The housing debate has often been viewed as a contest between two simplified stories. One side says the solution is obvious: build more housing and prices will fall.
The other says the real crisis is not scarcity at all, but greed, speculation, and a political economy tilted toward developers, landlords, and investors.
While each of those narratives captures a bit of truth — neither is entirely true on its own — but neither side is altogether wrong and that’s what makes this discussion tricky.
My own view is a synthesis of competing truths: scarcity matters, inequality matters, and the reality of housing is far messier than either side’s simple narrative admits.
I have long argued that California, and Davis in particular, face real housing constraints caused by years of insufficient production.
At the same time, the housing crisis is not just about housing production, but also about whether the homes we produce align with the incomes, life stages, and practical needs of the people who live here or hope to.
This is the mismatch between the market and the needs. It is not a denial of the need for supply, it’s an acknowledgment that supply alone will not fix the crisis.
A community can post respectable unit totals and still experience a severe housing crisis.
If available homes are priced beyond the reach of teachers, service workers, nurses, young families, and first-time buyers, those units do not function as meaningful housing opportunities for large segments of the population.
If most new construction consists of luxury apartments, large single-family homes, or investor-oriented rentals, the market may be active while remaining deeply exclusionary.
At the same time, the numbers in Davis in particular show that we are nowhere near producing a sufficient number of homes — 805 in the last seventeen years does not cut it. Because of the mismatch that number actually dramatically understates the housing crisis.
Seniors may want to downsize but have nowhere to go locally.
Young adults raised in the community may want to stay but cannot afford entry-level ownership options.
Families may need three-bedroom homes near schools and parks, not only one-bedroom apartments.
Workers may find housing only far from their jobs, increasing commute times, congestion, and household stress.
I’ve argued consistently that Davis’ traffic problems are related to the lack of housing that forces people to commute to their jobs, whether it’s at UC Davis or DJUSD.
Again, we need to be looking at supply — because the scarcity of housing in Davis is very real. 805 is not just a made up number, and it also is not just an abstraction; it reflects the constrained supply on the ground.
When demand rises faster than production over long periods, prices increase, competition intensifies, and access narrows — that is basic economics, which, yes, applies to housing and applies to housing in Davis.
But composition matters too.
A thousand units that do not match household needs will not solve the same problems as a thousand units diversified across income levels, household sizes, and tenure types.
At the same time, building housing requires investors, capital, and a viable return on investment. There is a reason why in San Diego this week, the focus was on ways to get capital investment to make projects viable.
As I noted in yesterday’s article, that financing piece may be the most significant.
Housing advocates and developers alike have increasingly argued that entitlement reform alone is not enough when interest rates, insurance costs and construction pricing have made many multifamily projects impossible to finance.
Assemblymember Matt Haney hit this point directly.
“You can upzone, you can streamline, but if the financing isn’t there to get these projects built, they don’t happen,” he said.
As we have noted many times here, and it was amplified by Nolan Gray of California YIMBY, “It’s really, really hard to make projects pencil today.”
At the same time, the housing crisis persists because existing power structures and structural barriers make meaningful change difficult to achieve.
However, the housing crisis cannot and should not be reduced to corruption. The deeper problem is not simply bad actors, but competing interests, conflicting incentives, and different visions of what communities should become.
But neither should we ignore how entrenched interests often influence policy.
Existing homeowners may seek to preserve scarcity because scarcity protects property values.
Political actors may weaponize environmental concerns selectively. Industry groups may support reforms that maximize profit while neglecting deeper affordability needs.
Financialization has turned housing into an investment vehicle as much as a place to live.
Those realities are part of the story, but they are not the whole story.
The temptation in public debate is to choose one lens and reject the others.
That is how we end up with shallow arguments where every project is cast as either salvation or exploitation, every critic as either selfish or enlightened, and every data point as proof of what people already believed.
Reality is more complicated than that and nowhere is that complexity clearer than in Davis.
