By Tim Keller
In my commentary last Monday I revealed some research into comparable “university towns” similar in character to Davis, in order to see if there were any trends that could be used to predict how big the City of Davis might need to be in order to bring our housing market into balance in terms of supply and demand.
Today we are going to dive a little deeper into the same analysis to find some more information on these comparable cities and, as you will see, that analysis points in a direction that I frankly didn’t expect, and a direction that is of significant importance to our housing decisions as a community.
To start with: the fact that there is a severe housing shortage in Davis is not up for debate; our near-zero vacancy rate tells us that much. But that rate doesn’t tell us anything about the size of the demand that is missing, and in the absence of that knowledge means that we really can’t do any effective planning for how to fix our housing situation.
The first pass analysis from that data suggested that a city such as Davis with a university the size of UCD might expect to be at least 100,000 or more people, based on the towns hosting similar institutions. And in theory, if you were to find a town 
where supply and demand for housing were “in balance,” you would see a vacancy rate in the range of ~3%.
Urbana-Champagne, IL
Indeed there were several university towns where this was the case, like the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne which has a slightly larger university, a population of 127,000 people and a City:Student ratio of 2.88. This is a great median case for this data set.
With those demographics, Urbana-Champagne has a “balanced” housing market with a 3% vacancy rate, and if you looked at that City by itself, it would make for a very tidy analysis!
Unfortunately, there are other examples on the list which tell a different story.
Ann Arbor, MI
University of Michigan is also a great comparable town for us to look at. It is also slightly larger than Davis, has a research endowment slightly larger, and sits at 120,000 people in population with a City:Student ratio of 2.37
But when you look at the housing vacancy rate for Ann Arbor, it’s 0.9%… a housing shortage… so, for Ann Arbor at least, having a higher ratio doesn’t necessarily mean a balanced housing market. Something else is happening there.
Stillwater, OK
Which brings us to Stillwater, Oklahoma, which has a very low ratio at 1.89, yet has a “balanced” vacancy rate at 3.4%
How does Stillwater get away with having such a low population in comparison to its university, and still have a balanced housing market?
This data point was the end of any hope for a simple analysis of city size as a direct correlation to university size. Obviously there is another factor at play.
Indeed when you do the statistics on the population ratio data I presented last week, you see a correlation coefficient (R-squared value) of 0.59 Which means the size of the student population only tells ~ 60% of the story about how big a city might actually be. Something else is a big factor here. ( Davis is the Red Square in this data)
I didn’t have to go very far to find that factor, and in fact, multiple people pointed out this particular difference in the comments on the first article in this series: The presence of “other cities nearby.”
Now, all of the cities in this analysis had fit the definition of “standalone college towns,” which were not absorbed into a big metro area like you see with Berkeley and Stanford, but the truth of the matter as we are seeing here, is that automobiles make the relative isolation of cities over short distances essentially moot.
I call this the “college town commuter effect” and I think the examples here show it perfectly:
Here I have drawn a circle in a 30 mile radius around the city in question and then looked up the populations of all of the other cities that fall into that radius… so the numbers listed above are the population that you find in “commuting range” of the university town itself.
For Ann Arbor, a 30-mile commute gets you well into Detroit, which has its own issues of course, and if you worked on the western edge of Detroit, would it be nice to live in Ann Arbor instead? Probably.
For Stillwater, OK… there is basically NOTHING close by. Tulsa and Oklahoma City are about 45 minutes away… a bit of a stretch for a daily commute. The other smaller towns within 30 miles of Sstillwater add up to only 13,000 people. Not much to commute to.
For Davis, we have the entire Sacramento metropolitan area on our doorstep: 1.6 Million people and the State Capital of the world’s 6th largest economy.
This finding is something I didn’t really expect from this analysis when I started, and I think it is important: Even though Davis is undersized by every measure we have come up with, there is nevertheless NO LIMIT on how big it could be if we were to simply build more housing.
More specifically: Because housing is in short supply almost everywhere in California, and because we have freeways and cars, there is functionally no upper limit to the number of people who might choose to live here ( and commute to their jobs ) if we built housing for them. In other words: If we increased our housing supply to accommodate say, 200,000 people, we still wouldn’t likely see a change in our vacancy rate!
