By Tim Keller
Over the past month and over the course of four articles here in the Vanguard, I have tried to ask some of the big questions around growth for our city and discuss these issues from a long-term strategic perspective.
My observation has been that as a city, we tend to let short-term issues (mostly Measure J projects) dominate our conversation around growth, and as a result, we never step back to look at the big picture:
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- How big do we need to be (and why?)
- What might be the best place and method to accommodate that growth?
- Who should we be building for?
- What is our city going to look like when we hand it off to our grandchildren?
(Will they wish we had made better decisions?)
Today I want to review those observations and try to compile an integrated concept for how they might work together.
What we have seen:
We saw that Davis is under-built by comparison to other cities hosting similarly sized institutions in similar regional contexts. (article here)
Yes, there are a number of smaller university towns which are our existing size and have healthy housing markets, but those are truly geographically isolated cities. Davis is not.
The closest analog city we studied is Ann Arbor Michigan.The University of Michigan is a powerhouse research university, very similar to UCD, and is situated within commuting range of Detroit, just as we are with Sacramento. ( article here)
With our proximity to Sacramento, our housing market is in fact regional, not local, and as a result we have “college town commuters” making up a significant part of our population. This makes it perhaps unrealistic to compare our housing to those true college-only towns like Stillwater, and it explains why our housing market is so impacted:
Because we have kept our housing supply artificially small via Measure J/R/D we have created an expensive housing market in which more affluent commuting workers are better able to compete for our limited, expensive housing supply, and thus a significant amount of our middle class households are displaced. These commuters include a whopping 75% of our local workforce, and 60% of university staff. (article here).
The restrictions on our housing market are creating daily mass migrations that are harming both our local and global environments.
Finally, I analyzed the concept of an urban limit line as proposed recently by former Mayor Robb Davis, and I tried to see if a city like Davis could grow to the size of Ann Arbor without creating sprawling housing developments out to the horizon.
What I found is that if we embrace moderate dense construction forms, averaging 20 units per acre, we are more than capable of providing all the housing needed for 50 years, while not extending beyond the natural boundary encompassed ailed by proposals already on the city’s docket. (article here)
So today I wanted to complete that thought process with an integrated vision for what development of our city in the future might look like.
First, I think it is worth pointing out that what I’m proposing is consistent with many themes of what people have been saying they value:
- Nobody wants endless sprawl.
- Everyone wants good bike-ability.
- Nobody likes traffic.
- (Most) are concerned with affordability of housing.
- Everyone wants the city to be healthy economically and fiscally.
- Everyone wants healthy amounts of green space.
- Everyone prizes sustainability, which includes:
- Preserving farmland,
- Conserving water,
- Reducing greenhouse gas emissions
- Reducing unwanted waste.
These shared values are the reason why everyone seems to agree that infill and densification are our preferred forms of city growth: Infill ticks all of the boxes above.
Unfortunately, there isn’t enough infill: Not enough to meet our RHNA target of 2,075 units let alone being able to start putting a dent in the task of repatriating our ~ 20,000 currently displaced local workers, which means that smart peripheral development unfortunately has to be part of the solution
Does lack of good infill development opportunities mean we need to build BAD peripheral development?
Here is where I really think we need to be paying better attention because the following statement is very true:
It is irresponsible for us to be building more single family homes.
Economically, Socially, and Environmentally: Single Family Housing is unsustainable. City planners, economics, sociologists and architects have been telling us this for decades now, and its time we accept it.
It might not be easy to accept of course, because single family housing is the entirety of what most of us know in terms of our city and how we build cities. In fact, many of us have never lived in anything OTHER than a single family home, making it difficult to even imagine anything else.
But If you look at the list of values I enumerated above, you will see that building single family housing goes AGAINST all of those shared values.
I am not the only one saying this, not by a long shot. Single family suburbs, also known as R1 zoning, have been the dominant way we have built our communities both here in Davis and across North America for the last two generations, But all of the experts now agree: it was a mistake. ( article HERE,)
Economically: Single Family Housing costs the city more money in the long term than it brings in in property taxes. This is the “Housing Ponzi-Scheme” of housing that has been documented quite well by organizations such as Strong Towns. There is a great series of Videos HERE and an article discussing this HERE. (This effect is true nationwide but is actually worse in CA due to prop 13.)
Socially: As I discussed in my third article in this series, suburbia was designed to be economically exclusive, and the high cost of owning a single family home, (which includes the cost of a car to access it) produces economic exclusion (read “segregation”) by definition. Deed restrictions, even in Davis, explicitly excluded certain classes of individuals, many of whom still reside here only in small proportions.
As I discussed in a previous article, (and mentioned above), our habit of only building expensive single family housing has created an economically segregated society. If we build more housing of this type we will only continue that negative trend.
Single family housing is also socially isolating for the people who live in it as described here.
Building housing is not the same as building a community.
Environmentally: Single family homes are the worst kind of housing we could possibly create from many environmental measures. Urban planners have been telling us for decades now, that the suburban model of development has failed, but for some reason, we are still building this way:
Land Use: If we prize the conservation of farmland, building single family housing on the edge of town is the second worst use of that land possible. The absolute worst option is to build NOTHING locally and instead let a different plot of farmland get converted to SFH elsewhere only to have those residents come here by car. See: North-North Davis.
GHG Emissions: Single family homes have at least two times the climate impact of denser housing. Part of this is from increased driving, and part is from higher heating and cooling usage. (The link above actually shows single family housing at roughly 4x the carbon footprint of an urban multi-family dwelling unit)
Water Use:
Single family homes use two and half times more water per capita than denser building forms. Much of this from the type of water guzzling landscape typical of SFH.
Traffic:
From a traffic perspective, Single-Family suburbs are a double whammy: Not only do they require car ownership to live there, increasing the total number of vehicles in circulation on our streets and highways, but the low-density of single family housing makes transit ineffective.
