By David M. Greenwald
Executive Editor
Davis, CA – Did you read yesterday’s column on “the vision thing” and happen to notice a glaring omission? You’re right, I did not offer my own vision. That was not an accident.
As one person asked: “What is your Vision for Davis, and what is your plan for making that Vision fiscally and economically sustainable?”
I think it’s a great question. But, I’m not about to offer a vision of Davis.
There are three primary reasons for that.
First, I think that is for the community to decide. The community is going to have to figure out exactly what they want the future of this community to look like.
Second, I felt pretty strongly that coming out of DSIDE and the Innovation Park Task Force and the Studio 30 report we had an answer for what the community should look 
like. The voters and other factors either rejected or canceled that vision. Given that I was in support of that vision, I don’t see why it should be on me to now come up with another one.
Third, and finally, I don’t view it as my job.
I can hear it now, you’re always supporting all of these projects, you should offer up a vision.
To be honest, I see myself more along the lines of madman in town square pointing out to people that their vision of Davis of dead and this is not the community that they think it is rather than the guy who wants to lead the way to fix the mess.
I think that was precisely part of the problem—the community needs to become more aware of all of these shortcomings. The typical person might be aware of the housing crisis and is certainly aware that Davis is becoming more expensive. But I think it is my job to point out all of the problems in town and someone else needs to get elected to office and start to fix them.
Here’s what I see in a nutshell:
- Davis’ housing and growth policies over the last 20+ years has led to an increase in the cost of housing that is pricing the typical middle-class family and certainly large swaths of traditionally underrepresented people out of this community.
- The city’s fiscal health has been precarious at best for the last 15 years
- The city has an underdeveloped retail sector.
- The city has a lack of space to take advantage of the proximity of the university to become a real player in economic development.
- The lack of housing for families is putting increased pressure on our schools—we are facing declining enrollment and thus a threat to the vitality of this community.
- There is a lack of a jobs-housing balance which leads large numbers of people to commute into Davis to work, a lot of them at the university, but also a large number of community residents to commute out of Davis to work. The result of that imbalance are traffic impacts and exacerbating GHG and VMT —a lot of it unnecessarily if we had a better balance.
- The downtown has long been a pride of this community, but it’s in decline. Retail sector is dying. Restaurants and entertainment are mediocre (even by standards of a student clientele), there is an underdeveloped core, crumbling infrastructure and a need of huge capital investment. While the three proposed projects are a good start, they are the tip of the iceberg.
- UC Davis is a huge driver of resources and capital, but our focus on student housing and various disputes over the years have pushed the university to invest more heavily in the region and away from Davis. That relationship made be difficult to repair and it is likely to have huge impacts not only on housing policies but also the possibility of economic development.
- The Measure J policies of growth control have strained the city on housing and economic development and put huge fiscal pressures on the city. There remains a possibility that the state will step in and there is a looming battle within the community over what projects to approve and whether to modify Measure J.
In short, Davis is a community where the cost of housing and the overall cost of living is enormous and it is pushing traditional populations out of this community.
I have argued that by trying to preserve this community as it was in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and early 2000s we are actually radically changing it in unintended ways that are not sustainable.
I agree with those who argue we need to have a vision. But I also believe we need to act now. We really cannot wait for 5 to 10 years for a vision to be developed and approved. We need to find ways to alleviate our housing crisis. And we need to find ways to take advantage of our name and proximity to the university.
The fact that the community has voted down three innovation/economic development projects has done huge amounts of harm to the future of the community and is pushing this community to the breaking point.
Finally, and I know a lot of people will take great offense to this, but the city has suffered from the lack of leadership. We have had years to address some of these problems, and we have addressed none of them.
Too many people have lived too comfortably in their houses purchased in another generation, and are either retired or at the end of their careers, and thus are not aware of what has transpired over the last decade.
It’s not too late to change course—but the warning lights are blinking.
I believe the correct phrase is “no sugar tonight with my coffee”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMG-Mi9I0-k
You got the reference….
.
I was a very active participant in DSIDE and attended most of (possibly all of) the Task Force meetings. My comments here are informed by that participation.
There was a lot of good work done by both DSIDE and the Task Force. An environment of engagement and directed effort was fostered by the City Manager Steve Pinkerton and Chief Innovation Officer Rob White. Unfortunately the City Council saw fit to reward those respective leadership efforts by forcing out Pinkerton and firing White. As a result the City Council and the community “got what it paid for” … the death of the economic development efforts.