This premise is backed up by the final City that I want to focus on: Fort Collins, Colorado.
Fort Collins is home to 32,000 students at the University of Colorado yet has a city population of 168,000 people and a City:Student ratio at the top of the charts at 5.12.
There is some secondary industry, notably it is a center for craft brewing, but there are also a lot of people who, priced out of the Denver area, choose it because of proximity to recreation and its nice college town feel, ample museums etc.
For all of that size, however, the vacancy rate in Fort Collins is still 0.9% Probably because of those secondary industries and the fact that in the 30 miles surrounding it there are just under half a million other people and jobs. Fort Collins is what Davis could be if we allowed the growth to happen.
Housing for whom?
This leads us to an incredibly important set of questions which I really think we need to grapple with as a city, and it’s not a question that I thought I would be led to when I started this analysis: Whom do we want to provide housing for? And whom do we NOT want to provide housing for?
I ask these questions because of one thing I have observed in our local housing debate: A sense in our community that we should be building housing preferentially for “locals” —university staff, local workers and students, many of whom are currently displaced into surrounding communities. Interestingly, this sentiment also finds itself incarnated in the “Davis-connected buyers Program” at Bretton Woods.
To confirm if this sentiment is indeed real, I created a quick poll on Nextdoor asking this very question:
The poll shows that this sentiment is indeed real, but perhaps not universal. One commenter indicated that while he had voted for “all of the above” he felt it was “tough that people who work in town often have to drive from outside of town.”
But if my demand analysis regarding university towns above is correct, then one of the implications is that if we simply build more housing, there is no guarantee that local workers will be served by that housing—in fact we can assume the opposite, as has been the observed experience of the Cannery.
Another commenter indicated that she was unhappy “…in part due to past development and promises not kept. Saying what our vision is for a quality livable community turns into political advertisements that lead us to believe in smoke and mirrors.”
Do we want to produce housing for the sake of meeting our RHNA numbers while not actually helping solving “OUR” housing problem: displaced local workers, university staff and students?
There is at least one reason why we should prefer to serve local workers: Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMTs) and our shared commitment to sustainability. A city that has housing for its own local workers is simply more sustainable than one that forces them to commute in, and if we provide a lot of housing for residents who commute OUT of town, then we are likely complicit in creating more traffic on our local streets and highways.
Can we actually build housing for locals?
Which leads us to the final question of “can we do something about it” or “can we build housing for our local workforce that won’t be gobbled up by more affluent commuters?”
The answer to that question is yes: And the best example is the Hibbert Lumber site, which has been criticized for being planned to include ZERO parking.
Tell me: If a housing project does not include any parking, who will choose to live in that project? The answer is going to be: “People who don’t need to own a car.”
If you work in Davis, then the Hibbert site is an easy bike ride or a walk to everything a person could possibly need. You will probably want access to a ZipCar every once in a while for trips out of town, but for daily purposes, a car will be totally optional. The Co-op is a block away, and every major employer is reachable by bike.
The Hibbert site is going to be preferentially attractive to retirees, empty-nest local professionals, and young couples with local jobs or post-docs and university staff—by virtue of its lack of parking alone. It will simply not work for people who work in Sacramento, unless their work is directly on the Yolobus line that runs to the Capitol.
Low-parking housing is the best thing we can do to provide housing preferentially for local workers, and it also happens to be the most environmentally sustainable way we can build as well. Let us remember that RHNA requires us to house people—not cars.
Living car-free is an alien concept to most Californians, but it is the reality for millions of Americans who live in denser cities which have adequate transit opinions, and those cities have far less GHG impacts per capita than car-centric cities like Davis. In my opinion, we can’t get enough of projects like that.
Unfortunately, the Hibbert project is alone in this regard. The currently proposed peripheral developments are exactly the opposite: They are car-centric single-family suburbs where you almost MUST have a car in order to function.
This is really the choice before us: Do we want to develop housing preferentially for local workers which is sustainable, or do we want to create more car-dependent suburbia that will likely preferentially be consumed by commuters?
These are the questions that I will delve more into in the third (and final ) installment of this series. I am interested to hear commentary on this expansion of this analysis.
Until then, if you are not familiar with what I mean when I say “car dependent suburbia,” I have some homework for you, because the suburban model of development is widely understood to have failed, and yet as a society we seem excruciatingly slow to catch on.
