In our previous article, we discussed our broken planning process and its consequences: How Measure J/R/D effectively prevents any high-level master planning of our community.
Today we will discuss the important issues around the proposals themselves, and why you too should be encouraging the developers and the council to reconsider going down the current path.
The Two Crises
When we talk about housing, we are actually battling two related crises:
The Housing Crisis
- “Starter homes” affordable to our workforce cannot be built here without subsidies;
- Even to rent a three-bedroom apartment takes a $120,000 income (assuming 35% goes to housing);
- The middle, especially our workforce, has been frozen out. This means 23,000 cars on our roads everyday for inbound commuters coming from neighboring towns to work here. (An almost equal number commute outward, and that also needs to be addressed);
- School enrollment is declining because young families are also priced out.
The Climate Crisis
- Receding glaciers among other indicators prove climate change is real, worldwide and now;
- The six warmest years on record in Sacramento have all occurred since 2014;
- Sprawling suburban housing patterns are recognized as a major contributor to greenhouse gases and global warming because our personal carbon footprint is largely dictated by the energy used in our house, and by our cars;
- Single-family homes require twice the energy to heat and cool than multifamily homes:
- Those 23,000 inbound commuters cause tailpipe emissions which would be reduced if they could afford to live closer to work, or eliminated if they were able to bike or take transit to work:
There is quite a bit to learn about the reasons why we started building our cities this way, who was behind it, and why we are still doing it, and it is a fascinating topic that, once again, we cannot hope to plumb the depths of here. But we encourage voters to learn this history, and we have a number of links on our website HERE for people who are interested in learning the back-story about why we started making these mistakes as a society;
That said, with the understanding that “the great suburban experiment” was indeed a mistake, is is disheartening to see these new proposals for the future of our city, perpetuating those mistakes: Car-centric, 1950’s-style low density housing, which in Davis’ market, will be unaffordable to all but high-income households, with commuters out of town;
Housing like this exacerbates the climate crisis, with low energy efficiency structures, and the people who live in these single-family homes, at the edge of town, by definition, will need to get into an automobile for every single trip outside the home—causing both traffic and GHG emissions.
The economic objections
On top of all of this are the city-economics objections to single-family housing, which are perhaps best communicated by a group called Strong Towns. (We have a local chapter of this organization here in Davis now, and you can find them at the Farmers Market.) In a similar vein, the economist Donald Shoup has also produced an enlightening work called “The high cost of free parking” which is also on our must-read list, and a short seven-minute summary video can be found on our site.
These economic objections to suburbia are compelling, and we have links to amazing articles discussing these issues on our website
But the short version of those arguments is this:
- Low density housing means that city services—roads/electrical/sewer—have to run much farther to serve many fewer people than they do in a denser city. And in the long term, the maintenance of these utilities costs far more than the property tax revenue paid by that housing. So single-family housing is a net drain on the city in the long term. In some cities that have been studied, the replacement costs for this infrastructure is more than the value of the homes themselves.
All Davisites who complain about the state of our roads, and the reliability of our grid during heatwaves, are in fact experiencing this very fact: We have a city (and PG&E) that has obligations to pay to upkeep infrastructure for homes that do not pay for themselves in property taxes (or utility rates). The dominance of single-family housing in our city is bankrupting us.
Why else do you think Measure Q was necessary? - On the commercial side, if everyone drives to go shopping, the only solution that can ever accommodate all of those cars is the kind of strip-mall, or mega mall development that we all hate.
We all love our local downtown don’t we? But what is the one thing we all dislike most about it? The lack of parking near where we want to go.
This is something that unfortunately cannot be fixed. You have to pick one or the other… either keep a downtown compact and walkable, or destroy it to build parking lots and push everything apart so that it isn’t as walkable.
You really can’t have both.
These seem like two different issues, but they are in fact two ends of the same issue: When we all live in the middle of a large tract of low-density housing, we all need to get into our cars to do everything. The low density of housing makes it almost impossible for transit to be effective or to make small nearby businesses viable, so that isn’t an option either.
That means that almost everyone who wants to go out shopping ALSO needs to bring their cars with them. The mega-mall and the strip mall shopping form factors are a result of this reality. Walkable commercial spaces like our downtown simply cannot meet the needs for all those cars.
Additional local issues
The above are the problems with the suburban paradigm in general, but there are also a variety of additional factors to consider that are specific to Davis:
- Approximately 1/3 of the 11,000 detached single-family houses in Davis are owned by persons over 65. Those who can afford to purchase the median price of $900,000 here have many options, including waiting for existing houses to be put up for sale.
- And because the housing shortage is regional, building more single-family homes in Davis will mostly attract more outbound affluent commuters, and will NOT be affordable by our inbound displaced population (the ones who jam up the Interstate 80 on/off ramps every rush hour). These commuters also frequently take their business out of town as well, reducing economic vitality here.
- Our shortage of student housing has forced many students into sharing single-family homes in the community. If we make more higher-density student housing available, especially closer to campus and downtown, we will actually free-up significant amounts of single-family rental homes.