Think about parking in our downtown. Now think about what it would be like if we grew to 120,000 people in this town, all in housing which could only be accessed by car.
The contrast of San Francisco, which maintained its transit system from the early 20th century, and Los Angeles which removed its transit lines in the 1950s is instructive here: San Francisco has a usable and effective transit system Los Angeles.. not so much. The difference is density.
Density on the Periphery?
Now, we have a situation where we need to find a way to satisfy two needs:
- We want the kind of environmentally benign housing we get with infill projects. But there are not enough infill projects to meet our growth needs, so peripheral development has to be part of the solution.
- But at the same time, I’m saying it is irresponsible to build more single family housing…
Does that mean we should be building densely on the periphery? Is that even legal?
I know this somehow feels wrong to some people because we think of cities in a nuclear / radial way: We think that there is supposed to be a really dense downtown, surrounded by housing of gradually lower density, with the lowest density at the edges.
But there is absolutely no reason we need to build in such a manner. In fact, there are a number of reasons NOT to.
The 15 Minute City
If you have heard the term “15-minute cities” then you have heard about one response to this problem: the notion that everyone should have the ability to walk or ride a bike to stores to get most of their daily needs within 15 minutes. It calls for decentralizing of our cities and creating smaller neighborhood clusters each with their own basic amenities.
You can see this type of community by going to Berkeley or San Luis Obispo where small retail shops and restaurants are distributed about each city.
Davis itself has shopping centers sprinkled throughout – but they are more spaced out and designed to be driven to, not walked or cycled, and they don’t include a full array of the neighborhood services.
When you hear people calling for “medium density mixed use development” they are talking about this same thing: A local ecosystem that provides a variety of services locally which do not require a car trip to use. By contrast, when you build only single family housing, everything requires you getting in your car.
If you read through the LEED-ND rubric which talks about walkability, access to transit, density and green space, it also, is clearly pulling in this development direction as well: More sustainable cities are denser, mixed use cities, period.
The threshold for this kind of urban density needed to make for a “walkable city” starts at around 10 dwelling units per acre, but in reality, the denser the better. The more people you can get within walking distance of a corner store, the more people will walk to that corner store, and the more economically viable that store will be… pretty simple.
In my previous article, I calculated the kind of density we might want to look for in our peripheral developments in order to allow a reasonably compact urban limit line to contain all the growth our city might possibly need in the next two generations. The number that I came up with was 20 dwelling units per acre. Which means that all of our peripheral projects are capable of being their own self-sustaining neighborhoods, with local stores and support if we build them at that density.
The Streetcar Suburb
Another benefit of building densely is that it enables transit. In fact, the ONLY way to create truly effective transit is to embrace density. Efforts to increase transit ridership significantly outside of already dense urban areas have largely failed for this reason.
The first suburbs created in the United States were not serviced by automobiles: they were enabled by streetcars. These were walkable neighborhoods put at the periphery of a larger city. Residents could walk to their streetcar line and be taken into the city center when desired. (Article on streetcar suburbs here. And a great video about them here)
People who build new developments in this way have a more modern word for this practice: The“TOD” or Transit-Oriented-Development. It is a strategy which allows for lateral city expansion without the predictable increase in cars and traffic that you get with car-dependant suburban development. (Good video on TOD’s here)
A TOD is basically a 15 minute city on a transit line. It is sufficiently dense to cater to most daily needs locally, and it is co-developed with a transit line that brings people into the local city center without the need for a car.
Tying these ideas together:
So far, we have seen multiple reasons why we might want to develop our city more densely. Medium-density construction:
- Helps conserve farmland.
- Is more affordable for working-class families.
- Preferentially provides housing for the local economy and university.
- Can cut our per-capita GHG footprint and water use in half.
- Is economically beneficial for the city long-term, (as opposed to single family which is net-negative economically).
Perhaps most importantly for the people who might be concerned about our city’s growth: Higher density construction enables efficient TRANSIT, which means that we can grow without making our downtown parking situation worse, or increasing traffic at key intersections.
But can we achieve a good transit solution for peripheral areas of town? Is a “TOD” in Davis feasible? I think so.
Consider this map:
Here I have laid out density zones roughly according to the math I did in my previous article:
- 30% single family housing, (Translucent green)
- 60% Townhomes and cluster homes (Medium Green)
- 10% 4-5 story Apartments and condos. (Bright Green)
I have also inserted some salmon colored zones which I think would shine as mixed-use commercial development with housing above. The blue zone is commercial / R&D / Lab space. (Yes, I still think this is the best place for it. For a balanced city, economic development has to be part of the overall plan as well.)
And what is important to point out is this: This map alone gets us all of the housing we need for 30 to 50 years.
As you have likely noticed, there is a blue line connecting all of these neighborhoods, and that line is offset in the middle of these developments. What I am proposing there is a dedicated transitway: A path that is only open to transit, bikes and pedestrians.
At first, this would likely be a dedicated bus-only route, but as these properties get built out over the next 30 years and density increases, there is a good chance that the bus could be replaced by a streetcar, because as I have read, the minimum density for light rail starts at 10 du / acre. At 20 du / acre, the chances that a streetcar might pencil are actually pretty good.
If we densify our arterial areas as well, including the F street corridor, as shown above then we in fact, have a setup for a very effective transit line which goes from campus, through downtown, up F Street, and over around the Mace Curve, linking to the long-envisioned innovation center site as well.