A good starting point is this series from the channel “Not Just Bikes” which covers into the work from Strong Towns and discusses many things that every voter on a Measure J project should know. If you watch that series, you will never look at the way we have developed our city the same way again.
Also this channel has a lot of great city planning episodes, and that linked episode in particular discusses the “missing middle” type of housing that I think should be our absolute priority, EVEN for peripheral projects—which I will discuss in the next installment
And if you would rather read something in print form, a good summary article about how suburbs have failed can be found here.
Tim,
You did not understand or accept the reply I made to your first post about University Towns.
THE CITY OF DAVIS DOES NOT HOST UCD. Why is this such a hard concept to accept? Would it help if someone drew a line around the area that contains the city’s area of sovereignty, responsibility and ability to collect taxes? Some sort of limit the city could create or demark on a map?
In my reply to you last week I outlined the reasons the city should grow. I also implied (but I guess was not explicitly clear) that other than meeting RHNA requirements; GROWTH SHOULD BENEFIT THE EXITING DAVIS COMMUNITY. That includes acknowledging and limiting the possible development of peripheral areas if necessary.
If you want to create profiles of “university towns” fine. But do it in a way that makes sense. Simple population comparisons of other university towns are irrelevant. Some universities actually sit within city limits and therefore those cities are to a significant degree OBLIGATED to plan for and provide services to support that university (or any other entity within it’s city limits). The city of Davis and UCD have gone their separate ways and like it that way. If UCD were in the city’s limits do you think the city would have been cool with UCD adding 10’s of thousands more students over the past couple of decades and adding all those dorms? I’m pretty sure there’d be a significant faction in the city that would have opposed that growth within their city. So UCD is just fine with not being part of the city because it can do whatever it wants and the city is just fine at not having to provide support to all those dorms and buildings on campus (UCD has it’s own infrastructure and services or pays into the city for it). So Davis and UCD should and do what is in their own best self interests. But that doesn’t mean they can’t and shouldn’t work together.
If you want to make comparisons profiles of other university towns and the city of Davis: FOLLOW THE MONEY. What I mean is tax revenue generation and sharing and how it translates to quality of life in those cities.
My reply to that comment in your last article was that it’s even worse that these people drive to Davis; most of them work OUTSIDE of Davis (at UCD) and then drive home. It pretty much does nothing for the city of Davis other than use city roads, maybe some services…..and if we’re lucky those workers come in to town and buy lunch….which captures a piddly amount of tax revenue.
Urban planning for the benefit of the community is pretty simple. Retail captures local taxes. Local businesses create local jobs. Residential supports both retail and local businesses. PLANNING is getting the right mix and timing of these elements in the community. It’s why I emphasize creating more retail. DESTINATION RETAIL to draw people here buy stuff. Local job creation to get people here to spend money…..and lastly residential to get those people that work here to live here and spend money. But why are we planning all of this? What’s the point? Quality of life for the existing community. So that tax money generation hopefully means better city services, nicer parks, better maintained streets, better social services, better expanded mass transit….etc…
This is why I emphasize PLANNING. I am not a fan of student housing in Davis. In fact I generally oppose it. But I’ve advocated in the past for the planning of a student quarter that focuses student housing and student focused retail and entertainment in one area. A relatively dense mixed use area that captures tax revenue from student focused retail spending. PLANNING is why I also emphasize that if/when the city provides housing to meet the RHNA requirements, the city had better have a plan to pay for the services and maintained those residence will consume (or any other development). Heck in my opinion fiscal planning for RHNA growth…while ideally revenue positive….should at least be revenue neutral. New development beyond that should definitely be revenue positive. That’s why there should also be concurrent plans for retail growth and expansion in the city to capture revenue to support these new residential developments.
So if you want to compare and profile other university towns..fine…but consider the economic, political and fiscal connections between them and how they compare and relate to the city of Davis. But remember the ultimate WHY to this exercise in growth: the betterment of the quality of life for existing members of the local city community.
“But remember the ultimate WHY to this exercise in growth: the betterment of the quality of life for existing members of the local city community.”
Isn’t that a double subjective?
(1) One value might be the betterment of the quality of life for x-class of people, but that’s not an objective value
and
(2) What constitutes betterment is itself subjective.