Again, one of the most important facts in Davis is this: the city added only 805 single-family homes in 17 years.
You cannot run from that number.
Whatever one’s broader theory of housing may be, that is an extraordinarily small amount of family-oriented ownership housing for a high-demand, university-adjacent community with strong schools, stable neighborhoods, and enduring regional appeal.
Families with children often seek stability, space, and the ability to remain rooted in one place over time.
Many households want a yard, multiple bedrooms, or proximity to neighborhood schools.
Others would gladly choose a townhouse, condo, or smaller detached home if those options existed at attainable prices.
But when very little ownership-oriented housing is added over nearly two decades, pressure concentrates on the existing stock.
Higher-income buyers bid for a limited supply of homes, existing owners gain wealth through appreciation, younger households struggle to enter the market, middle-income families look elsewhere, adult children raised in Davis find they cannot afford to return, and new workers commute in from surrounding communities because living locally is out of reach. The result is not merely higher prices, but a gradual reshaping of who gets to belong.
But it’s more than that — it has civic, environmental and traffic consequences.
School enrollment decline does not happen in a vacuum; it often reflects a local housing system that is not making room for the next generation of families, workers, and residents.
To say that is not to romanticize endless growth or dismiss legitimate concerns about change.
Davis residents are right to ask hard questions about major development proposals, because traffic, farmland preservation, water use, fiscal sustainability, infrastructure financing, design quality, and environmental performance all matter. A healthy city should debate those tradeoffs seriously, not rubber-stamp every proposal placed before it.
At the same time, some of those very problems are exacerbated by limited housing growth.
Too often, our debates treat every individual project in isolation.
One proposal raises traffic concerns, another raises farmland concerns, and another sparks questions about timing or financing, with each concern potentially valid on its own terms.
But if the cumulative result of saying no, delaying, downsizing, or narrowing options year after year is chronic underproduction, then the city bears responsibility for the broader consequences as well.
That is why the path forward can’t be reduced to a binary choice between “build more” and “fix inequality.”
We need both.
Davis needs more total housing, because scarcity remains a real constraint.
It also needs a better mix of housing: starter homes, condominiums, townhomes, small-lot homes, family-sized rentals, accessory dwellings, affordable units, supportive housing, and places where seniors can downsize without leaving the community they helped build.
It needs policies that expand access rather than simply protect accumulated asset values, approval systems predictable enough to encourage production while still demanding quality, and affordability strategies that include both market supply and deeply subsidized housing for households the market will never adequately serve.
It also needs transportation and land-use planning that reduce forced commuting, with growth tied to civic goals — not growth for growth’s sake, but not stagnation disguised as stewardship either.
Most of all, it needs honesty.
Honesty means acknowledging that supply constraints, inequality, and financialization are real, that not all housing serves the same public purpose, that local choices have long-term demographic effects, and that a city can preserve its character while still making room for new people to share in it.
The easiest politics are built on false choices that flatter people into believing every problem has one villain and one cure, but housing does not work that way.
There is a shortage, a mismatch between what exists and what many households need, structural barriers embedded in the economy and political system, and in Davis, prolonged underproduction of family-oriented housing.
Recognizing all of those truths at once is not inconsistency, but the reality of a complex system that we too often try to reduce to its lowest common denominator.
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“Again, we need to be looking at supply – because the scarcity of housing in Davis is very real.”
It is not “real” at all – you’re aware of Zillow, I assume.
“805 is not just a made up number, and it also not just an abstraction, it reflects the constrained supply on the ground.”
Right – it reflects the number of houses that were built. It might be 805 “too many” houses that were built.
Nowhere in your article do you actually quantify what you claim is the “shortage”. And that’s because there is no shortage.
The market is fluid, and there isn’t any accurate way to measure it. The people commuting to UCD is also not an accurate way to measure it.
Just as you can’t claim there’s a housing shortage in Roseville or Elk Grove, by quantifying the number of commuters commuting from those places to Sacramento, for example.