It is also important to be clear about what was accomplished in the efforts prior to Pinkerton’s and White’s departures. To do so I will use a metaphor of hydrating one’s body. At a minimum, Hydration needs two components, (1) a liquid and (2) a physical container to both hold the liquid and pour the liquid into one’s mouth.
The DISIDE and Innovation Park Task Force and Studio 30 efforts only addressed the second of those components … the physical container. There was no effort put into understanding the first component … what market segments of businesses would logically fill the container. Anyone who has lifted an empty water bottle or beverage flask to their lips knows how much hydration (sustenance) they got from that effort.
The words sustenance and sustainability have the same word origin/root. I am quite confident that Rob White had a plan for identifying and exploring the market segments that identified with the core competencies of the Davis community. Unfortunately he was driven to the guillotine before he could do that.
What are Davis’ core competencies? Has there been any effort to clearly identify them? Do we have any sense of what the economic value is of those core competencies … economic value that outside businesses would like to tap into?
A good place to start the quest for answers to those questions is to look at our community’s current businesses … and their respective core competencies.
Yep, I’ve answered these questions here in several articles: Our bread and butter for economic development is agtech, renewables, food tech and automation. The combination of automation and agtech… that in particular is an important future industry (AgRobotics) which is “ours to lose”. And we really should be actively encouraging the success of that sector.
The field of crop tech is just as important, and we have a substantial number of companies already here creating the plants that feed a good portion of the world.
Moving on to discussion of David’s point… given that I have laid out both economic and housing / transit / sustainability visions for davis, does that make me the ONLY person who has articulated a proactive vision for how we develop our city? That can’t possibly be true, and it’s sad if it is.
I was hoping that if I laid out one potential future, it would inspire others to step forward with their own, hopefully superior, alternatives…. But so far, we haven’t seen it….
Tim Keller said … “Our bread and butter for economic development is agtech, renewables, food tech and automation. The combination of automation and agtech… that in particular is an important future industry (AgRobotics) which is “ours to lose”. And we really should be actively encouraging the success of that sector.”
Tim’s comment above illustrates the Ying and the Yang of core competencies. If you look at the current universe of jobs in the City Limits, what has been the jobs trend over the past 25 years in any of Tim’s four listed competencies. Essentially the job growth in all four of those market sectors has been infinitesimally small. So the on-the-ground job growth reality for those four areas is abysmal. I agree with Tim that those four sectors have great potential, but Davis has shown no ability to tap into that potential.
If you expand your analysis area to include the UCD campus, the picture gets both interesting and incredibly frustrating at the same time. UCD has definitely been responsible for considerable job creation in those four sectors BUT with the exception of research jobs on campus, all the created jobs have been in communities other than Davis.
What is incredibly clear is that one of Davis’ core competencies is NOT business development.
Another core competency that is missing is collaboration. If that existed in Davis then UCD and the City would be working together to have created a very different reality than the anemic one we currently have. As Pogo has often said, “We have met the enemy, and they are us.”
That brings me around th David’s abdication of responsibility that is the central message of his article. David isn’t alone when he plays Pontius Pilate. Davis is full of Pilates, but very few pilots. Said a different way, community leadership is NOT one of Davis’ core competencies. We are a reactive community, not a proactive community.
The most glaring issue about this article is this point which is completely ridiculous. The biggest “dispute”has been UCD’s years of negligence to produce the needed on-campus housing for its students, which continues.
UCD has over 5,300 acres and a 900-acre core campus, the larges in the UC system. Ye UCD is the ONLY UC which has not committed to producing at least 50% on campus housing. This is inexcusable as is UCD’s lack of planning ability by continuing to build low-density housing on campus when other UC campuses are building far higher density housing such as UC Irvine and UC San Diego.
UCD’s redevelopment of Orchard Park is an embarrassment as it is a complex of 4-story housing which is directly across the street on Russell Blvd. is the “Identity” student housing complex which is 7-stories.! This Identity project was built by a private developer who had to pay city development fees, and property taxes and had the added high expense of the land. UCD has none of thee costs, plus Gov. Newsom has allocated over $1.2 billion for university student housing yet UCD has not applied for any of it! This inexcusable and irresponsible behavior by UCD.