Of course it’s quality of life is subjective. Very little in life isn’t subjective.
One of the main points I made in my reply to Tim’ first post was WHY growth. The first part was required growth. That required growth included the RHNA requirement and getting the city’s fiscal in order (to in the very least keep the current level of quality of life in the community relatively unchanged). This was what I called the starting point that I believed we all could agree on.
I have no idea where you’re going with this. I’m hesitant to dive down into your social justice rabbit hole. But I’ve advocated for more affordable housing AND public housing solutions. In fact this is what I said in my comment.
Bottom line, as a community, do you want to help the poor and disenfranchised? You gotta plan to make money to pay for those solutions.
That’s only a small part of the housing market. Housing for the missing middle, which includes much of the UCD staff and young faculty, has to be addressed through expanded market priced housing. Some of that can be met by moving students out of duplexes into expanded student housing, but only a portion.
I’ll point out that many of the enhanced quality amenities that we point to in Davis such as Village Homes and the North Greenbelt came with new developments.
But I do agree that we need to pay for those those expanded services by allowing market priced housing to pay for those solutions.
Richard, “housing for the missing middle” is not a simple binary “on or off” situation. The reason is simple. The housing decisions for each respective member of the missing middle are discretionary.
In describing the missing middle demographic’s demand for housing in Davis, you are not differentiating between conceptual (theoretic) demand and real (actionable) demand. In concept each respective member of the missing middle in Davis (a term that you and others use freely but have as yet not clearly defined) represents a unit of housing demand.
For the sake of discussion (specifically starting the discussion) the biggest constraint on that demand is financial/economic … with the ideal goal that the housing costs of that missing middle household never exceed 30% of their total income. Again for the sake of discussion (using Don Shor’s provided statistic that to afford a $500,000 sale price ownership residence) the combined missing middle household income needs to be at least $134,000.
That is where the conceptual demand road parts from the real demand road. Specifically, what kind of ownership residence does $500,000 purchase in Davis? With the answer to that question in hand, the next question is what kind of ownership residence does $500,000 purchase in the surrounding communities (within comfortable commuting distance to their existing employment in Davis). Armed with those respective available $500,000 homes as choices, the missing middle couple (or individual … although I would say that an individual making $134,000 is not in the “middle”) makes a choice between their conceptual demand choices, and the one they choose is their unit of actual demand. If that missing middle household has no children and plans to not have children, then the reduced square footage of living space and the reduced size of yard are much less onerous limitations. However, for a missing middle household that has children and/or plans to add children to their household, the reduced square footage of living space and the reduced size of yard are much greater limitations.
Apartment rental housing for the missing middle is also affected by the duality of conceptual demand vs. real/actionable demand. In simple terms, missing middle households with children and/or plans to add children want play space for their children, and for the most part apartments do not provide that. An apartment can be a short term housing fix for a missing middle household with children, but they will only be transitory apartment demand … looking to move on to housing that better matches their family’s needs.
Your statement is a fiction. As I have demonstrated over and over, the positive attributes for Davis arise from hosting UCD. Your attempt to parse this with legalese does not obviate the de facto situation. Many of the colleges and universities in Tim’s list also sit outside city limits, but we still consider them to be part of that city. And because there isn’t a moat with barbed wire fencing and an official policy of not allowing either students or staff to live in Davis nor purchase any goods and services from town businesses, Davis has the obligation that you attribute to other communities. Based on the housing value premium that Davis has over neighboring communities, the City collects 40% to 50% more in property taxes than it would otherwise if UCD was not here. (That ignores the sales tax and TOT revenues also flowing here. It also ignores the likely property tax premium due to more rapid real estate turnover that accelerates reassessment under Prop 13.) That is a direct fiscal contribution. So we should follow the money right to that benefactor.
To make the comparison more commensurate, Tim probably should add the 9,300 students who live on campus to the Davis total, but our ratio is still quite low.
Ann Arbor, Berkeley and Eugene have “student quarters” that derive a lot of benefits for each town’s businesses. Davis has a relatively small one along A St. The University Mall site is a natural location for another and we can only hope that Brixmor is rethinking what’s been there so far. But we also need housing for the faculty and staff who don’t want to live in a student quarter. And it’s pretty foolish and dangerous to the climate to rely on other towns housing UCD’s workers, forcing much longer commutes.