This transitway would have bike paths in parallel. The bike ride from the middle of the Mace Curve into downtown is only 4 miles. With the advent of e-bikes and personal electric vehicles (PEV’s) getting to any place downtown or on campus will be faster and easier on a bike than by car, especially when you consider the time it takes to park and then walk to your destination. (As someone who has used an electric skateboard instead of a car for the past 2 years, I know this to be true)
Finally, parking provided to this development would be capped at 1 spot per unit, or perhaps 1 spot for every 2 bedrooms. The easy access to local transit, and the under-provision of parking means that this housing, by design, will be less attractive to commuters, and more useful to local workers.
Given that the average annual cost of owning a car in California is over $10,000 per year, this transit-oriented development approach will make this housing even more affordable to local workers who by living here can easily get away with only owning one car per family.
The Alternative
Now, this is just one potential solution for how we might develop our city in the long term.
I fully expect (and hope) that someone who is actually a qualified urban planner might have a better ideas than this. Im only putting out my design to make one simple point: How EASY it is to design a vision for this city that is better than what we are going to get via the status quo.
My layout doesn’t isn’t specific, it hasn’t planned for parks or open space, or other city amenities, but it is already significantly better than what is being planned for us by the developers!
Here I have pasted the currently proposed peripheral projects onto a map of the same area, along with a solid color for the one remaining parcel that does not (yet) have a proposal for it.
Let’s think through this map and compare it with mine. These are single family homes, less than 8 du / acre. The only “plan” for transit here is assuming the existing Unitrans bus line along the bottom edge won’t stop service, and there is no indication that one could bike in between these, let alone have a robust connection to downtown and campus.
If we develop our city THIS way, then every resident of these properties will come and go by car, which also means that commuters will also likely be able to out-compete local workforce for these houses as well, just as has happened already across our existing city.
Not only is that a significant additional amount of cars on Mace, but we would in fact be enhancing greenhouse gas emissions by encouraging a population which treats Davis as a bedroom community while pushing our workers out of town.
There is also no retail proposed for ANY of the properties around the mace curve; no local cafes, restaurants, barbershops, or grocers within walking or biking distance. For EVERY single thing those residents need to do, they will need to get into their cars and drive to one of the existing commercial centers. So much for a “walkable” city
These are developments, not neighborhoods. There is no community, just a bunch of people parking themselves in their tidy and expensive houses between car trips elsewhere.
We can do better.
I have presented the equivalent of a “cocktail napkin sketch” of a city plan. It isn’t a perfect plan, it isn’t even a fully developed plan… but already it is vastly superior to what we know we are going to get if we continue along with Measure J.
We have many urban planners in this town, both professional and amateur.. I would LOVE to hear your thoughts and suggestions.
Conclusion
My intent with these series of articles was not to arrive at some perfect grand plan, but to start a conversation, and get people thinking about the larger picture. It is SO easy for us to just accept the status quo and forget that we actually do have agency over making decisions in a better way.
Measure J has been successful at preventing the kind of runaway urban sprawl that we have seen in some neighboring communities, but it has also become a double edged sword: While it does slow down growth, it has also unintentionally paralyzed our city’s planning process, making more deliberate, long-term plans for sustainable forms of housing all but impossible. At the same time, the negative socioeconomic effects of Measure J are something nobody involved with its creation ever intended.
My feeling is that the replacement of Measure J with an urban limit line that has specific transit, connectivity and density standards is the way to split that difference: Preventing a construction free-for-all while enabling a robust master planning process, and making sure we get the kind of housing we need most.
We don’t have to accept a broken process anymore. We don’t have to be a hostage to developers construction preferences, and we don’t have to accept the lack of a master plan.
It’s time we started planning this city for ourselves. I’m extremely interested to hear your thoughts.
In a comment from yesterday’s housing article, David mentioned the “region’s needs”. Well, if the “region” is your model, you’re never going to understand what led Davis to enact Measure J in the first place.
The “region’s needs” is essentially defined as encouraging folks to flee a more-environmentally “responsible” region (the Bay Area), to a much-worse one. (the Sacramento Region).
Might as well put someone like Barry Broome in charge of planning. In fact, I’d argue that his type of views already prevail, and have for a long time.
So yeah, I’m not sure that Tim Keller is “convincing anyone”, by showing what’s already occurred in the region.
It is true that Davis (and the state) is changing. Folks are having fewer kids, the population is ageing, etc. To which I’d state, “don’t fear change”.
But glad to see that Tim Keller acknowledges the damage created by the pursuit of single-family sprawl (which dominates the region, and already dominates Davis itself).
Tim Keller has laid out many of the issues re future planning for Davis. I support many of his suggestions and appreciate him adding his voice to the dialogue.
His focus on transportation is a unique choice and correct. I have occasionally said we ought to let Unitrans plan our developments. There is a great deal of value in that being done.
The two proposed developments sit on bus routes. Their southern edges should be be all market rate and affordable multi family buidings but they are not. In fact, there are very few apartments in the plans which is a pity because given the abnormally low vacancy rate, market rate multi-family apartments are drastically needed for Davis. To make bus routes pay they need a mass of passengers along the routes. The present proposals miss the bus (tongue in cheek).
If we want to encourage people to use public transportation we need many apartments on bus routes. Lower income residents look for frequent bus service to get around town but won’t find it in the two proposals.
Unitrans ups its frequency along routes with many apartments but neither of these two proposals mass enough multi-family apartments to up the service frequency.
Much more can be done in the two developments to lower the use of vehicles but it has not been done in the two proposals of mainly single family homes.
Are we paying any attention to climate change in the planning we are doing for the next ten years.
We are not.
PS. I do have a masters in architecture and urban planning from UCLA so I am grateful that Tim laid out his observations and asked for our responses.
PPS. In working as a partner in Neighborhood Partners LLC, I was shocked to find out that a number of the affordable housing sites (Tremont Green, Twin Pines and Moore Village) were nowhere near existing bus routes thus forcing low income residents to need cars.
