By David M. Greenwald
Executive Editor
Davis, CA – As I write this piece, the city of Davis remains out of compliance with state housing law and has twice failed to adopt a Housing Element. The city now estimates that they will submit their third version of the Housing Element by the end of the year.
One of our former commenters has argued we should do as certain coastal cities are doing in order to meet their housing needs. I am not sure how instructive that actually is. San Francisco, perhaps the best example, is being asked to zone for 82,000 additional units, half of them affordable.
How are they doing that? Well they have some huge vacant or underutilized parcels within their city (on the edge actually) and they are going to densify. Davis could certainly attempt to meet its housing needs by increasing its density and staying within current confines—but Davis is not San Francisco, and that approach will lead to very expensive housing, most of which will not be attractive to families.
Instead, what I would suggest is look at what is happening across the state with cities like Elk Grove, Huntington Beach, and San Bernardino.
Davis doesn’t have the geographic limitations of San Francisco, and building 16-story buildings is probably going to change the character of this community a lot more than my proposed suggestion of adding the proposed projects that have come forward. Davis will 
need to figure out a way to probably double the amount of affordable housing offered by those five projects, but, if they do, they can probably make it through the next twenty years or so.
Can Davis do it within the confines of the current Measure J laws? I think that—as I alluded to earlier this week—is a critical question going forward. I have suggested a few ways to modify Measure J to make sure we can build our housing without at the same time totally removing growth control measures.
The state of California I think has demonstrated that they will take things seriously. HCD and AG Rob Bonta have demonstrated they will use their authority to compel cities to comply.
This week, they announced a settlement with San Bernardino to zone for about 8200 units in its Housing Element.
Rather than fight it through, the city reached a settlement with the state.
“Our state’s Housing Element Law is in place to ensure that all cities build their fair share of housing. No city is spared from that legal obligation. It is not a choice. It is the law,” said Attorney General Rob Bonta. “I applaud the City of San Bernardino’s city council, and its planning and legal team, for recognizing that public resources should be directed at collaborating, rather than further litigating, our way out of California’s housing crisis. State leaders are united and committed to ensuring that every city provides more affordable housing options.”
“Cities that fail to follow the law and plan for their fair share of housing will be held accountable—the status quo will not be tolerated,” said Governor Gavin Newsom. “The state is providing incentives, resources and when necessary, taking legal action to ensure that communities do their part to meet the housing needs of Californians.”
“Our message is clear—every city and county will be held accountable to state housing laws,” said HCD Director Gustavo Velasquez. “The state is making financial resources, technical assistance, and state-owned land available to help cities and counties meet current and future housing needs. We will continue to work in partnership with the City of San Bernardino to ensure they meet all the terms agreed to in this settlement because ultimately we want to spend time building homes—not in court.”
“This settlement agreement is a major victory for the residents of San Bernardino. San Bernardino has been in desperate need of new affordable housing for many years,” said ICLS attorney Anthony Kim. “Housing Element law is designed to make building affordable housing more attractive to both City planners and housing developers alike. Submitting a Housing Element that complies with California law puts San Bernardino on track to be a more attractive place to live for all residents of California.”
So what does this mean for Davis?
That’s going to be the interesting question. Will there be a lawsuit? We know that Legal Services is already threatening to file one based on the city’s failure to comply with state housing law. We know that California YIMBY has filed some suits as well.
It is probably instructive to note that the state here acted as Intervenors in a lawsuit filed by Promise Gracia, Nadine Fierro and Sibylle Bartz against San Bernardino.
They note, “Californians continue to suffer under a housing affordability crisis.”
The Legislature has found that “[t]he lack of housing . . . is a critical problem that threatens the economic, environmental, and social quality of life in California.”
This crisis is “hurting millions of Californians, robbing future generations of the chance to call California home, stifling economic opportunities for workers and businesses, worsening poverty and homelessness, and undermining the state’s environmental and climate objectives.”
A key contributor is the failure of local governments “to plan for the necessary housing supply.” One of the ways to counteract that is the requirements that local governments include housing elements which zone for the necessary housing.
In this case, the city of San Bernardino has not complied with this requirement. As such, HCD required that the Court “issue a writ ordering the City to bring its housing element into compliance with State law, and issue a declaration that the City has failed to fulfill its planning obligations.”
I think most reasonable people will agree that the Davis City and City Council are in good faith attempting to comply with state law.
Right now they are scrambling to find land that can be rezoned. But at some point, probably the next RHNA cycle, they are going to have to look toward peripheral lands to do so. And that’s where I think Measure J is probably most vulnerable.
If the state and/or the courts see Measure J as the barrier to compliance, there is a good chance they will reach out to the courts to intervene and there is a good chance that the courts will. We are not there yet and there are still ways the city can forestall this.
But if the state went after San Bernardino and others, Davis will follow at some point. And at that point, we will start to lose some local control.
The sooner the State kicks Davis NIMBYs to the curb the better.
I think the question is less “can” and more “will”… Theoretically we CAN pass all sorts of housing via measure J, but the reality is that we don’t.
The other issue is when you consider the question from yesterday re: what TYPES of housing can get produced via a measure J process, it is very obvious to me that we have some perverse incentives at play because of that ordinance: There is a big difference between “the kind of housing we need” and “the kind of housing project that will pass at the polls”.
What is being proposed is “typical suburban development”. which isn’t controvertial to many voters but also isn’t what we want if we actually want to solve our local housing shortage OR if we want to take climate change seriously.