We do know that the population itself (of the state and nation) is no longer growing.
Zillow shows that Davis has a price premium of 50% over other neighboring communities. The average price shown in Zillow requires a household be earning about $200k a year to be affordable. That’s 185% of the area median income.
We can quantify the scarcity using economic tools with estimates of demand price elasticity. Using one estimate of -0.7, the 50% price premium over neighboring cities shows that Davis has an excess demand of about 9,000 houses. In other words adding that amount would bring Davis to price parity with Woodland and elsewhere.
Achieving price parity is unrealistic goal, but this calculation quantifies the amount of excess demand. As David has shown earlier, additions to the Davis housing supply are highly constrained which has created this excess demand.
Richard, you once again oversimplify. You aren’t providing an apples to apples comparison of prices in Davis and Woodland. Segmentation matters a great deal in markets. You can’t do an equal comparison of the prices of milk gallons to milk half gallons for example. Because of (a) historical building patterns, Davis has an abundance of “gallon” homes for sale, and as a result Zillow’s average price for Davis homes is high. Woodland has an abundance of “half gallons” homes for sale, and Zillow’s average price for Woodland homes is lower.
As I have said to you before, if you want to see if there really is a premium in Davis over Woodland, you need to use Return On Investment (ROI) rather than price. That will even out the amenities differences between houses.
Not sure how Richard is calculating this, but if Davis approves 9,000 houses (and it somehow reduces prices to Woodland levels), then Woodland’s prices would also drop further in this model. Meaning that the discrepancy would still exist.
Woodland’s housing prices and availability impact Davis’ housing prices (and vice-versa).
But there’s 1,600 housing units waiting to be built right now at the planned technology park (despite being approved years ago). Apparently, it’s not penciling out enough to proceed so far.
One can buy a new house in Spring Lake that’s semi-suitable for families in the $550-$600K range. No yards, no street parking (other than in “mini” parking lots).
https://www.lennar.com/new-homes/california/sacramento/woodland/ruby-cottages#availability
You’re better off buying an existing house in Davis (that has little or no Mello Roos, large lots, better materials and location, mature landscaping, etc.). If anyone wants me to find one for them (e.g., they can’t manage to use Zillow on their own), let me know. Pretty sure I can find nice ones for about $700K.
Bottom line is that there is no housing shortage in the area. And I can’t imagine a worse idea (for any community) to pursue growth for the sake of lowering housing prices. Sounds like giving the keys to the developers, and letting them run amok – as they’ve historically done throughout the state and beyond.
Atherton’s average housing price is close to $8 million dollars. Is there a housing shortage, there? I’d argue that there isn’t, but perhaps that’s where the housing lunatics should focus their energies, rather than the community which (at best) has housing prices that are around the state’s average price.
There’s plenty of nearby places where the housing lunatics are already in charge. Why do they have to be in charge in Davis, as well?
Correction – I meant that you can’t conclude that there’s a housing shortage in Sacramento by determining the number of inbound commuters FROM places like Roseville, Elk Grove, Rancho Cordova, Natomas, Davis, etc. (I realize Natomas is in Sacramento, but it stretches far from downtown.)
I do have a “challenge” for David, though – just thought of it.
Since David thinks that 805 houses is “not enough”, perhaps the first step for him is to determine the number of workers in each of those 805 households, and then determine where they work. For the sake of this exercise, let’s limit the definition of “workers” to those who actually have a career (and aren’t just working at a local coffee shop – which can be found in ANY city). In other words, teenagers aren’t likely to “count”.
It might be noted, however, that jobs themselves are ultimately “temporary” in nature for individuals. Very few stay with a single employer these days (until they retire – at which point they’re no longer commuting anyway). University professors are probably the one exception regarding lack of “job switching” once they become a permanent professor at some university.
We don’t need to audit every household’s job history to know whether housing production has been adequate. The real issue is whether housing production kept pace with population, employment growth, household formation, and regional demand over time.
You have no definition of “adequate”.
