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.
Developer is not a four letter word and your reference is insulting. Developers are the people who provide opportunity for people to build equity. “To get in” as one local politico once described his own home purchase.
In America most equity is held through home ownership and those homes are usually built by developers. So in essence developers are the portal to the middle class. And yes they do it to make money. That is our capitalist system.
How is this statement “insulting” : “As much as we have tried to make the term “developer” a four letter word, housing doesn’t build itself.” My point being that people in the community act as though developers are evil and yet, housing doesn’t build itself. How is that insulting?
It’s early so maybe I read you wrong but it’s high time someone took on this greedy developer meme.
The reality is that Davis sucks at DEI despite all the everybody welcome signs all over town. As your story on antisemitism shows we suck at diversity and inclusion. And your rhetoric, that you attribute to others, attacking the people who provide the opportunity to build equity shows we suck at allowing people to be included in the opportunity provided through ownership of property.
“It’s early so maybe I read you wrong but it’s high time someone took on this greedy developer meme.”
That was my intent.
David, I would make two comments
1) there is a wide gulf between where we are now which is “zero master planning” and what you are worrying about… which is “so much master planning that we don’t actually build anything”
This is not a binary choice between blindness and paralysis. Just a little bit of master planning could do a world of good.
2). You point about “we need housing” is far too simple. To borrow from the way Alex puts it: we need “housing, not houses” and sprinting to build the WRONG kind of housing that won’t actually solve our housing shortage really is silly.
We have time to negotiate / conceptualize for better proposals, we dont have time to let the proposals fail again and then re-start from scratch, and THAT is the biggest threat.
My recollection from previous comments is that you have met with the developers of Village Farms and they have no plans to change their proposal. Is that accurate? If so, then we don’t ‘have time to negotiate’ etc. Best evidence is that it will be on the ballot November 2025.
Don, yes and no. Im not surprised that the developers didnt seem eager to change their proposal based on the feedback of one guy when I met with them.
But that doesnt mean they arent going to be willing to change their proposal at all. I remember at the EIR scoping meeting watching Whitcomb defending his idea about “replacing” the vernal pool by “building” similar habitat to the north, and he seemed completely unwilling to move on that point… yet is looks like in the most recent version, they DID retreat on that point.
The developers will change their proposals if they think it will help them pass. We shouldn’t be afraid of asking them to earn our votes with projects that we actually can support.
I don’t disagree about master planning and pushing for improvement. Sadly master planning is a casualty of Measure J. Anyway, at the end of the day there will be a final proposal and I believe that the owners are trying to put forward something good. I worry that too much second guessing will cause nothing to get built. Arguing for improvements is one thing but opposing is another.
David
Your article implies that if the community takes on any type of planning role that make any type of demands on the developer, that the developer will just walk away, forgoing sales worth several million per acre. That’s not a reasonable assumption. Other communities push requirements on their developers and housing still gets built. West Sacramento has been doing this for two decades. It may not be the housing that Davis wants, but we also have a 50% value premium on West Sac that gives us more leverage.
Further, you appear to be falling into the trap that we must do something, anything. That’s how we end up with unintended consequences that we regret. Mace Ranch is one example that was key to raising opposition to future housing. Poor planning for UCD’s West Campus that failed to align it more closely with the campus is another example of giving into status quo stakeholders (i.e., faculty) over a better alternative. We need to avoid building more commuter housing that atomizes our community further and undermines its what we truly want. We need to be taking our lessons from the past rather than repeating the same mistakes.
DISC 1 and 2 lost because Ramos refused to give community stakeholders represented on the city commissions a commitment to implement the measures they proposed. The Ramos team included almost all of them in their plans (so the proposals clearly were not outlandish) but they still wanted to be able to fudge on those (as the Cannery developers have.) DISC 1 lost by just few hundred votes that probably would have switched with a full throated endorsement from the NRC, BTSCC and Open Space Commissions and their allies. (DISC 2 lost badly for another specific reason we all know.)
I don’t see anything that we’re asking for that is inconsistent with the 3 points you specify. The only objection I see is that we’re asking the City to focus on avoiding our past mistakes, which may take additional time. But as we wrote, if the projects fail Measure J/R/D votes, that still delays the process. And no, I’m not ready to repeat stupidity just because we want to accelerate building housing by a year or 2–housing that will likely last for the next century.
I’ll point out one of the best examples of how “do something, anything” just made things worst in the long run. California’s experiment with restructuring the electricity industry went awry in 2000. (Other states have done a much better job.) Governor Gray Davis panicked and in February 2001 ordered the Department of Water Resources to sign enough long term power contracts at whatever price they could get to get to meet 100% of future forecasted energy needs for 10 years. “Do something, anything” Davis cried. I consulted stakeholders on what should really be done, including signing shorter term contracts for no more than 50% of future loads. This was one of the factors that led to Davis’ recall in 2003. Instead the debacle set the stage for the escalating PG&E rates that we face today. California already had the highest rates in the lower 48 states before PG&E’s rates went up 30% this last year.
Why do we want to make the same type of mistake that lasts for decades?
Richard, Why is this story about electricity relevant to the measure J vote coming up?
I have no problem with people voicing how they would make a project better as long as they support the final project. Your idea that a no vote will only cause a delay until somewhere down the line is where we differ. Measure X on the same land was almost 20 years ago.
“Your article implies that if the community takes on any type of planning role that make any type of demands on the developer, that the developer will just walk away, forgoing sales worth several million per acre. That’s not a reasonable assumption.”
And yet, that is exactly what this developer/ownership group did twenty years ago when the community voted against their project. They didn’t come back with an ‘improved’ project as opponents predicted, they walked away for two decades. It seems to me that it is your stated assumptions that are not reasonable.
The time to make demands on a developer is before a specific project has been proposed. That way, they haven’t spent significant money yet. The City (not some random group of residents) should have clear criteria laid out for what is required from all development projects, with projected costs and timelines for getting projects approved. With that, developers have some certainty on what it will cost to do a project, which in turn, allows them to better project their ROI. Upfront demands and costs can be accounted for, before any significant design efforts have been expended. The Terner Center produced a report on the importance of this predictability a few years back, looking at several cities in the Sacramento region. I have posted the link before so won’t bother doing so again.
Davis doesn’t work that way. First, we do not have clear criteria for developers to work with, we wait to see what is proposed and then react. Second, our approval system is not well defined with clear costs presented upfront, instead we have a planning department with a history of confusing and often contradictory demands and a City Council with a long history of making new demands from the dais at the time of approval (‘I want another $million,’ ‘I won’t approve unless you reduce the project height by a floor’). Third, we have a City Manager with scant experience outside of Davis, so he doesn’t really know any other way to operate. Finally, if that were not enough, we have the ultimate predictability killer with Measure J.
The developers have proposed a project that first, they know how to build and second, they have a history of similar projects on which to base their internal cost projections. They also know first hand the impacts of Measure J. The project that has been proposed is the project that this group is comfortable with and which they think they can build successfully. I would not expect to see any significant changes to the proposal regardless of the new demands from ad hoc groups.
The appropriate time for the sort of planning proposed by the Davis Citizens Planning Group was a decade or two ago, so what they are proposing today should be applied to projects coming up in the 2030’s-40’s. Not those already proposed or in the near term pipeline. The groups focus ideally should be on educating the City Council members on the benefits of changing our approach to development and pushing for the necessary changes to City processes, and where necessary, staff.
In regard to current projects, all the group is functionally doing is working to prevent new housing from being built.