Tuesday the Davis City Council will review a consultant report commissioned to help inform long‑term land use and mobility planning for the northeast area of Davis.
Many in the community, including our group (DCPG), welcomed this work when it was commissioned and were hopeful that it would provide an independent, professional look at what true transit‑oriented planning might look like for this part of the city – particularly in light of multiple peripheral development proposals currently under discussion.
What the report ultimately delivers, however, is something quite different and, (perhaps unintentionally) instructive.
Rather than showing how land use and transportation could be designed together to enable effective transit and limit sprawl, the analysis assumes a sprawling land‑use pattern to begin with and then demonstrates that the roads and transit network needed to support it will be undoubtedly problematic.
In that sense, whether intended or not, the report has given us a cautionary, worst‑case scenario for Davis voters to react to.
What the Report Shows
The consultant’s analysis makes two assumptions that were surprising to us:
- It assumes the existing Village Farms and Willowgrove proposals will pass and does not attempt to proactively plan anything involving or serving those sites beyond what is included the proposals (which we thought was the point of the exercise).
- It lays out huge amounts of acreage in very large chunks that make little empirical sense—such as wrapping higher‑density housing behind an already established permanent agricultural easement.
Witness this land use map from the report
There are a variety of things to say about this map, but the main points to point out are that
- It assumes that both Willowgrove and Village Farms will pass, and no further planning affecting either of those properties is considered.
- While there is a nice amount of medium-density housing proposed, it is shoved out far to the northeast and even curls back behind a permanent conservation easement. A decision which guarantees that:
- Transit service here will never work. Which also means
- Every single person living out there will be 100% dependent on a personal automobile
The report then goes on to declare that:
“Providing transit service to the potential new growth area would be challenging for several reasons. High frequency transit service would not be cost effective to fund for much of the northern portion of the potential new growth area that lacks the high densities normally associated with frequent transit service (i.e., 10,000 residents and/or employees within ½ mile of bus stops). “
It seems they completely misunderstood the assignment. They create a land use plan that ignores transit-oriented design and then remark that their design won’t work for transit? That implies that the consulting team and planning department should have come back to the client to ask what was specifically intended before moving forward with releasing the report.
Another item from the report is this:
“The City does not have sufficient revenue from existing sources to cover the full cost of operating and maintaining (O&M) the existing network. Any expansion of the network will exacerbate this problem unless new development is capable of covering the full cost of construction and on-going O&M”.
By now, analyses both globally and within Davis well establish that low-density housing development bankrupts cities – especially as regards to the upkeep of spread-out infrastructure serving low-value land uses.
So how did we get a report that proposes a massive, disconnected, low-density extension of the city, while simultaneously reporting that such a low-density design will bankrupt us?
Is this a Worst‑Case Scenario?
The answer that makes the most sense to us is that the consultant returned “the best report they could given the constraints they were provided”… constraints shaped by the political realities inside City Hall.
The entire point of this exercise was supposed to give us information about options for long-range growth that could be included in the General Plan Update. However, the two projects on deck have not passed a Measure J/R/D vote, and it is likely they are in conflict with best practices of fiscal responsibility and transit-oriented development that we and others expect to be applied in the GPU, as we have pointed out repeatedly. The study was not for the purpose of assuming they will pass and then planning even further into the future – but that is the report we actually got.
But while we are disappointed to not see what we thought was coming, this report ends up with true value for the General Plan Update: It shows us what our city might look like and what the fiscal implications are if we FAIL to do a good job of transit oriented development.
What is more, it provides external validation of something that many, including our group, have been saying for a while now: You can’t make a sustainable city by designing around piecemeal land use choices. Planning needs to START with design for transit, and land use needs to follow. Doing anything else means you are planning for cars / tailpipe emissions / unsafe streets and traffic.
The Counterpoint
Lets now take the land use plan that has been developed by DCPG and put it side-by-side with the plan from the report. Here we have re-drawn our proposal on the same base map using the same coloring scheme.