My suggestion would actually help your argument (or not), if you or some other growth advocate looked into it. It’s the basis for your entire argument (aka, “build housing for the local workers” – which in your mind includes UCD).
So you’ve got 805 single-family examples of it – have at it. (But again, you’re also going to have to see if any of the active career-level employees in those households work somewhere else, such as Sacramento. In which case, that would be an argument to build housing in Sacramento, from your point of view.)
And again, it’s the same argument for those living in Elk Grove, Roseville, Rancho Cordova, Folsom, Natomas, Davis, etc. – who work in Sacramento. Your argument is that they should all be living in Sacramento (somewhere closer than Natomas at least.)
““build housing for the local workers” – which in your mind includes UCD”
Not just in David’s mind. The City is now officially acknowledging the integrated nature of the local employment market i its presentation on the General Plan Update just released.
Richard, I agree with you that it is an integrated market of the city plus the campus. With that said, what has the job growth of the UCD Davis campus been since 2006 and/or 2015. I suspect the number of campus employees has actually shrunk since 2005.
In your tracking of the jobs within the City Limits from your jobs history sources, what has the growth been since 2005, and in what industry segments has that growth come?
The US Census reports, which you have argued understate the total number of Davis jobs, clearly show that according to to their numbers jobs in Davis have only grown by 2,000 in 20 years, with virtually all the growth being in relatively low paying hotel room maintenance/cleaning jobs and hospital room support jobs.
Bottom-line, housing growth and jobs growth have been on a par with one another.
Further, according to its MOU with the County and the City, UCD is going to house 100% of its enrollment growth in on campus beds.
A 3-month supply of housing is considered a ‘balanced’ market by the real estate industry. Higher is better for the buyer, lower is better for the seller.
Davis market, Feb 2026, per Houzeo: “With just a 1.5-month supply of homes and properties taking an average of 27 days to sell, sellers have considerable pricing power and can command premium offers.”
What that means is that the Davis real estate market would be healthier if there were more homes, new and used, on the market at any given time.
In some parts of the market, this affects the rents as well, though less so for the m-f units with high turnover due to students.
Not sure that I’d take the real estate industry’s word for anything (and I certainly wouldn’t recommend making ANY planning decisions based on their input, let alone housing advocacy from a school district which has accepted some $500,000 from the Village Farms developer, over the years).
In any case, Redfin is showing that prices have declined by 16.2% since last year (median price of $685K), but are only taking 8 days to sell.
And that the price per square foot has also declined by 13.5% since last year.
https://www.redfin.com/city/4690/CA/Davis/housing-market
So make of that what you will. (Maybe they need to start tearing down some houses.)
Zillow is showing $854K with a 1.5% decline in the last year.
https://www.zillow.com/home-values/51659/davis-ca/
The Census is showing $866K in 2024
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/daviscitycalifornia/PST045224
8 days on the market is almost a flash sale in real estate. It illustrates the scarcity of housing supply here.
Two different equivalent websites, two different results.
The problem with what you and Don are noting is, “where” is demand coming from?
That’s why I suggested looking at “who” is living in the 805 new houses, and where they work.
This is ultimately the same reason that you’re concerned about Village Farms.
As for what the council does (in regard to a general plan), this is the same council that’s supportive of Village Farms, supportive of the school district’s self-interested advocacy, etc. If they thought that the voters would support it, they would also eliminate Measure J.
The university is not pursuing a net increase of employees. But if they do, they already have an example of the best type of place for that (the development on UCD’s land in back of the Davis Commons mall, downtown). Those people can walk to work (don’t even need a bicycle).
As for prices, days on market, etc. – that’s not even a consideration regarding how large a city should be.
Richard, your 8 days on the market is an exception. Ron, anyone who does budgeting knows there is a huge difference between “need” and “nice to have.”
You need to look at the real estate sales data for Davis and Woodland. In 2025 Davis had more home sales and more listings than Woodland. 41.4 listings on average each day in Davis, and 37.3 listings on average each day in Woodland. The average days on market for Davis was over 37 days.