Richard, your moralizing about “the positive attributes for Davis” that come from State of California taxpayers is noting more than zealotry. I have asked you many times to provide evidence of the State dollars that are flowing into the city each year, and to date you have provided not a shred of such evidence.
The facxt that you want to ignore the reality that there is a fiscal and distrust “moat with barbed wire fencing” between UCD and the City, does not change the clearly evidenced fact that that fiscal and distrust moat exists. If UCD and the City were one community, they would be regularly collaborating on win-win solutions to the challenges that the aggregate Davis community challenges. The President of the University of Pennsylvania and the Mayor of Philadelphia meet in person every month to work collaboratively on their collective challenges. The result is a resilient/sustainable fiscal and trust partnership.
Shakespeare wrote in his play “As You Like It” … ‘Tis Mad Idolatry that makes the service greater than the god.” Your idolization of your moralistic belief about Davis’ obligations to the taxpayers of California fits that quotation.
You have made the point in other comments of yours that Davis homeowners receive the housing price premium when they sell their Davis house. That is a true statement, but it (conveniently) ignores the fact that the Davis homeowner paid that premium when they purchased their home. Over the past 20 years the average home sale price in Davis has risen no faster (in some cases less fast) than the average home sale price in the surrounding communities. That begs the following hypothetical question … which is the better investment (1) a $100,000 purchase that you sell for $120,000 or (2) a $150,000 purchase that you sell for $180,000?
In closing, I challenge the applicability to Davis of your statement, “It also ignores the likely property tax premium due to more rapid real estate turnover that accelerates reassessment under Prop 13.” For that statement to be true the housing turnover rate in Davis would need to be faster than in the surrounding/comparative communities. I do not believe you can demonstrate with statistics that that is the case. Everything I have heard in my 25 years living in Davis has been the exact opposite … that Davis homeowners age in place much more than average and as a result the turnover rate in Davis is considerably lower than ith the comparative communities.
An interesting conclusion–to create incentives for housing for local needs, reduce the car-centric nature of new housing. Finding a way to limit personal vehicles in these new developments is key to this. Perhaps limiting dwellings to a single car garage with no on street parking is one approach. (Families with young children still need a car which is why so few of those families live in SF.)
One nit to pick: The focus on vacancy rates emphasizes rental housing when we’re mostly discussing housing prices. A better index is the house price premium for those college towns over the surrounding county’s. Zillow and Redfin provide useful indices. For Davis vs. Yolo:
Zillow – Davis: $865,745, Yolo: $600,388 44%
Redfin – Davis: $920,000, Yolo: $600,000 53%
https://www.zillow.com/home-values/51659/davis-ca/
https://www.zillow.com/home-values/97646/ca-94243/
https://www.redfin.com/city/4690/CA/Davis/housing-market
https://www.redfin.com/city/35589/CA/Yolo/housing-market
The price differential is the reason that folks (especially younger families) pursue housing in surrounding towns.
And none of the proposals will change that. The availability of housing in surrounding towns already keeps Davis prices “in check”.
Did The Cannery “lower” Davis housing prices?
Try 2-3 cars per household – not “one”.
There are wealthy families who move to S.F., but for those who stay – they also don’t send their kids into the atrocious public school system there.
In Davis, one can purchase a perfectly-fine house for about $700K. Hopefully, prices will drop further with more interest rate increases.
But so far, no one has even put forth a coherent argument regarding the reason that Davis should be pursuing more young families, nor have they put forth any argument regarding the (implied) claim that new housing wouldn’t experience the same result (e.g., folks aging in place).
Young families are probably the group which creates the most “demand” for services (e.g., schools, libraries, sports parks, parking, etc.).
Another metric which is better than the “vacancy” rate (which I’ve never seen reported for owned homes before) is the “average days on the market.” Most houses are sold by an owner who still resides there so there’s no vacancy. I suspect the vacancy rate my reflect more about where the seller is moving to that is driven by local characteristics (e.g., completely out of the metropolitan area because there are no other jobs locally vs. looking to simply relocate within the same job market area.)
