Davis, CA – This week, YIMBY Law introduced its Fair Housing Element Tracker. Buried within my article is the fact that Davis, while in compliance with its Housing Element, is making what they call “slow progress.”
“This city is falling behind. It is not on track to meet its housing targets,” they write.
The tracker noted, “Every 8 years California assesses housing need and assigns each city with a target they must hit. If Davis repeats its efforts from the previous cycle it will only meet 82% of the identified need.”
This is a reminder that this is a bit of a new game. I have pointed out the problems Davis will have complying with housing, and some people have argued that, well, the city is in compliance with housing, therefore this is a problem for four years from now.
That’s not how it works anymore.
“If a city fails to adopt a state-required housing plan and ignores housing mandates, they can face a series of penalties including losing the power to control their own zoning or being sent into a court receivership and have decisions made for them,” an article last year that appeared in the Voice of OC warned.
It’s one thing not to adopt a housing plan on time—Davis had previously incurred that, which included the so-called Builder’s Remedy status which has led to the city being forced to allow the Palomino Place project to go through the Builder’s Remedy status and bypass a Measure J vote.
Palomino is of course a bit of an outlier because it was zoned for agriculture but incorporated into the city already.
Then there’s San Francisco.
Last fall, the state warned San Francisco it may losing be funding if the city didn’t meet its housing goal.
They had already had an approved Housing Element, but ABC 7 reported that “despite efforts to build 82,000 new housing units in the next eight years, San Francisco’s streamlining process hasn’t gone far enough to meet that goal. So, California has put San Francisco on notice by threatening to lose millions in funding.”
As we noted earlier this year, San Francisco became the first city in California to miss its state housing goals.
The Chronicle reported that “the California Department of Housing and Community Development ruled that San Francisco did not meet its housing permitting goals in 2023, making it the first city in California to be subject to Senate Bill 423, the housing streamlining legislation passed last fall.”
That’s because SB 423, sponsored by Senator Scott Wiener, “requires cities that are behind on their state housing goals to streamline the approval of most projects.”
It’s more stringent on San Francisco which is required to be subjected to annual evaluation of its state housing goals.
But other cities will be evaluated every four years—that means there is a midway check point for cities like Davis, and Davis is behind.
I have been predicting over the last several years that there is a good chance that the state will come in and challenge Measure J—the voter-passed ordinance that requires a vote of the people in order to rezone agricultural land.
The state continues to be very aggressive here. We have seen numerous cities face litigation from the state when they failed to pass housing projects, when they failed to adopt a housing plan, and, in San Francisco’s case, when they failed to make adequate progress on their annual report.
We have already noted that Davis faces a challenge in the next cycle, because the city has acknowledged they lack infill opportunities to meet the next cycle of housing needs.
But we have paid less attention to progress on the current cycle that was only approved earlier this year.
“The city in a nutshell is going to have to turn over every stone of infill sites, but even that alone will not do it. We are going to, I think without question, also need to be looking very seriously at periphery housing sites as well,” City Manager Mike Webb acknowledged during a November meeting.
But just getting the Sixth Cycle approved took three submissions to the state, and the city struggled to put together enough sites of infill in order to get its Housing Element finally approved.
While they finally made it, the margin is now “rail thin,” as one councilmember noted.
Mayor Arnold further warned, “I would just say to those who have said that we will be able to meet our next RHNA cycle numbers without going outside of the city limits… I suggest they tune in or watch the recording of this meeting as we really try to meet our current requirements simply with infill and the difficulty we’re having in doing so.”
The peril of the plan is that it relies on cobbling together a number of small infill sites to get to the number the state is mandated.
The removal of the two church sites—one located on Mace and the other on Montgomery and Mace—meant that the city would lose around 175 units. That punctuated the problem faced by the city—they can no longer just put dots and shade shapes on a land use map; the stuff has to be entitled, planned and building permits taken out.
The data from YIMBY Law shows the city is behind in this cycle. And that wasn’t even supposed to be the heaviest lifting.
As I pointed out last week, the city council chose to delay the approval of two land use projects until 2025 and 2026 and delay the potential of an update or amendment to Measure J until an undetermined point in time.
So at what point will the state begin to throw its weight around? We’ll have to see. I still think the city has time to approve housing projects, but I do think they have made the margin not only “rail thin” but also caused the path to compliance to be extremely narrow.