Notes: (We do not include on this map our proposal for densifying along major arterials to be phased in over the next four decades. Commercial space (pink) has been included in this version which beyond the housing focus of our original article, but was included in the consultant report. The green areas are agricultural preserves in both plans)
Hopefully the differences here are self evident: The DCPG concept is transit-first which means we looked at where we might be able to put a transit line, and then clustered the densest land uses around it. We specified a neighborhood-serving center across the street from Harper Jr High with a small amount of commercial space for daily needs, and laid out a transit line that connected the DiSC “business district” on one end, up through these developments, down J street, through downtown and onto campus on the other end.
We don’t feel it is a stretch to say that, given a choice between the two, the DCPG concept is much more palatable to Davis voters who have consistently rejected sprawl.
What to do
The upcoming City Council meeting is to give the staff and consultant direction on what to do next, including whether to analyze additional development patterns. We would like to ask the council direct the consultant to analyze a TRUE transit-oriented development alternative without the political constraints that likely undermined the current study.:
- Design for effective transit first, all other decisions follow
- Ignore the current designs of Measure J/R/D proposals.
- Freedom to re-zone existing parts of the city as necessary.
That is the version of the future that we need to analyze our options against, a plan that would adequately frame our choices at the ballot box this spring and our opinions going into the general plan.
Our city has been the victim of a dysfunctional planning process compromised by measure J/R/D. We suspect that this report is likely another victim of that dysfunction – a report that only tells us what we already know: That sprawling / car-served city designs do not work.
We would like the same effort that went into this analysis of a worst-case scenario be put into a land use plan that is more likely to serve its citizens well and be palatable to the voters here who value sustainability and who have repeatedly rejected this kind of urban sprawl.
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“It assumes that both Willowgrove and Village Farms will pass, and no further planning affecting either of those properties is considered.”
I, on the other hand, assume that one or both of them will fail (meeting the same fate as DISC 1 and 2).
Problem solved – you’re welcome.
Assuming that a measure J project will fail is a fairly safe bet, which is why this particular analysis is even more of a missed opportunity.
The City’s consultant shows the same old post-war planning which with just a few changes repeats the single family Levittown. Cost effective public transportation requires customer scales usage which is hardly present in the future Davis growth displayed.
It shows that the city needs to adopt some basic requirements that build a better future.
The developer driven model for only their project prevents any long term infrastructure and transportation planning for our city.
The City-Unitrans is better than most cities our size but it too has a multitude of tenuous funding sources needed to subsidize the system.
Our public transportation system in in reality not economically capable of providing the additional system capacity of the consultant’s predictions.
Our lack of a long term planning process becomes very costly in the long run.
“It seems they completely misunderstood the assignment.”
Usually the assignment for consultants is to find sucker cities that fund consulting firms with minimal oversight.
“They create a land use plan that ignores transit-oriented design and then remark that their design won’t work for transit?”
That’s like creating a dog park with a hamster wheel.
“That implies that the consulting team and planning department should have come back to the client to ask what was specifically intended before moving forward with releasing the report.”
Um, yeah
Interconnected transit/bike/ped path between all new projects with housing density along the line and clustered at rapid bus stops. Basic planning 101. Unless you were born in 1935.
Without this, downvote for all, as the NE suburbs are pooched in perpetuity.
Agreed. It’s disturbing that our planning department and/or the consultants advising them seemed to have missed this entirely. We don’t see any analysis on what would make transit feasible, instead getting just hand waving. We pay consultants for rigor to support planning staff.
Much of the subject land is within 1 mile of the county landfill and sewage treatment plant complex/Davis wetlands and is designated “Open Space for Public Health and Safety”. The GP says “The intent is that residential development is prohibited”. See figure 31a and b in the 2007 GP. In addition much of the land is 100-yr floodplain. See SACOG FEMA floodplain map. That leaves only the Willowgrove and the Mace blvd parcels. To add to this, most of the land is highest quality agricultural soil and it is against Yolo County LAFCO policy to build on it. So that should eliminate even more of the land for expansion. For example Willowgrove still needs LAFCO approval since it is not in the SOI because of the quality of the farmland. So this planning exercise seems ill conceived and therefore sets a dangerous precedent.
You would have hoped that the City Planning staff would have seen these types of problems and warned off the consultants from going that direction. (As a long time consultant, these types of observations and advice from clients about local issues is very helpful.) This lack of oversight is very disturbing and problematic.