Yes we have a planning process to go through… but have we ever seen a project substantially change during the planning process?
( Im actually asking.. thats not a rhetorical question.. I’d like to know)
The few proposals I have paid attention to through that process have changed VERY LITTLE… so we are kinda at a lose-lose proposition with an un-altered measure J: the proposal either gets shot down by the voters ( lose) or we get a traditional single family development that has 2x the carbon footprint of what we know we should be doing, and will do little to reduce VMT’s and house our displaced locals… ( also lose)…
I’ve been trying to have these conversations with developers, but guess what: Energy efficiency and carbon footprint and VMT’s aren’t really even on their values map. It’s what economists would call call an “externality” for them…. So what motivation does a developer have to propose something different or potentially controversial for the sake of energy efficiency and carbon footprint? NONE.
This is why even though I tend to prefer “smaller government” when possible, it is nevertheless true that in situations like this, regulation and oversight is entirely necessary. In this case, the modification to J is exactly a tool to provide incentive for building sustainably AND for the right population. Under the current system, those incentives are reversed.
Oh, yes, though this was many years ago:
https://www.cityofdavis.org/about-davis/history-symbols/davis-history-books/growing-pains-chapter-4
By the way, I highly recommend reading through that whole book
(https://www.cityofdavis.org/about-davis/history-symbols/davis-history-books/growing-pains-thirty-years-in-the-history-of-davis)
It looks like the Senda Nueva project changed for the worse. Village Homes went through largely unscathed (having lived there.)
I’m a bit surprised that a developer or group of developers have not challenged Measure J directly in the courts.
That said, the citizens of Davis need to act quickly to control how the City decides to move forward. At the moment, it’s really a very passive approach that seems to harken back the 1950s when the City was run by local businessmen in their interests. This time its a cadre of developers who are pitching their plan individually without coordination. As others have suggested we need to pull together a broad proposal and a set of guidelines.
For the most part I think the reason developers haven’t is that they are playing the long game, and most local developers realize this isn’t a one-time deal and they can possibly gain in the short-term and lose the long game.
That is an interesting comment David. I’m not sure what you man by “lose the long game.” Care to elaborate?
For the most part developers only care about one thing … net money flowing into their bank accounts rather than net money flowing out of those accounts. Their ideal scenario is as much net money flowing in as possible. That desire runs completely contrary to the general public’s strongly expressed desire for greater housing affordability. The public wants houses that cost considerably less than the average home in their community costs. Developers want to build and sell houses that cost the buyer more ore than the average home in their community costs. That sets up a clash between capitalism and social welfare … an intractable clash.
That is where the State comes in. As noted in the article Governor Gavin Newsom recently said, “The state is providing incentives, resources …” In addition, HCD Director Gustavo Velasquez said, “The state is making financial resources, technical assistance, and state-owned land available to help cities and counties meet current and future housing needs.” If the State really means what it is saying then the capitalistic desires of the developers can be met by the infusion of those State provided financial resources.
By the long game, I mean they plan to have more than one project going forward, so they don’t want to burn their bridges.
Matt, I think you are taking a macro economic view of the housing market and by applying it to Davis you are missing the mark.
I know of several frontier parcels on the periphery of Davis that are owned by local families that view the current blockade created by Measure J as something they are willing to wait out if they must. These families, who arrived early in this land of opportunity created by the siting of UCD, have amassed assets with tremendous positive cash flows in addition to holdings of undeveloped land that they hope will someday be passed on to their children and grandchildren if they are blocked from development today. They are under little economic pressure to act because they have portfolios that throw off so much cash they can easily wait.
While Keynes correctly observed that “In the long run we are all dead.” Many of the local families, that have done so well developing the housing infrastructure, that for many years allowed UCD to focus solely on the education and research missions of the university, now are looking at undeveloped properties they own as opportunities for their kids or grandkids.
David,
But it the developers have NO projects, it’s not clear what their long game should be. By challenging the law, they can actually get into the game. And it’s clear for some developers, they are less concerned about the community politics.
Ron, I think you are correct in your assessment as far as it goes, but since I have a parcel map that I created several years ago to serve as a reference, I’m not seeing very many of those families that own peripheral land that are actually waiting on the sidelines. Most of them have active proposals that have been currently submitted to the City, and nonme of those proposals are structured to increase the net housing affordability in Davis. That makes sense because they are indeed capitalists.
The only way to get the landowners/developers the profit margin they desire AND increase the net affordability of housing in Davis is for the community (local, State and Federal) to come up with the financial resources needed to bridge the gap between the net profitability of truly affordable housing and the net profitability that the developers desire.
Agreed… this is why we have government
Agreed, this is why activism exists
The difficult thing here is that our government exists for doing those things that the free market does poorly or not at all… but we ARE in a situation where the relevant government body is used to NOT being engaged in the process in a prescriptive way…
We have let measure J proposals BE our planning process for more than a decade… and we have forgotten that it is our governments’ job to actually plan our community and look after these details.
If citizens do not request intervention, there is no reason why we should expect any.
I think one could make a case that if Measure J had never been enacted the City Council would have taken a much more active role in development planning. With Measure J in place, why bother to put in a lot of effort to plan because the ultimate decisions aren’t up to the Council anyway.
Project proponents want to work with those who hold the final say. Measure J effectively takes the CC out of the picture since all they can do is put the project on the ballot.
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