By David M. Greenwald
Executive Editor
Davis, CA – This weekend I put forth the radical suggestion that Davis end its inclusionary housing requirements. This is not because I don’t believe we need affordable housing, but rather because I believe in order to get affordable housing, we have to get housing period, and we are making that difficult.
I was to respond to a few important comments.
First, Mark West pointed out, “The current system isn’t working, but it is considerably better than the previous one. We had a period of greater than 10 years recently where no new apartments were built in town despite the historically low vacancy rate. This was primarily due to the affordable housing ordinance requirements making new apartments construction non-viable. That changed when someone figured out that building 4-5 bedroom apartments rented by the bed made the projects more feasible, which of course simply changed the complaint being leveed by opponents.”
He added, “You cannot build affordable housing until you are willing to build housing in general.”
As I noted previously, those who pushed for higher affordable housing are often the same people attempting to slow and stall housing in general.
That said, I think both Eileen Samitz and Matt Williams separately raised important points.
She raised the point RHNA is requiring Davis to build a particularly high percentage of affordable housing. Davis is *only* required to build a total of 2075 in this planning 
period but 44 percent of that is affordable.
Meanwhile, West Sacramento, while required to build 9471 units, has just 37.8 percent affordable and Woodland has a mere 33.8 percent affordability requirement.
Those numbers stuck out to me from the first time we saw the RHNA targets.
Samitz uses those figures to argue, “I don’t think that a practice of ‘build anything’ is a solution to our housing issues, but in fact is more detrimental than beneficial if we are not getting the type of housing we need and is being demanded of us by RHNA.”
I don’t disagree with here point overall—that given the percentage of affordable units, we have to be strategic in terms of how we meet our housing needs.
But my overall point is that inclusionary housing requirements are really not going to move the ball forward very much. Realistically, we probably ought to think in terms of having to build 4000 to 5000 overall units rather than 2000. Even then, we would be asking those projects to provide 20 to 25 percent affordable housing rather than the current 15 percent guideline.
The city can only require 15 percent for what they term non-discretionary projects. Those are the infill projects that are now zoned in the downtown area.
On the other hand, 15 percent is the floor rather than the ceiling for discretionary projects—anything that requires, for example, a Measure J vote. This is where I continue to argue we are going to have to make up the difference. And frankly, as David Thompson has pointed out as well, 25 percent is very realistic if you have a land dedication site and the land available for affordable housing.
The key to doing that is going to be density.
Matt Williams raised an important point to me last week—he noted that the city’s affordable housing requirements amount to an unfunded mandate. And in some ways they do. The state is requiring the city to build nearly 1000 units of low income housing this cycle, and, while Governor Newsom continues to pump money in for affordable housing, everyone knows it’s not nearly enough.
In 2022-23, for example, the state invested in about $11 billion for housing production and $2 billion over two years for affordable housing production.
But as Cal Cities pointed out in May, the budget revise fell short on fundings for homelessness and affordable housing.
The final budget saw “modest restorations to first-time homebuyer and foreclosure prevention programs. That brings the total statement investment in affordable housing and homelessness to $3.2 billion.”
Cal Cities noted, “Legislators wanted to add an additional $1 billion in funding for the Homeless Housing, Assistance and Prevention grant program. Instead, the final budget agreement includes intent language to allocate an additional $1 billion for the 2024-25 fiscal year.”
They continue: “Yet again, lawmakers have chosen to prioritize short-term fixes over long-term, sustainable solutions.”
“Addressing the many facets of homelessness … has the same established need for funding as education, prisons or parks,” said the Sacramento Bee in a recent editorial. “Yet homelessness has no similarly established home in the state budget. It has to fight for the leftovers. Big city mayors end up fending for themselves and heading home with far less than they need.”
Homelessness is only one component of this, but what is clear is that the state needs to reimplement redevelopment when it could reasonably demand 35 percent affordable housing—until that kind of funding is available, it is going to be difficult to achieve our housing goals.
That said, in my view, the answer is not to punt.
What is clear, however, is that we are going to need to go peripheral in order to meet our affordable housing needs.
We should be able to get to at least 25 percent with the current proposals.
I continue to believe we can revise Measure J a bit to facilitate affordable housing.
I am intrigued with the notion of resetting the urban limit line along the lines that Tim Keller suggested a few weeks ago. That would give us the space to be able to grow as needed while still creating a brake against runaway growth. By relaxing Measure J requirements, we can also use that as a carrot to get more affordable housing.
Another possibility of course would be to make housing projects that are 40 percent affordable—for example—exempt from Measure J.
