The campaign over Measure V is over. The ballots have been counted, the election has been certified and the proposed Village Farms development has failed by 276 votes.
But if there is one lesson from the campaign, it is not that Davis has settled the question of growth. Rather, it is that the community remains almost perfectly divided over how to address housing, and the defeat of one project does nothing to resolve the larger challenges ahead.
In an interview with The Davis Enterprise, No on Measure V campaign leader Eileen Samitz reflected on the campaign that resulted in Village Farms’ defeat. She expressed relief that the project did not move forward and argued that the community can now begin to heal.
“The Village Farms project caused division in the community and pitted neighbor against neighbor, which hampered our ability to communicate the information people needed to have to understand the many problems Village Farms would bring,” Samitz said.
She later added, “We hope that now this issue is behind us, the community can come together again. We need better planning than Village Farms, and a good example is the Willowgrove project, which does not have the many problems that Village Farms has. It is a well-planned project primarily because the developers were responsive to what the community was asking for. As a result, it has broad support.”
Her comments raise an important question: Can the community simply move on?
The evidence suggests otherwise.
Measure V failed with 50.6% of the vote against 49.4% in favor. More than 23,000 residents cast ballots, and the margin separating victory from defeat was just 276 votes.
That is not a decisive mandate for either side.
Rather, it reflects a city that remains deeply divided over housing policy, growth, affordability and the future of Davis.
If anything, the narrow outcome demonstrates that nearly half the electorate believed Village Farms represented an important opportunity to address housing needs, while just over half concluded the project should not proceed.
The campaign itself reflected those competing visions.
Samitz argued that the project suffered from serious flaws throughout the approval process.
“For the first time in Davis history, the Planning Commission was forced to vote on an incomplete EIR which was not a Final EIR, imposed by the city so it could meet an election deadline that the developer desired,” she said.
She also criticized the environmental review and development agreement.
“As a result of the toxics, contaminated groundwater was likely to mix with Channel A runoff, then travel through Wildhorse, continuing east to the Yolo Basin and its habitat, eventually connecting with the Sacramento River,” Samitz said. “The rerouting of Channel A also threatened habitat along the channel as well as the vernal pools.”
She argued the affordable housing provisions were inadequate.
“The only exception was that the developer ‘may’ possibly be asked to build 100 affordable apartments, which would not even potentially happen until the last phase of the project, 10 plus years down the road,” Samitz said.
“However, the loophole word ‘may’ was in the Development Agreement, so there was no assurance that the affordable apartments would materialize. Also, the developer could simply walk away from building these 100 affordable apartments because 90% of the expensive market-rate houses would already have been built by the last phase, with a huge profit. This concern was brought up repeatedly by Council member Bapu Vaitla, who eventually voted for the agreement.”
Whether voters agreed with those arguments is ultimately less significant than recognizing that they represented one side of a broader debate.
Supporters of Village Farms argued the project would provide desperately needed housing, including hundreds of affordable units, generate funding for city infrastructure and schools, and help Davis begin addressing its long-term housing shortage.
Opponents believed the environmental risks, traffic impacts, floodplain concerns and project design outweighed those benefits.
Neither side persuaded an overwhelming majority.
Samitz also described the campaign as one built on factual analysis.
“Those voters understood that Village Farms would be seriously detrimental to the community and was not going to deliver what it claimed it would,” she said.
She argued the project should instead have been redesigned.
“They should have included the ‘reduced footprint’ alternative in the EIR,” Samitz said. “We formally proposed this alternative in writing and in testimony to the City Council early in the process when the alternatives were being determined for the Village Farms project, but we were ignored.”
She also pointed to the disparity in campaign resources.
“We were outspent far more than 10 to 1, with the developers spending over $780,000 using hired political operatives and professional PR firms,” Samitz said. “They also hired a huge number of people, including UCD students, to lobby the community and post on social media. California law requires hired campaign workers to disclose when they post advocating for Measure V, but they were ignoring that regulation throughout the campaign.”
Those claims formed the basis of the No campaign’s message.
But it is also true that the campaign itself contributed to the atmosphere of division Samitz now laments.
The campaign was not merely a disagreement over planning policy. It became one of the most contentious local elections Davis has experienced in years.
Developers, elected officials, city staff, school leaders, housing advocates, environmental organizations and neighborhood groups found themselves on opposing sides.
Claims and counterclaims dominated public meetings, social media and campaign literature for months.
Responsibility for that polarization cannot reasonably be assigned to one side alone.
Nor should it surprise anyone.
Measure J itself encourages precisely this outcome.
Unlike most California cities, Davis requires voters to approve peripheral housing developments through citywide elections.
As a result, complex land-use decisions that ordinarily would conclude through planning commissions and city councils instead become political campaigns.
Those campaigns require fundraising, advertising, direct mail, endorsements, public forums and increasingly sophisticated political operations.
Each side has incentives to emphasize risks and benefits in the strongest possible terms because every project ultimately becomes a public referendum.
The result is a process that rewards political mobilization as much as land-use planning.
Village Farms was not unique in this respect.
Previous Measure J elections have produced similarly contentious campaigns, and there is little reason to believe future proposals will be different.
The more fundamental question facing Davis is what happens next.
The defeat of Village Farms did not reduce the city’s housing obligations.
City planning efforts continue to identify the need for thousands of additional housing units over the coming decades through the General Plan update.
The city’s housing element remains subject to state requirements, and California has continued increasing oversight of jurisdictions that fail to accommodate housing production.
Those realities remain regardless of whether one supported or opposed Measure V.
The debate over housing is therefore far from over.
Future projects will almost certainly return to voters.
Some may resemble Willowgrove. Others may look very different.
Some may gain broader consensus. Others may generate the same divisions that characterized Village Farms.
The challenge for Davis is that defeating one proposal does not answer the larger question of where future housing will be built.
Nor does it resolve longstanding disagreements over Measure J itself.
Some residents continue to view Measure J as an essential safeguard that protects local control and community character.
Others increasingly see it as a structural obstacle that makes it extraordinarily difficult for Davis to meet housing needs or comply with state housing policy.
That debate is unlikely to disappear simply because Measure V failed.
Samitz expressed hope that “the community can come together again.”
That is a worthy aspiration.
But reconciliation will require more than moving beyond one campaign.
It will require acknowledging that nearly half the community supported Village Farms, nearly half opposed it, and both sides remain convinced they are protecting Davis’ future.
Until the city finds a way to bridge those competing visions—or fundamentally rethinks how housing decisions are made—the next major housing proposal may once again pit neighbor against neighbor.
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“BUT DAVIS’ HOUSING DEBATE IS JUST BEGINNING”
Are you kidding me, you’ve been debating this for at least 10 years now, almost daily.