Thank you David, I’d love to buy you a beer or a coffee and get some deeper feedback from you if you can make the time. I wont post my email address in the comment here, but if you are up for a chat, you can find me on linkedin… pleasure would be mine!
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With the above statement as background/context, I have the following questions, “What are the anticipated 5,000, 10,000, 20,000, 40,000 and 60,000 additional residents of Davis going to do? How are they going to pay their bills? What are the core competencies of Davis that will cause tose additional residents to move here?”
Further, building on a theme from yesterday’s article, “Will the lives of those additional residents have vibrancy here in Davis … and what will that vibrancy look like?”
David bemoaned the loss of vibrancy that has taken place in Davis since he first arrived here as a UCDF student. In wrestling with David’s lament I found myself asking multiple versions of the same question in the many discussions I had with people on that topic during the day yesterday, specifically, “What was David able to do in his day-to-day activities when he was a UCD student that today’s UCD students can not do?” The consistent answer I got was that life for UCD students today is every bit as vibrant as it was for UCD students when David was a student. Thoughts?
Very good question Matt, and there are really two discussions behind the answer, BOTH of which I didnt include in this series of articles (… because 5 articles is probably enough)
My intent was to draw a limit line which is permanent. If we had an idea of exactly where 60k people might want to move in from starting tomorrow, then 60k is probably not the right number… I hope that makes sense… I wanted to provide a number that we couldnt currently see ourselves exceeding… THAT makes for a limit line that is “real”
That said, I can easily see where 30k of those people might work, and I could see us building that much over the next 2o years:
1) We currently have 20k people commuting in every day. Some fraction of those people ( but not all) would love to live in davis if they had a chance. Lets say 10k people there
2) We can assume that the university will continue to grow, and for every student on campus this study has shown that you need at least 0.8 people in the surrounding community to work service jobs. If the university increases enrollment by 6000 students we will need an additional 10,000 housing units…
3) We could greatly benefit economically from keeping some of our most promising innovation companies in town… this is the reason why I got involved in the housing debate after all: The best criticism of DiSC was that there was no comprehensive housing plan, and we were planning to ship IN to town everyone who worked there… I agreed with those criticisms. It wasnt Ramos et al’s fault… the city asked for the innovation park AND the city didn’t have a housing plan to go along with it… the fault was again, our general planning process and the thinking that “lets build an innovation park” equals an economic development strategy… which it doesn’t.
This vision for the city directly links that innovation park via transit to a big swath of housing AND opportunities for retail to serve that housing etc… It makes the innovation center make a lot more sense, and makes it promise to have much less of a traffic and carbon impact. But again, for every innovation job that comes in for primary industry you probably have another .8 service sector jobs…
This is back of the envelope math of course, but I hope you get the picutre
Add those up and I think we are in the 30k people range perhaps…
Addint to that, Even though i said it is irresponsible to build single family homes, I did still include 30% single family homes as a concession to people who refuse to accept such a radical paradigm change… and Im a believer in “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good”
But to the extent that we DO build any single family housing, you can be assured that it will be filled, not all with locals, probably preferentially by commuters telecommuters and retirees… Filling up that part of the plan is not a challenge, but it also isnt really a priority in my mind… So I dont want to rush to build out the single family houses. Thats not what moves for the needle for us as a city.
I say that after we do all of the best master-planning we can, we build the densest, multi-family mixed use residential units FIRST and just watch the vacancy rate of those units and how fast they sell. If they sit vacant ( they wont… but im totally okay with this as a natural experiment to show that Im right) then maybe we can adjust our thinking… But so long as the dense units that are preferentially accessable by locals are filling up, we can keep building those until we hit saturation, and only then do we start buiding out the planned single family homes.
Perhaps SOME SFH can be built if it helps pay for land dedication sites perhaps… (?) that might be justifiable…
Tim, thank you for the thoughtful response I’ll try and wrestle with the challenges that your answer illuminates.
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The challenge the City will have with the addition those 10k people who already work in Davis is that they will be money losers for the City Budget. As you pointed out in the comment I reprinted earlier, “Economically, Socially, and Environmentally: Single Family Housing is unsustainable. ” The reason for that is simple the costs of providing services to the individual residents of those homes is greater than the Property Tax and Sales Tax they generate. As you have pointed out, hat is true nationwide, but it is particularly true in Davis where the per capita Sales tax revenues are horrendous. Davis residents don’t spend money in Davis (with car purchases and restaurant meals being the exceptions). In addition those existing employees who commute into Davis have minimal discretionary income to spend, even if there were places to spend that money in Davis.
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I am not sure where you get your service jobs ratio of 0.8 people, but with a total job count in Davis of 16,077 and a Davis campus enrollment of more than twice that number, I don’t believe that 0.8 ratio applies to Davis. When we look at the breakdown of those 16,077 jobs in Davis, how many of them are directly related to UCD enrollment? The first category isn’t. That is DJUSD. The second category is hospitals and doctors and other healthcare providers. Again, not going to change as University enrollment changes. Food Services and Hotels definitely will be affected. Retail Trade? Professional, Scientific and Technical Services? The 16,077 current jobs ends up being whittled down quite a bit. Even on-campus, the 11,439 total Faculty and Staff on the Davis Campus is only a ratio of 0.3, and that number has been going down for UCD at the same time as enrollment has been increasing.