- Single adults and families need apartment rental options too, and there currently are not many rental properties that are not designed for students. Apartments designed for families with larger floorplans and rooms are also needed in the mix.
- Purchasing a home is the first step in building family equity and wealth, but prices for single-family houses are too expensive to be “starter homes” for most; but single-family homes are not the only kind of housing in which you can build equity. Condos, townhomes and co-ops are property types that are more affordable by nature, and can serve as a more accessible first rung on the property ladder, but there is almost no available inventory of properties of this type.
- And if we want to reduce traffic, i.e. our community’s vehicle miles traveled, we should aim to provide housing for the 23,000 inbound commuters who are currently priced out of our market. The only way to do that is to build housing THEY can afford, and lots of it.
So in summary: There is simply a huge disconnect between our actual housing needs and what is being proposed by developers. They are the wrong kind of housing, being built to serve the wrong population.
The myth of “The Starter Single-Family Home”
This is another point which likely merits its own article, but the economics of our housing market mean that even “starter homes” need some kind of subsidy or (ineffective) financing gimmick such as down payment assistance or participating second mortgages in order to approach even the higher rungs of the market-rate affordable category—and when they are produced, they tend to be small homes on miniscule lots averaging 8-10 units per acre.
In our opinion, this category of housing shouldn’t even exist in our development proposals.
When you pack single-family houses that tight, there is no room for trees between them, any “privacy” you might want from your neighbors as compared to a multifamily structure are non-existent, and you have all of the energy inefficiencies of single-family homes.
At the end of the analysis, you are better off building townhomes, garden courts, or cluster homes. You can actually achieve higher housing densities, lower prices AND preserve much more common open space when you instead build multifamily housing. Maintaining the single-family home formfactor when the densities get much above 6 units per acre (gross) is actually a mistake.
That said, by all means we should be prioritizing the kind of housing that allows residents to get themselves onto the property ladder at the lowest rung. But that rung should NOT be a single-family home. It should be a condo, a townhome, or a co-op.
Are we letting the perfect be the enemy of the good?
This is the primary question that we get when raising these objections. Is it better to just let SOME housing pass for the sake of appeasing the state? To this question we have multiple responses:
- The framing of the question itself assumes that the baseline proposals are “good” and that we are expecting the “perfect.” Neither of these assumptions are true, given what we know about the impacts of single-family housing, economically, environmentally, and socially; and given that we know single-family housing won’t solve our housing problem AND will consume any opportunity to do it right. There is no reason to call these proposals “good.” None at all.
At the same time, the things we need to change to put them into the good category aren’t that extreme: We will get to the details of that in a follow-up article, but it really isn’t very hard to do a LOT better. We aren’t asking for “perfect,” just “good,” and the proposals aren’t there yet. - The ONLY way to see these proposals improve is to push back against them. Whether they get improved because the developers listen to our feedback, or the council does and requests changes… we don’t actually care. What is important is that these issues be raised, and alternatives explored. If we don’t push back, the chance of us getting something better is zero.
- We pay a particularly high opportunity cost if we develop these particular peripheral properties un-wisely. We can’t go back and change land use decisions once we approve these proposals (look at Mace Ranch), and certain opportunities like the chance to connect all of these peripheral properties via a coherent transit service will be lost if we develop half of the properties without that kind of high-level thinking.
- The scenario that we most hope for is that the projects get amended in a few important ways that address our concerns. If that happens, not only will we be for these proposals, we will help campaign for their passage. (The developer of DISC failed to make a commitment to City commissions to what the developer had already proposed, and the first one failed by a small margin as a result due to lack of that endorsement.)
In a town like Davis, THAT is what you need for a housing measure to pass. You need engagement from the community and genuine local grassroots support if you want to get past 50% of the vote.
We WANT to be part of the solution, we WANT to be part of the campaign that pushes these proposals to victory at the ballot box, but there are a few things that need to change to earn that buy-in.
This is how democracies function. Its negotiation, it’s give-and-take. We as voters have a right to decide whether these projects are good enough to make it to the ballot. We the voters have the right to decide whether our council members have been receptive enough to community input. We do not need to be blackmailed with “this is what the developer wants… take it or leave it.” And frankly, if that is how a developer engages with the community s/he is building for, then “leave it” is undoubtedly the right response.
good planning means considering our economy, our housing and our transit systems simultaneously—that is not being done here, and if it were, we would have much better proposals coming before us.
The properties around the Mace Curve represent an 17% expansion of our city. Are we REALLY thinking that it is a good idea to push forward issues that affect such a huge corner of our community without any effort at high-level master planning? We certainly don’t think so.
It’s not unreasonable for us to be asking our city to do SOME master planning; it is unreasonable for developers and the city to expect US to approve massive expansions of our city without it.
The Davis Citizens Planning Group
Alex Achimore – Architect
David Thompson – Urban Planner / Affordable Housing
Anthony Palmere – Transit
Tim Keller – Economic Development
Richard McCann – Sustainability and Energy