I agree that “average days on the market” is a better metric than vacancy rate for ownership housing. However, the unlimited demand reality that Tim has pointed out is a major contributor to that very low average days stat in Davis. The competition for apartments and the competition for ownership housing that Tim’s identified regional demand reality produces, yields the same result … a low statistic.
You are trying to make the “obligation argument” which we know we disagree on. This article is about market forces, which totally ignore the city / university boundary. The presence of students and the jobs created by the university are the economic backbone of our city, whether the university is within the city limits or not. It drives our economy and the demand for housing – at least 2/3 of the demand for housing I guess. I just don’t think the point matters in THIS analysis.
The point about housing students staff and local workforce locally is an environmental one, and a traffic one. If we dont agree on the city’s “obligation” then we might simply agree in terms of efficiency.
I \ agree with you that planning is vitally important, and I agree that everything we build should be good for the whole community, ( but not just for “existing residents” future beneficial residents too. )
I also agree that retail to capture taxable revenue needs to be built in as well. Neither the Shriners nor the village farms sites have any commercial mixed in. So much for the “walkable neighborhoods” that Judy Corbett’s letter called for, and Robb’s plan AND the LEED-ND rubric… There is a huge gap between what is being asked for and what the current peripheral developments have put on the table… a HUGE gap… a real “planning process” would have caught that… but real planning apparently isn’t happening.
.
One subject that Tim’s articles have not as yet addressed is jobs. He may be planning to address that in future “parts” of the series.
To illuminate the importance of jobs, I will use the quote from the article I have copied and pasted above. Regarding Champaign-Urbana as a “great median case for this data set” I would argue that it is actually not that at all. Why? Here is why.
— Champaign-Urbana is actually two separate municipal jurisdictions. Davis is only one municipal jurisdiction.
— Champaign has (according to the US Census) 46,563 people who are employed in its population of 88,302. That means 52.7% of the population is employed.
— Urbana has (according to the US Census) 20,465 people who are employed in its population of 38,336. That means 53.4% of the population is employed.
— Compare that to Davis. Davis has (according to the US Census) 16,077 people who are employed in its population of 66,850. That means 24.0% of the population is employed.
The difference between 67,000 jobs and 16,077 jobs in a community is massive … and a huge contributor to the population and population ration differences. Even if you add the 16,600 jobs on the UCD Davis campus, you only get to 32,667, which is less than half of Champaign-Urbana’s 67,028.
Hmmm… I guess the “employed” number gives you the population that isnt” Children / students / Retired… Seems like a low number but maybe it makes sense in a college town.
You are saying the difference is industry?
I am indeed planning to address jobs in the next installment.. but I wasn’t looking at it from that angle..
Tim, the Census reports break the jobs down into categories. Tomorrow I will slice and dice the data and get back to you with the areas of difference, but absent that specific parsed data it Is fair to say “jobs not related to the respective University.” They could be industry jobs, or retail jobs, or government jobs (if the city is a County Seat), etc.
Tim, as promised here are the side by side jobs by NAICS Industry Sector for Davis and Champaign and Urbana.
Manufacturing … Davis 500 Champaign Urbana 3000
Retail … Davis 1800 Champaign Urbana 6000
Warehousing … Davis 30 Champaign Urbana 2000
Educational Services … Davis 3500 Champaign Urbana 17800
Educational Services … UCD campus faculty and staff 11,439
Health Care & Social Assistance … Davis 2950 Champaign Urbana 13900
Accomodation & Food Service … Davis 2100 Champaign Urbana 5700
All across the board they have a more robust economy … which results in lots more residents
https://davisvanguard.org/screenshot-2023-06-14-at-11-15-34-pm-2/
Thanks for all that Matt…
I guess it makes sense… if you have a higher ratio city, the people arent going to ALL be retirees.. There was a point in this town where we thought developing more of a off-campus workforce and economy was a good thing. I might be in the minority thinking that way these days. 😉
Tim, conceptually I am in that same “minority” as you are.
Taking a concept and making it into a reality takes a plan, and the City of Davis has no such plan. 23 years ago Davis made a conscious decision not to have a clear (and accountable) economic development plan. 23 years of no plan and no accountability has brought us to the place we are … a bedroom community where 21,000 Davis residents leave town to go to work and only 4,000 stay in town to go to work.
Taking a concept to reality also takes collaboration, and our community has a woeful lack of collaboration.