David Greenwald said … The real issue is whether housing production kept pace with population, employment growth, household formation, and regional demand over time.
Population growth in Davis has been flat since the 2008 Great Recession according to us Census reports. We have had virtually no jobs growth in the Davis City Limits in the past 20 years, and what little jobs growth there has been has been in modest pay jobs in hotels and the hospital … again according to Census reports. Household formation in Davis has actually decreased.
So what you are left with is regional demand, and the question one has to ask is why must local supply satisfy regional demand. As we saw from the purchases of new homes at The Cannery, local demand was anaemic when compared to non-local demand.
Matt, of course the population growth has been flat since 2008 in Davis, there’s been very little new housing since then. How would Davis grow without new housing?
If you guys want to tackle housing prices by pursuing development, I’d suggest that you focus on the following city. (almost $8 million dollar average price, up 9% from last year). I’m sure they’d welcome your input.
https://www.zillow.com/home-values/30280/atherton-ca/
As for me, I’m not going to be trying to move to Atherton and insist that they build a cheap house for me next to Mr. Zuckerberg. And I’m perfectly fine with letting that community (and its 1-acre sized lots) be the way it is. When I lived somewhat closer to that area, I was grateful that it existed just the way it is, when I periodically passed through. They don’t need me there (and vice-versa).
As a side note, the mid-peninsula open space district is probably one of the wealthiest land preservation organizations in the world, and that’s probably due to the presence of Silicon Valley. And yet, even I was allowed to use those parks.
“With that said, what has the job growth of the UCD Davis campus been since 2006 and/or 2015. I suspect the number of campus employees has actually shrunk since 2005.”
What you smoking dude? I was on campus the other day because I needed to transfer buses. The place is packed. Way more people on campus than ten or twenty years ago. I suspect your suspicions are based more in your imagination than reality. Currently UCD serves over 40,000 students. In 2005 it was around 30,000. Over the same period UCD has added thousands of employees.
Employees Ron. Employees! All those people you are seeing on the campus our students or people who are related to students. They don’t have jobs. They don’t have income. The housing growth in Davis needs jobs to support it. I don’t know what it is about that that you do not understand.
There you go again Matt. You don’t know the employment status of the people on campus yet you assert there has been no employment growth in 10 or 20 years at UCD. Based on what Matt? Even a cursory investigation contradicts your assertion. Stop digging Matt.
Ron, UCD issues annual employment reports, with place of residence of the employees. I haven’t requested a current one for a number of years, but I will do so when I return from the least Coast.
Perhaps you should check your sources.
Also, no one has ever said two UCD faculty couldn’t afford a home in davis. What was said was two DJUSD teachers, where the starting salary is approximately $54,000 per year.
There is no problem regarding the so-called “housing shortage” (nor is there a problem regarding “inappropriate” type of existing – other than in the growth advocates’ imagination).
There is no “problem” to be solved here.
There are problems in Somalia – how about focusing on THAT?
By the way, I (and everyone else) have yet to directly hear from ANYONE who claims that they’re waiting for a developer to build them a cheap house in Davis, by blowing up Measure J for example. Instead, we have a few YIMBY types who claim to be speaking on behalf of the group waiting for cheap developer housing on farmland.
Perhaps the biggest b.s. story of all time, short of what George Carlin noted regarding religion.
Honestly (since I don’t actually believe that I’m super-smart or insightful), I don’t know how this YIMBY-created argument even got this far among otherwise intelligent people. (Let alone the argument that the “city is too small” in regard to the interests of the school district).
Isn’t Davis supposedly full of people smarter than I am – at least? If not, I’m disappointed.
While I’m at it I want to share what I found out about UC Davis professor salaries. A two faculty member family will easily qualify for a conventional mortgage on a Village Farms home. Add in relocation subsidies and the entire argument that U.C. Davis faculty won’t be able to afford homes at VF falls apart.