3,505 Educational Services 21.8%
2,953 Health Care and Social Assistance 18.4%
2,129 Accommodation and Food Services 13.2%
1,828 Retail Trade 11.4%
1,571 Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services 9.8%
558 Other Services (excluding Public Administration) 3.5%
504 Manufacturing 3.1%
492 Real Estate and Rental and Leasing 3.1%
490 Public Administration 3.0%
332 Management of Companies and Enterprises 2.1%
304 Finance and Insurance 1.9%
301 Wholesale Trade 1.9%
290 Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation 1.8%
266 Administration & Support, Waste Management and Remediation 1.7%
250 Construction 1.6%
208 Information 1.3%
66 Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting 0.4%
30 Transportation and Warehousing 0.2%
0 Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction 0.0%
0 Utilities 0.0%
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You and I are in agreement on this item; however, we do disagree on what the “best criticism of DiSC” was. For me, housing was a side issue. The biggest criticism of DiSC by far was that they had no prospective tenants, no marketing plan with target tenant possibilities, no endorsement from UCD, and no City of Davis Economic Development Plan. It was the Emperor’s New Clothes when it came to actually producing jobs.
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On that we also agree, and here again the specter of the Ponzi Scheme comes into play.
“You and I are in agreement on this item; however, we do disagree on what the “best criticism of DiSC” was. For me, housing was a side issue. The biggest criticism of DiSC by far was that they had no prospective tenants, no marketing plan with target tenant possibilities, no endorsement from UCD, and no City of Davis Economic Development Plan.”
To be honest, that was your lack of understanding of the dynamics of the market. Everyone I talked to actually in the business noted that the turn around time was too distant for actual clients and they also pointed out the lack of key space in the region. That was a non-issue that people made into an issue. Although most people who voted against the project wouldn’t have cared about this point anyway, because it was no skin off their back.
There’s a giant, already-built facility (in the form of Genentech) which will soon be available. Do they have any comments about that?
Not to mention the closure of a facility which housed biotech in San Francisco (pretty sure I can find that article, as well).
Also, do they have an opinion as the reason that the “Davis Innovation Center” (which “relocated” to Woodland) hasn’t been built so far? Even AFTER it added 1,600 housing units during that “move”?
Is there anyone who had their “skin removed” as a result of the repeated failures of the “innovation centers”? (Other than those who actually would have experienced a “housing shortage” – it it was actually viable and approved in the first place?)
This entire issue was one of the most-clear examples of a “pursuit of growth” that had nothing to do with the claims of a “housing shortage” – despite those claims originating from the SAME PEOPLE.
The logical question being, do they ignore their own “justifications”? Apparently so.
This is part of the reason for adopting more dense building forms. The place where single family houses break us is the maintenance of roads, sewer lines, electrical. You have to run a LOT more linear feet / miles pipe to service a single family home than an apartment building.
The work from strong towns examined this and showed that the denser more urban areas were not only net-profitable, but they were subsidizing the single family zones.
I don’t know where the point is in terms of density where we start making money rather than losing it, but there is SOME point where that occurs, and part of the “real” planning process we should go through is to understand and know exactly where that point actually is, (and make sure we are exceeding it.)
That is probably the only truly useful thing that came from my attempt to come up with a student : city ratio… The floor value of city size to students in the smallest college towns with no commuters was 1.8… That is where that .8 comes from.
Again, another reason to build medium density mixed use. You are building residential AND the commercial to go with it at the same time.
Thinking about it… this is another place where our protectionist instincts backfired… I suspect you were involved at the time… when we realized that our keeping of stores like target out of town were only forcing people to drive out of town for shopping thus depriving us of sales tax…
It all points to the need for comprehensive and thoughtful planning… details matter, as does a healthy respect for actual market forces.
David, you have tried to make that vacuous argument many times before. I didn’t say actual tenants. I said prospective tenants. They couldn’t even articulate anything meaningful about the market segments they had identified as targets. There was zero intelligence shared about what the scope of actual demand was in the marketplace.
You fall into the same thinking trap when you cite the number of housing pre-applications as evidence of demand. When the funding sources for the individual pre-applications weigh in, they will narrow the field considerably. Right now the respective developers are trying to be the ones that get to the starting line first. Those are the ones that the funding sources will see as having minimal competition from the other proposals. The ones that get to the starting line later will have to do considerably more convincing of the financial community that the conceptual demand can be translated into real/actionable demand.
Matt:
David:
You are actually both right.
This is a mixed bag…. a good innovation center has space for companies at various stages. If you want to attract a DMG mori to town, or a pharma company like the new one that just landed in Vacaville, you need already entitled land with zero question marks on it, ready to go. No “big” tenant like that ( and they are the ones that really pay benefits to the city) is going to sign up prior to a measure J vote… They dont have time (or risk tolerance) for that… which makes David right.
But that said, But at the same time… if you ONLY try to cater to the big companies coming in from the outside, then you really aren’t building an “innovation park” and that is where I think Matt’s criticism is valid. The companies that are most likely to realize their revenues here (and pay lots of taxes here) are probably going to be the homegrown companies… and so you really do need a pipeline of support to get companies to that mature stage where they are economically productive for the city. That is the END of an innovation pipeline, and there was no work developing the middle of that pipeline.
Take-home message: There wasn’t enough comprehensive planning from the city’s side… it again speaks to a myopic process that isn’t looking at the big picture. If we don’t fix that process, I don’t think we are going to get different results.
Tim – I don’t completely agree that this only applies to big companies. If you figure 6 to 10 years for build out and approval, I don’t think a small company is going to be able to commit either. At best, you might be able to capture a few companies that are in Davis, have a current place, and looking to expand/ move up in a moderate period of time.
You are right David, I made my point pretty clumsily… let me try again….
For big companies, an innovation park is a place with vacant land to build your factory on. This is the space that DiSC had labeled as “advanced manufacturing” on their space plan. It is “build to suit”.
You are correct that it is impossible to expect the developer to have that space sold, or even have a LOI prior to the campaign…. No business would go for that.
for small and medium companies however, the building need to be built on spec…. There is a different business model and a different kind of landlord who builds life science space like that, and there are many that do Buzz Oates is generally not that kind of landlord…. But I’m working on them…. They might come around.
point is, the details for that pipeline, how they were going to support the young / smaller companies, what they were going to commit to building on spec and for who…. Those were all things that could have been done more proactively, but they weren’t. Fault for that is on the city…. That is where I’m saying matt was right…. I quoted the wrong part of his statement earlier….
