difference does it make other than maybe Stanford doesn’t get the tax benefits that the UCs do?
Uh….no….there’s no reason UCD should EXPECT anything. You love to talk about the mystical (and largely intangible) benefits stuff. I’m from the school that you only expect what’s written down in an agreement. You know as well as I do that directly capturing tax revenue from UCD is difficult for the city.
UCD gets about 10% of its funding from the state. Tuition and fees account for about 15%, grants and contracts about 13%, miscellaneous sales and services about 12%, and Med Center income about 41%. Not so different from Stanford.
Colin
From a climate change impact perspective, which is at the core of the recently adopted Climate Action and Adaptation Plan, we do not want UCD students and employees scattered across the region–we want them as close to campus as feasible. We don’t want them living in Shingle Springs or Yuba City or Fairfield because their cars emit GHGs which will hasten climate change that is an existential threat. That’s why the City and the County declared climate emergencies.
And we will never have a public transit system that runs from Yuba City or Shingle Springs to Davis because we don’t have the population density to support such an infrastructure. Where transit thrives in Japan and Europe, the densities are much higher and workers live closer to their workplaces. Yes, UCD should be better connected, but that won’t solve the commuting problem on a larger scale until we change the land use patterns needed to support that type of transit.
Colin
I’m trying to square your comment that extended commuting is allowable for UCD staff and students, but then arguing against expansion of I-80 because of the increase in VMT in this letter sent to the City Council. Thanks to the dispersion of where UCD employees live, it’s not feasible to build a sufficiently dense transit network to serve those employees in manner that is environmentally beneficial over the current situation. Either all would have to commute in one or two buses each way each day, or there would be many miles of near empty buses and deadhead returns.
Richard, Your right UCD, and the entire region need to massively improve the public transportation infrastructure and get cars off I80. You are wrong when you say it will “never” happen. Frankly if you don’t think public transportation can and should be improved in our region then you should not be working on the Yolo County CAAP.
My suggestion that UCD needs to be better connected to the region through public transportation is 100% in sync with not widening the freeway.
Lots of UCD employees commuting from any of those three locales, you’re claiming?
With at least one of them probably being more-expensive than Davis, to boot.
YoloBus already has lines to UCD from surrounding communities.
Tim
Good starting point. I have a correction and some additions to your list. First, as a Michigan grad I will inform you that Michigan State is in East Lansing–Lansing is the state capital. That adds a complication to your list which is focused on towns that are largely isolated and dependent on a university.
To that end I’ve added four cities in the Northwest that are similarly isolated and are economically dominated by the university. Arguable Eugene and Bellingham are economic centers for the local forestry industry as well, but that role has faded. In this list, only Pullman falls below Davis in the ratio.
(I’ll try an Excel table instead of an image which wasn’t accepted)
City Population University Enrollment Ratio
Bellingham, WA 92,289 Western Washington 16,142 5.72
Eugene/Springfield 237,352 Oregon 23,202 10.23
Pullman, WA 34,506 Washington State 20,975 1.65
Moscow, ID 25,435 Idaho 10,474 2.43
East Lansing/Lansing 160,425 Michigan State 49,809 3.22
One other point of importance: the cities with the lowest population to student ratios are also the most isolated. Pullman and Stillwater are well beyond commuter distance to other major cities. Moving closer, such as 15 minutes from Sacramento, increases that ratio, implying that the appropriate ratio for Davis is higher than the average.
Like Keith, you have put your finger on the next level of analysis here. My expanded data set includes the residential vacancy rates of these same cities as well as the population of other cities within “commuting distance” ( which I set at 30 miles ) For a town like Stillwater there is essentially nothing nearby, and thus, nowhere to commute to. I will have to check out pullman, but I suspect it it the same.
This means that there are actually two drivers for housing demand in a university town: 1) Locals and 2) Commuters. The second article in this series will delve into that.
Tim, thank you for this thoughtful article. I will add a few additional thoughts to your contemplation. The example of Ithaca Lansing Cayuga includes a broad area well beyond the City Limits of Ithaca itself. If Davis were to include a similar geographic reach both Woodland and parts of Sacramento would be part of Davis. Further, as has been pointed out by others, many of your example cities are regional economic hubs in addition to being home to the university. When you look at the economic activity of those respective cities, separating the academic from the non academic economy is a necessary step. If the city is a county seat, exclude all the governmental services that magnetically accrue to a County Seat. If the downtown is the only such economic hum for the surrounding regional residents, then that economic activity needs to be segregated.
