I want to end my 2024 with some thoughts about… wait for it… housing. Shocking, I know. But I see housing as the biggest issue facing the Davis community—in part because it plays a huge part in driving some of the other problems Davis faces, particularly homelessness and declining school enrollment.
Here I want to start by excerpting some comments from Will Arnold—the now former two-term councilmember—from the November discussion on Village Farms.
Number one, over the course of the next few years, we need one or potentially several projects of this size, housing projects of this size in Davis, not something that you’re going to find with an ADU here and a duplex there, and a few apartments over a shopping center.
We have a housing crisis that we are addressing, and we need a project of this size. I believe that’s undeniable.
Secondly, I believe this is also undeniable. This is the absolute best place in town for that project to be full stop.
A child could go to every level from kindergarten and graduate high school without traveling a full mile.
The idea that it being near existing travel destinations is somehow a negative, and that because it’s near an intersection that a lot of people already use on a daily basis because they have to, because it’s a major crossroads of our community. The idea that that’s a negative is absurd.
The alternative would be building it out in the middle of nowhere, right?
If you want to find a not-impacted intersection, I think Road 29 and Road 95 is a not-impacted intersection. Let’s just build stuff out in the middle of nowhere and have sprawl.
I highlight this portion of Will Arnold’s comments because it highlights pretty much the issues we are going to be dealing with in 2025.
Davis is going to need to approve several major projects—almost certainly Measure J type projects—over the next few years in order to meet state mandated housing goals.
We do not have discretion as to whether to build those units. We do have discretion over when and where and how to build them—but only if we act reasonably and responsibly.
As Will Arnold points out, the projects are going to need to be “of this size in Davis” and that’s not something “you’re going to find with an ADU here and a duplex there, and a few apartments over a shopping center..”
The last housing element kept all of the units in town, but that comes at a cost. First of all, it exhausts pretty much any realistic feasible housing on infill spots. Second, it’s not clear that the city is going to be able to be build even those that have been included in the Housing Element.
To a person in 2023, the council acknowledged they were going to have to go peripheral in the future.
There is a huge cost if the city falls short here—there is a good chance that the state will come in, take out Measure J, and we will lose a lot of our local autonomy.
The battle over housing is now going to shift—and I believe this is a good thing. It will not be a debate of housing/no housing. It will be a debate over what type of housing we need and where we will put it.
Personally, I think this is a better debate to have.
I’m going to punt on the issue of type of housing for now.
The issue that I’m going to focus on here briefly is the where. I have already laid out that the city is going to have to go peripheral. I think most people who are not the most hard core of anti-growth people acknowledge this.
As I have pointed out, there really are feasible limits to where housing is going to go. There is some possibility of having housing east of the current city. The Pioneer project would have been a possibility. There are also possibilities near and around where DISC was proposed.
But most of the potential housing sites are going to be north of the city. Shriners to the east of Wildhorse and Palomino Place and north of Covell. Village Farms in that spot between Cannery and Pole Line. And there are some spots in the northwest quadrant.
Will Arnold argued that the Village location is “the absolute best place in town for that project to be, full stop.”
The campaign against Village Farms is going to argue the opposite—that it is the worst possible place for housing in Davis.
There is something to be said for both positions, frankly. I will say, a lot of the debate is going to focus on traffic.
There is something to be said for Will Arnold’s argument here: “If you want to find a not-impacted intersection, I think Road 29 and Road 95 is a not-impacted intersection. Let’s just build stuff out in the middle of nowhere and have sprawl.”
I also believe that if you look at actual traffic problems through the corridor, they are caused not by local traffic going to places like the Cannery and Wildhorse, but rather most of the traffic there is either headed to Woodland on Pole Line becoming Road 102 and going onto Mace to get on I-80.
And if that’s the case, having more local housing where people can commute to work by bike and bus instead of cars, you may actually improve traffic conditions with additional Davis housing, rather than worsen them.
That combined with where else are you going to put large scale housing in Davis should cause people to rethink this issue. But they may not and we will have to watch how this thing plays out.
“I want to end my 2025 with some thoughts about… wait for it… housing. ”
Well you’re going to have to wait a year for that…
see I’m already in 2025… thanks