Fair enough Tim. I’m not going to defend the city, I don’t think the city or council did nearly a good enough job of laying out the need and benefit for economic development.
Matt
On retail sales tax revenues, Davis’ problem is that we don’t have the businesses offering what residents want because of City policies that have restricted those businesses. The experience of Nugget replacing the previous failed grocery store on Covell is one example, and the existence of grocery stores that are too small and targeted to the wrong populations in Old East Davis and West Davis are further examples. Failing to expand the Richards underpass which restricted access to downtown from both I-80 and South Davis further squeezed out retail sales. And a mistaken belief that car sales would continue along the same path is another factor. In addition, because we’ve unintentionally pushed out local workers (who now commute) with our housing policies that were supposed to do the opposite and replaced then with commuters, mostly to Sacramento, we’ve driven away the customer base. Those who commute in don’t see the retail and services to buy here, and the Sacto commuters shop and dine first in Sacto and West Sac (see the renewed vibrancy in Midtown for example). But that’s the status quo and we can’t use that to project into a future where we are trying to change the status quo. That a key part of creating a vision. Why bother making changes if we assume that we can’t make changes?
There have been larger companies that have tried to build here but our restrictions and barriers have steered them away, and our restrictive neighborhood zoning that was intended to enhance downtown businesses has both failed to maintain the downtown retail (at one point this year there were 7 empty large restaurant spaces) and discouraged smaller retail distributed around town to make “15 minute” neighborhoods. All of these problems need to be addressed as part of a more comprehensive planning process.
A point on the number of jobs within Davis–its much more than 16,000 because the source you cite is missing 4,500-8,000 jobs when matched against both Census and Employment Development Division data. I confirmed with Matt Kowta that this gap exists and that data source cannot be relied upon. So we have many more people working here that we need to plan for. Remember that there’s a pool of 3,500 who work at UCD and at least 12,000 commuting to Davis who probably would prefer to live here.
As for the service job ratio, it can’t be computed directly from job linkages as Nobel Prize winner Wassily Leontief showed in developing input-output analysis. There not only direct and indirect job creation, but also induced job creation that support those direct and indirect jobs. That ratio of 0.8 is a very common finding across most regional economic impact studies.
I agree with David’s point on DiSC that asking for more specifics on tenants etc was not possible, but on the other hand the developers couldn’t get those commitments in any case due to the political uncertainty created by Measure J/R/D. This was a chicken and egg problem. It’s probably the same reason why UCD refused to commit to support it–why be on the losing end of a local dispute? Changing the approval process is the only way to start to fix this problem.
Yet I also agree with you that the development could have been better at defining what industries it was targeting. But again there, having a City economic development vision, like the one that Anya and I spelled out to focus on sustainable food. I put more of the blame on the City than the developers there.
When you are a student, Davis FEELS smaller and more walk-able. When I was an undergrad I lived near trader joes, I could bike onto campus, walk into downtown… you saw people on foot everyhwer.. it did feel very vibrant.
But if you are an adult living in El Macero, or west of 113, you are living a VERY different reality… you come home to a quiet home of your own… you drive to a shopping center… maybe downtown or to sudwerk (if you are cool) But that “people are everywhere” feeling is not the same as it is on campus and downtown when shool is in session.
I think the downtown is more vibrant than ever actually… especially with the outdoor dining options… Summertime is dead of course… but friday afternoons, most evenings, and weekend… there are LOTS of people in our downtown walking around… I dont think that it has lost its vibrancy..
Tim, I agree with your perspective. In my opinion the vibrancy of Davis hasn’t changed. David has changed, and what was once vibrant for him, no longer is vibrant. For the demographic that David now inhabits, I would argue that Davis never was a vibrant place. For the demographic that david now inhabits Davis was a bedroom community with most of the people living in their own personal cocoons, focused on the day to day activities that they have chosen to include in their life. The rather rapid death of Neighborhood Associations almost immediately after they were born is one anecdotal example.
Since David was a UCD student, one very clear change has been the substantial growth of households that are retired. There are plenty of exceptions, but for the most part those retired households aren’t looking for vibrancy.
But David has been conspicuously silent on what “vibrancy” is. I am hoping he weighs in on that sometime soon.
I’m a little confused, are you talking about me or David Thompson?
Great comment, Matt. A couple of sentences stand out (in particular):
Though one example might be the closure of The Graduate. Can that be “blamed” on the city’s futile efforts to compromise that mall? Not sure.
And as a side note, the claim that (only) low-income households, living in subsidized apartments take public transit is flat-out wrong.
There is/was a substantial number of commuters taking public transit to their jobs in Sacramento, including those from Mace Ranch. One reason is that employers subsidize this, while another reason is due to the fact that commuter parking is expensive there. I don’t know if this has changed, due to the ability to telecommute. In which case, essentially no “commute” is required at all (or at least, not very often).
I suspect that the folks who commuted via BART to San Francisco are not (on average) “low-income”, either. But BART is now one of the public transit agencies experiencing a significant decline in revenue, apparently due to telecommuting (and possibly retirement of commuters in that area, as well).
None of this fits-in very well with what the state is requiring of those locales (e.g., regarding the “justification” for RHNA targets).
Even the Golden Gate Bridge has experienced a significant reduction in the number of crossings/revenue.
.
You shouldn’t be confused. You are the one who brought up vibrancy, not David Thompson.
I guess I did… yesterday, in another article. I will have a full response in a future column.
Tip for potential developers: Be sure to use the word “vibrant” in your upcoming mailers.