We have a huge lift, and some major cultural change to implement if we want to have a different economic reality.
That we 75% of our workforce commuting would indicate that we have a serious jobs/housing problem that is exacerbating our climate impact. When I look at Ann Arbor or Bellingham, we see near parity in the number of people people leaving to commute versus working in town. However both also have large job inflows, but UM and WWU are included within city limits.
So what does this make of the argument being put forward that Davis needs more housing so workers don’t have to commute when over 4 out of 5 resident travel out of town to their work now? So somehow magically all the new housing will now only house people who work in Davis? Please…
“So somehow magically all the new housing will now only house people who work in Davis? ”
That would be extraordinary. A perfect one to one ratio, and perfectly contained community.
It would be extraordinary and impossible because you know that if we go by Matt’s numbers that most of the new residents will be traveling out of town for work and only adding to the VMT and pollution.
Matt
I don’t know how you get to 16K jobs. I find 32K jobs here (and it clearly excludes UCD): https://datausa.io/profile/geo/davis-ca/#economy.
57% of the population is in the labor force and the unemployment rate is 2.8%. With a population of 67,000+, that means that 37,000 of the residents are employed.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/daviscitycalifornia
Richard, the 37,000 US Census number you have linked includes the 16,077 jobs that are actually in the City plus the 21,236 jobs of the people who are residents living in Davis but employed outside Davis. The US Census graphic below shows those inflows and outflows for the year 2020.
https://davisvanguard.org/screenshot-2023-06-14-at-11-08-48-pm/
The graphic you linked shows only 25,000 total employed in Davis. Something is wrong with that graphic versus some spot checks I’ve done of other cities which show closer correlation. BTW, UCD shows 22,000 jobs on campus.
This Census map doesn’t match with the Census data showing 32,000 employed in Davis (which isn’t entirely surprising given that Census products often don’t completely reconcile.) I confirmed that the Census Quick Facts (linked above) shows 32,000 employed in Davis, so I don’t where the missing 7,000 jobs are. When you looked at Champaign/Urbana, did you use the same graphic or a different source? When I looked at Bellingham, the jobs reported in the LEHD map (which I downloaded but don’t know how to post graphics here) are within 1,000 calculated from the Census Quick Facts (which appear closer to the actual government values). (BTW, the Davis values from 2020 may be highly skewed by the pandemic and remote learning at UCD.)
I think an important point here is that Davis’ job/population ratio is unusually low compared to other college towns.
One important difference is that Champaign/Urbana is much more isolated than Davis, which is one of the findings in Tim’s presentation–as a town becomes more integrated regionally, e.g., Ann Arbor vs. Champaign, it’s population/student ratio rises.
Richard, the data source for all four cities (Davis, Champaign, Urbana, and now Bellingham) is the exact same US Census reporting system. Since you brought up Bellingham I have captured both the in-out graphic and the Jobs by Industry numbers for Bellingham and attached them below. Bellingham has 47,898 jobs in the City. 18,577 of those are filled by Bellingham residents and 29,321 are filled by commuters into Bellingham from other communities. 35,508 Bellingham residents are employed with 18,577 employed in Bellingham and 16,931 employed outside Bellingham.
https://davisvanguard.org/screenshot-2023-06-15-at-10-33-56-am/
https://davisvanguard.org/screenshot-2023-06-15-at-10-43-37-am/
Richard, I don’t know what your source for UCD employment is, but my numbers provided to you in the table below are directly by email from the UCD Finance/Data department. 28,039 total employees, 11,439 are Davis Campus and 16,600 are UC Davis Health.
https://davisvanguard.org/screenshot-2023-06-15-at-11-37-19-am/
Richard, your point about Champaign/Urbana being much more isolated than Davis is extremely important for a lot of reasons, most important of which is that it serves as the economic center of the region. As a result the economy is essentially “full service,” acting as a magnetic hub bringing in consumers of products and services who do not have any other close by alternative for those products and services. Said another way, the economy in Champaign/Urbana is regional. The economy of Davis on the other hand is assertively local. That is why the jobs numbers in certain industry categories are so much higher in Champaign/Urbana than they are in Davis.
Further, isolated communities like Champaign/Urbana are often the regional seat of Government, which also adds jobs.
All of the above produces a much higher population/student ratio.