In a way, the easiest group to deal with are those who somehow do not believe we have a housing crisis. At some point, you simply make your best case as to why you believe we need more housing and agree to disagree.
More difficult is the group of people who agree we need housing but argue “not this” or “not here” or even “not now.”
This weekend it was confirmed that the timeline to put Village Farms on the ballot is now November 2025. What has not been explained is why the project has slipped off a more aggressive March 2025 timeline.
I have had real concerns with pushing off the important and contentious discussion as state timelines tick. Worse yet, I am concerned that we have not gained anything from that delay. It is not as though we have greatly advanced the General Plan update while waiting on the specific housing.
So instead, we are going to need to push forward on discussions updating the General Plan concurrent with processing the latest Measure J projects.
Meanwhile, as the city drags its feet, time is marching on. The city needs to address housing for the current RHNA cycle and soon plan for housing in the next RHNA cycle and, at some point, as I have argued and as we have seen in other jurisdictions, the state will step in and say “enough.”
A lot of people seem in denial as to what that could look like and, more importantly, they are treating this time as though it were business as usual.
With all of that as the backdrop, the group, the Davis Citizens Planning Group, published a piece on their vision for the future.
At one level, I appreciate that they understand where things currently stand.
They write, “You believe Davis needs more housing, and you understand that there are not enough infill opportunities, which means we need to expand.”
They recognize the basic dilemma that the city faces—it needs more housing, it lacks sufficient infill opportunities, and therefore the city will have to look outside of the current boundaries to address housing needs.
The problem is that they don’t like the current proposals.
They think, “This isn’t what we need, it’s simply more expensive houses; a continuation of the failed pattern of ‘Urban Sprawl’ that we have long known is a failed paradigm.”
At the same time, they say, “You have thought carefully and long about development alternatives that better fit the livability and environmental goals expressed by Davis citizenry resulting in proposed alternatives, but the City is so far behind in the General Plan that there is no forum to get them into the public conversation.”
The bottom line is, therefore, “you might find yourself, a housing advocate, facing a Measure J/R/D vote that you cannot in good conscience support.”
That’s the premise of the Davis Citizens Planning Group. And they have a point.
But there is a problem. Actually there are several problems.
The first problem is that Davis needs housing. It needs housing because it lacks affordability in its current housing inventory. It needs housing because it lacks availability in its current housing inventory. It needs housing because the state of California is saying it has to build a certain amount of housing over a certain period of time and it is falling behind.
There is a second problem—not only do we lack infill opportunities, we have a limited number of Measure J projects where there are developers who are willing to build enough housing to meet the state’s requirements. (And I don’t think we should be blaming HCD or the state or RHNA for this; we need housing because this community is unsustainable without it).
As much as we have tried to make the term “developer” a four letter word, housing doesn’t build itself.
There is a third problem—we want to have certain types of housing, but in order to build housing we need someone willing to build it. We lack resources at this point to let the government do it. So we, for the most part, are going to have to rely on private developers and they need to be able to show investors and funders a return on investment that is sufficient to take the risk of underwriting what is often a billion dollar project.
That makes things challenging.
Finally, Measure J is really not a tool to accomplish this. Measure J is a blunt instrument. It gives the community a veto point to stop a project they don’t want. What it has not done very well is give the community leverage to get the project they do want.
As I see it, the are ways this could have been improved. The city needed to have the General Plan update sooner. It needed to start discussions on opportunities for revisions to Measure J.
But there also needs to be an understanding that, at the end of the day, the people putting their money behind these projects have some say over how they look. By drawing these kinds of lines in the sand, we in essence say that we would prefer no housing to housing that doesn’t meet the standards of what we want.
That works if we have time to hash these things out, but not if we need a certain amount of housing in a certain period of time or the state will take away local discretion.
And, even if that is not true, it has been 20 years since voters, for example, rejected Measure X and only now are we getting a new proposal.
That’s the problem—the perfect is pretty much always the enemy of the good. And we paralyze the process when we try to overanalyze things.