Perhaps right underneath the depiction of a sailboard or glider.
I look forward to it.
The one – and only – thing that currently makes the above even a possibility is Measure J. The city doesn’t develop property, developers do, and developers propose developments that they believe will make them the most money. The City Council can cajole a developer in an effort to make a peripheral project better, but in the end it has only two options: approve it for a Measure J vote, or kill it. And City Councils have a dismal record of denying poorly-designed projects.
Standing up to developers and saying “we want this density, with these transit features, and this commercial acreage, and don’t come back until you have it” will require a Council with vision and courage, and we haven’t seen that kind of vision and courage on the Council for at least 10 years. In the mean time, Measure J is the only thing standing between us and more of the same crappy developments.
Jim, As I see it, measure J is part of what is keeping us from having any cohesive planning or standards.
In a recent council meeting when they moved the two peripheral projects forward to the EIR… the council was asking Mike and Sherri why they couldn’t have a general plan update or a specific plan… and what eventually came out was: When the council puts a measure J project on the docket, that is pretty much “the direction” that the planning department pursues.
Because under Measure J/R/D the proposals START with the developers outside of any large-scale plan, they just do what they think will a) pass with the voters and b) allow them to make money.
Contrast this with what Robb Davis has proposed: ( this is from his “densify davis” piece)
I think that sounds like a better way. You dangle a carrot of NOT having to go through a measure J process in return for building what WE want you to build. Seems win-win to me, and if that is what you mean by “The one – and only – thing that currently makes the above even a possibility is Measure J.” then I probably agree.
Moving on I’d like to comment on another of your statements:
While I agree, the problem I think is a little deeper… why does the council need “courage” to do good urban planning? Because of a toxic anti-growth contingency that appears at every council meeting and floods their inboxes with emails opposing everything that even smells like change…
Politicians do not crave toxic dissent, they avoid it, and there has been no organizing FOR growth until the last year or so, and even for those organizations being described as “in their infancy” would be generous.
So I’m not as quick to blame our council for this. The voters are the ones ultimately in charge. It’s up to us to demand good planning and ensure that the council actually does it. For the past 20 years the only pressure they have been subjected to has been from a well-organized “we don’t need a growth plan because we don’t want to grow at all” contingent.
THAT is what needs to change if we want to see change in city policy: We need to organize outside of city hall if we want the right decisions IN city hall to be made in the future. I might not be an urban planner… but I DID get a minor in political science…
I think that Tim and Robb have proposed a more effective use of the Measure J/R/D process and avoids a confrontation with the state over its legality: Set up a set of clear standards in a prescribed area that allows a development to bypass the uncertainty and expense of an election, but the certainty gives the City the opportunity to comprehensively plan across multiple prospects and integrate with the existing city. But the the prospect of a vote and the increased likelihood of losing if a developer doesn’t agree with the standards is the hammer that provides leverage with compliance. We can have the best of both options and maintain even more control over what is developed.
In a recent council meeting when they moved the two peripheral projects forward to the EIR… the council was asking Mike and Sherri why they couldn’t have a general plan update or a specific plan… and what eventually came out was: When the council puts a measure J project on the docket, that is pretty much “the direction” that the planning department pursues
In making that statement, Mike and Sherri are saying, “We are not capable of doing two things in the same time line.” That is appalling on its face, but even more important is the fact that it says they are not capable of thinking and acting proactively, only reactively.
Matt
I’m afraid you’re right about the inability to plan proactively. Like the Downtown Plan, it’s going to have to be citizens supported by consultants who take this on. We’re going to have to push aside staff.
In regard to the “usual suspects” who keep trying to undermine Measure J, all I can say is good luck with that.
You haven’t even put forth a compelling “problem”, yet. (Not for lack of trying, however.)
Voters are, however, apparently going to be asked to approve at least a couple of massive, sprawling proposals within the next couple of years under Measure j – not long after the two consecutive failures of DISC. With the first one being essentially a “carbon-copy” of the earliest failure under Measure J – Covell Village.
After Covell Village II and Shriner’s fail, I’m actually looking forward to all of the hand-wringing, finger pointing, and moaning that occurs on here – along with more empty threats regarding Measure J. At this point, I find it “satisfying” (dare I say “amusing”?) to see their increasing frustration.
I have learned from experience on here that being polite to these people (or pointing out the weakness of their arguments) doesn’t work, anyway. They’re going to continue their war, regardless.
And they’ll continue to lose. (That’s not a “hope”, as much as it is a reality.)
These are separate issues. If the Council wanted to do a general plan update or specific plan, they have the power to make it happen (there’s that vision thing). And if the Council didn’t like any of the developer proposals, they didn’t have to direct staff to pursue them (there’s the courage thing).
Jim is correct when he says, “If the Council wanted to do a general plan update or specific plan, they have the power to make it happen (there’s that vision thing).” Look at how the Downtown Plan was accomplished. The vast majority of the work was done by paid consultants and citizen volunteers. Council does indeed have the power … and part of that power is the ability to write the check for the consultants. It is pretty clear that they don’t want to do a general plan update.
Thats pretty much what I was saying.. they have the power, but they didn’t feel the incentive to USE it. (And probably still don’t) because the anti-growth activists show up and complain loudly, and the the other side doesn’t ( unless they are a developer)
Either way, we are playing coula/woulda/shoulda here because we cant go back in time and ask the council to take general planning seriously. Its apparently too late.
At the council meeting where they allowed the two properties to go forward with an environmental review, they decided there wasn’t even enough time for a specific area plan… so they defaulted to “just lets review the developer’s plans” ( AKA NO master planning)
So this is a wholesale failure of the planning process, and the process is currently going forward to allow two huge swaths of single family housing which we KNOW is irresponsible to build, (for all of the reasons I have enumerated in this series of articles…) all because the city was doing the easy thing and letting measure J be our de-facto planning process.