I know some people are opposed in general to tweaking Measure J, BUT, if you think about it this way, at current levels we really are going to have to zone for another 4000 to 5000 units of housing to meet the affordability requirements; if we create an incentive to build up to 40 percent that will greatly lower the amount of overall housing we need.
So,paradoxically, creating reasonable reforms to Measure J could reduce the overall amount of housing we will have to build.
The alternative is that the state at some point could come in and say that Measure J overall is a barrier to housing and use that as a rationale to take it out.
Exactly as I’ve been pointing out, via articles from other publications (e.g., 48 Hills). So, why would anyone take this seriously?
If you’re referring to something other than these “fake” needs imposed across the state, don’t you think you should start off by defining what you believe those needs are in the first place?
Quantify it (e.g., number of people, location of employment, income level, cost of housing that they can supposedly afford, and compare it with the cost of wherever they’re living – which might or might not already be in Davis, etc.). In other words, “who” and “how many” are you talking about, here? The answer (which isn’t a “single” answer in the first place) would create an entire series of articles – probably without even coming up with a supported number.
But once you’ve at least taken a stab at it (and can come up with some kind of number that you believe can be supported), you can then talk about solutions – such as rent control.
Or, you can just continue to cry “housing crisis” – if you think that works.
Oh, and definitely eliminate Affordable housing requirements within city limits, if you think that’s going to “support” your call for continued sprawl.
(I’m actually kind of looking forward to the city doing something like that, as I’m pretty sure that it would make my “volunteer job” that much easier, during the next Measure J campaign.)
The city has some impossibilities to deal with and admittancies to make.
No matter what we do we cannot reach the RHNA targets of 580 VLI and LI unts.
Between within the city and adding the VLI and LI units from the two proposed peripheral developments even then we cannot reach the target for VLI and LI affordable units.
Give the present day realities, the regional RHNA numbers are too ambitious and truly impractible for Davis and the other Yolo County jurisdictions.
IS there an appeal process?
I believe under present circumstances both internal and external we cannot reach them.
But what do we do if we admit that?
.
While multifamily and vertical mixed-use yields smaller of numbers of affordable housing since generally they are in the 150-200 unit range of units, every unit built helps because it is costly to build any housing unit.
But what does not help, is building exclusionary by design group housing where we get no affordable housing like all of the the mega-dorms approved. Since that type of group housing does nothing to help provide housing for our workers and families , because it generally is a design of rent by the bed and often has a lock per bedroom door and a bathroom per bedroom. This is also not sustainable planning since the amount of water used is far more with a bathroom per bedroom.
Further, SACOG/HCD is objecting to giving the City any credit for our RHNA allocation due to the group housing design because they are not compatible with housing families nor workers generally due to the design being group housing. This question of “Would the City get RHNA credit for these more than 4,000 student beds in the City, and what about affordable housing for these mega-dorms?” was asked repeatedly in written communications and public testimony to the City and the City Council, but there was no effort to determine the answer to this critical question.
So as it turned out, the City wound up approving over 4,000 beds which will include no affordable housing, and SACOG/HCD does not want to give the City any RHNA credit for these mega-dorms.
However, had these mega-dorms been built instead as traditional apartments, then anyone, including families, workers or students could have lived in them, plus we would have gotten at least 15% affordable housing units.
What a phenomenal lack of planning by the City. This disaster could have, and should have been avoided, had the City bothered to find out the outcome ahead of time regarding SACOG/HCD’s position on if the City would get RHNA credit for the mega-dorm group housing format, and what about the lack of affordable housing?
Also, regarding Measure J, there is no need to change it because it already has an exemption for affordable housing in it.
There’s an exemption that has never even remotely come into play in 22 years – what makes you think that’s going to change?
The solution for an unfunded mandate in this situation is to provide for incremental property tax financing such as in the Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District and Climate Resilience District that retain local revenues. This is the mechanism the state should be using to incent new housing.
Rent control will not build new housing, and even disincentivizes new rental housing. Rental housing will be pulled off the market, as it is in San Francisco, and converted to owner occupied. Rent control also tends to benefit upper middle income households that reside for longer periods.
Any housing for students helps release the supply of duplexes in town to families. Half of the rental housing in Davis is in SF and duplexes. Saying that high occupancy student apartments undermines affordability while advocating to locate all student housing on campus in high occupancy apartments to relieve housing demand in the city is illogically inconsistent.
Tim Keller has laid out a feasible plan of how to get to the RHNA targets, although the Affordability targets may need to be revised.