Bottomline, how many of the communities in your list have as anemic a local economy as Davis has? How many have as few non-service sector jobs? How many are nothing more than bedroom communities?
A reminder to Ron O, here is a universally accepted definition of sprawl rather one individual’s idiosyncratic version:
Characteristics of SprawlThe phenomenon of sprawl has been described in various ways, ranging from development aesthetics to local street patterns (Galster et al., 2001). While there is no universally accepted definition of sprawling land development, there are several common characteristics pervading the literature that can help us understand and even measure its occurrence. These include:1) Low-density, single family dwellings. The most frequently cited feature of sprawl is the abundance of large-lot (usually 1-5 acres depending on the development context), residential housing developments that consume large amounts of previously vacant or productive land. Density, in this sense, can be represented by median lot size, the number of dwelling units per neighborhood, or median floor space of single-family units (Song & Knaap, 2004).2) Automobile dependency even for short trip. Because sprawling development patterns create large distances between dwelling units and segregate different land uses, residents are forced to rely on automobiles at the expense of alternative forms of transportation. Also, the cul-de-sac dominated street patterns within these neighborhoods foster a lack of connectivity and serve as an obstacle for walking and biking to nearby destinations (Benfield et al., 1999). Reliance on the automobile also encourages the development of homogeneous neighborhoods that lack a mixture of land uses (Song & Knaap, 2004).3) Spiraling growth outward from existing urban centers.Sprawl is also conceptualized as low-density development rapidly expanding away from more compact urban cores. Approximately 80 percent of the acreage used for recently constructed housing in the U.S. is land outside urban areas; almost all of this land (94%) is in lots of 1 acre or larger (Heimlich & Anderson, 2001).4) Leapfrogging patterns of development. Another well-known characteristic of sprawl is dispersed development, which favors the development of parcels situated further out in the countryside over the vacant lands adjacent to existing development.(Torrens & Alberti 2000). Leapfrogging creates a haphazard development pattern that consumes large amounts of land.5) Strip Development. “Ribbon” development, in which residences or commercial properties line roads extending outward from urban centers is another prominent characteristic of sprawl (Tsai, 2005). Homes arranged along rural highways present hazards related to traffic safety; commercial strips comprised of fast food chains and large retail stores cater to automobile access and are often fronted by expansive parking lots.6) Undefined edge between urban and rural areas. Sprawling residential development extending outward from urban centers tends to blur the division between urban and rural domains (Heimlich & Anderson, 2001). This development pattern is often associated with the encroachment of open space and agricultural lands.It is important to note that sprawling development patterns are tied to the context of the urban-suburban landscape. Low-density residential units may mean different things in the city of Houston than in a small town in coastal Maine. Also, one development project or neighborhood does not make for sprawl; rather, sprawling development must be assessed as an overall pattern at the regional level. as an overall pattern of development.https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-characteristics-causes-and-consequences-of-sprawling-103014747/
nature.com
The Characteristics, Causes, and Consequences of Sprawling Development Patterns in the United States | Learn Science at Scitable
How do development patterns impact our ecological systems and the livability of our local communities?
And yet, the second sentence of Richard’s quote states this:
Do you suppose that Richard reads his own citations?
I think the perspective of comparing Davis to other university towns is valuable and a strong argument for approving additional housing but I believe there are two relevant questions that need to also be addressed. They are:
1. Presumably capitalistic supply and demand forces resulted in more housing being built in the comparable university towns. Why are Davis residents or leaders so resistant to additional needed housing and why have they been so successful in suppressing new housing efforts? Newsom has found out most California cities and counties have a “Not in my backyard” mentality to adding providing additional housing for the homeless. Many Davis residents want to keep Davis a nice slow paced small town so they are against new housing. Last year the Davis school district lost 380 students. The resistance to new housing is turning Davis into a Marin County town where the children of Davis residents can’t afford to live here. When we attempt to freeze Davis in a permanent rustic charm state, we pay with a lack of diversity and young families including our own.
2. It seems to me that any discussion of adding additional housing has to be expanded from the university needs to Davis’s response to our share of the solution to homelessness. As a progressive city, Davis needs to provide affordable homes and small square footage homes that young families and low income families can afford. This has to be in addition to a permanent shelter.