It didn’t have to be this way… but it IS, and that is what we need to respond to.
There needs to be a measure J amendment on the 2024 ballot. We have the time to create a GOOD plan that delineates where we want the urban limit line to be, and details the development and connectivity standards discussed in Robb Davis’ proposal… It doesnt need to be an exhaustive general plan update for it to be ten times better than what has been proposed already, and if City Hall wont lead that charge, then WE should.
There already are master and specific plans for those areas – which I support at least.
Those plans include rotating crops of tomatoes, corn, and (not sure – but did I see wheat growing at the Covell Village site within the past few months)?
Now, why anyone would be “opposed to” those plans is beyond me.
You’ll have a chance to “reaffirm” the plan that I support.
Indeed – vote against them.
I’d almost encourage you to try. Can only imagine where “we” (whatever that means) “want the urban limit line to be”, the “conditions” under which sprawl would be allowed in those massive, newly-annexed lands, and the decision-making authority (regarding whether or not a given proposal meets those conditions) granted to the council – as if they’re not already causing enough problems for the community.
(The same council which doesn’t even update the general plan).
Not to mention “state involvement” on any/all annexed lands, which may override “any” decision made by voters or the council. (Apparently, the only thing that the state can’t touch is farmland, outside of city limits.)
Oh, and definitely try this in 2024, before the two proposals are scheduled to be on the ballot. I’m sure that those two developers will be “happy” about throwing a monkey-wrench into “their” plans, at this point. (So yeah – go for it.)
And in fact, when the attempt to undermine Measure J fails again, it will probably help doom those two proposals (assuming any “help” was needed to do so in the first place).
Ron O
You’re support of a particular plan is irrelevant because you live in Woodland, not Davis where the decision is being made. You’re not part of the “we”–its the citizens of Davis who are the “we.” Don’t pretend you’re a stakeholder.
So what about the tomatoes, corn and wheat that will be plowed under in Woodland to build the housing that would have gone into Village Farms? And what about the local air pollutants and road drainage runoff from the roads between Woodland and Davis from the commuters would otherwise live in Davis and likely ride bikes more in town? What about the increased GHG emissions that increase the ambient temperature and depresses crop output everywhere? You are failing to look at this holistically.
We risk losing much control of peripheral development if we don’t amend Measure J/R/D is a manner that keeps the state from coming in an abrogating it.
“We risk losing much control of peripheral development if we don’t amend Measure J/R/D is a manner that keeps the state from coming in an abrogating it.”
This is a critical point but I think part of the problem is that (A) Ron doesn’t see a housing need and (B) Ron believes the state will not succeed in requiring additional housing.
Do you view Don Shor as a “stakeholder”? Again, I’m not here to discuss my personal connections to Davis.
For that matter, I’ve never discussed where I live, and neither did the newspaper articles you posted some time ago.
What are you referring to? Woodland’s plans are already established. Nothing that Davis does will impact them, other than perhaps the timing.
You seem to think I’m a supporter of development in Woodland. Did I ever say that?
I did say that Woodland (and just about every other locale in the region) is a “lost cause”.
Try it, see what happens.
Truth be told, Measure J will always be under threat, one way or another. And if it’s somehow overturned, that’s only one round of the continuing battle.
But again, the more-likely outcome is that the state will “take control” of any land that is annexed to the city.
I don’t think the “need” has ever been defined or quantified in any way, other than the state’s targets – which have no basis.
The claimed “need” seems to alternate between “price” and “supply” – again, neither of which have been defined or quantified. For that matter, probably 3/4 of the permanent population of Davis is UNAFFECTED by the so-called “housing crisis”. It’s a sound bite to them – like “systemic racism”.
Price (e.g., rental price) can be controlled via rent control. But it’s already “moderated” by surrounding communities, as well.
Who, exactly are the (additional) people you’re trying to house, and what makes you think they’d move to Davis from wherever they’re currently living?
Or do you think crying “housing crisis” repeatedly is an “argument”?
So yeah, that’s what you’d need to do – define how many additional people you’re trying to house, the reason that they’d move from wherever they’re current living (which may include family members who DON’T work in Davis or UCD), the household salary range you’re targeting, the price and type of housing that is suitable for them, whether or not it requires a subsidy, where that subsidy would come from (and how soon), where they’re working (e.g., in the city, or at UCD), how you’d prevent your non-targeted population from occupying that housing (e.g., migrants from the Bay Area), etc.
Just a few factors, off the top-of-my-head.
Or, you can continue yelling “housing crisis” – your choice (and one you’ve already made).
Oh, and Richard can continue putting forth persuasive arguments regarding where I live.
It doesn’t work that way.
Actually, whether or not “I’m” included in that group wasn’t even my point – and wouldn’t make any difference, anyway.
I was merely pointing out that “someone” (or some “group”) would have to propose “where” the proposed urban limit line would be (beyond Davis’ current boundaries), before even presenting it to voters.
As such, there is no representative “we”. (It certainly would not consist of just “you”, Tim Keller, Robb Davis, etc.)
“We” (which isn’t a comprehensive collection of stakeholders in the first place) is nevertheless / ultimately the voters, themselves. The same ones you want to disenfranchise, via this idea. That particular “we” is not going to support this.
And I don’t think it’s likely they’d approve an expansion that whomever “we” consists of presents to them. Let alone the “conditions” that some other “we” (the council) would supposedly help create and then monitor.
Small groups consisting of “We” is the very reason that Measure J was created in the first place.
“We” is also the reason that more than a decade (and untold amounts of money) were wasted regarding failed technology parks.
“We” is also the reason for Covell Village I, and now – Covell Village II.
Turns out that “we” causes as a lot of division and problems, in Davis – even outside of its boundaries.