So, UCD needs to stop under-performing in their planning and start by building a minimum of 7-stores of student housing at the Solano Park redevelopment project on campus.
The Vanguard needs to stop “running interference” for UCD and being their apologist, and recognize UCD’s responsibility playing a major role in causing our housing shortage.
Eileen, The Orchard Park complex is for families. I believe that it was discussed and determined that families with small children would not be comfortable in housing taller than 4 stories. So don’t look at that complex as some sort of missed opportunity.
It was a mistake to wall off West campus from town. Instead Westwood and Stonegate neighborhoods should have pushed for a redesign of Russell Blvd and building of staff and faculty housing.
Families with small children happily reside in tall apartment buildings not just in New York City, but other major cities all over the world as well.
Sharla,
No, actually Orchard Park is student housing for graduate students with and without families, as well as undergrads.
My point is that UCD has squandered all of their opportunities with their new on-campus housing which are only 4-stories generally, with a rare 5-story unit (i.e. usually dormitories where the first floor does not have housing and has a lobby, mail room, etc, so a net 4-stories of residential.)
There is not reason why young families temporarily living on a college campus would not live in higher density housing, particularly since it is so conveniently close to classes.
It is embarrassing that UCD used up 19 acres of land with a complex of 11 buildings that are only 4-stories high. UCD could have almost doubled the number of units and beds had they gone 7-stories like the “Identity” privately developed student housing project right across the street on Russell Blvd. in the City.
Further, it was no mistake to separate West Village from West Davis given that Russell Blvd. is the only access to West Davis.
Sharla: Four stories? What’s the problem? Millions of families with children live happily in buildings with more than four stories.
To David’s list, I might remove some or edit details of others, but I would definitely add:
* Staff continually invests hundreds of hours in bad development projects which don’t meet our goals regarding sustainable transportation, climate projection, general conviviality and so on.. and then citizens who recognize this and vote no are blamed for housing prices.
* No one – not politicians, not most locally-based media, not most Commissions, not many activists including self-identified progressive socialists – say much about landlords and their toxic pathology of greed.
* While I hope the forces that are against a widening of I-80 prevail, the status quo is a joke and this goes far beyond the eastbound traffic and diversions on certain afternoons. I-80 is a blight, rumbling and noisy even if a bit less smokey etc in the future…. and it’s also quite central and a great place for other things, such as businesses, housing, etc. We really need to re-locate it in the form of a bypass, south around the City…
* We need to spend the money to connect Davis to the mountains, to Sacramento and to the western half of the Megaregion by fast and frequent rail with lower prices for travel. Do graduates want to live in a town where it’s necessary to carpool everywhere outside of town, especially at night?
* We continually ignore deep study of bad development in Woodland and West Sacramento and its huge negatives for Davis. We need to think more along the lines of a inner region, as it were, consisting of these places.
“Four stories? What’s the problem? Millions of families with children live happily in buildings with more than four stories.”
There is a lot of research that suggestions you’re wrong on this point.
I would be very interested to read some of that research. Can you provide links?
I put “families with children” and “apartments” into Google and the first displayed article was a very interesting read. It’s link is https://citiespeoplelove.co/article/designing-apartment-homes-for-families-with-children
Here is another interesting article about families with children living in apartments. https://theconversation.com/more-children-are-living-in-high-rise-apartments-so-designers-should-keep-them-in-mind-100756
Here’s a Smart Cities Dive piece: https://www.smartcitiesdive.com/ex/sustainablecitiescollective/7-reasons-why-high-rises-kill-livability/561536/
I believe there is also some research in Psychology Journals that’s informative here.
Thank you David for those references. I look forward to reading them.
The few articles I have read (definitely a small sample) seem to be focusing less on the number of floors/stories and much more on the design of each individual floor … which applies to the second, third and fourth floors just as much as on any higher floors in a taller apartment building.
The key design issue appears to be having each floor include a communal play space where the children can safely be let out the front door of an apartment and interact with children from other families. That design essentially replicates the historical model where children went out their front door and played on the street while their mothers watched them through windows or while sitting on a porch.
Does the UCD design include communal play spaces like that?
Here’s a high rise livability article https://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/news-and-media-releases/articles/high-rise-living-makes-social-life-difficult-for-young-families-deakin-study
David,
My point is that Orchard Park should have been 7-stories or more , not only be four stories. It is an embarrassment and a complete squandering of the use of the 19-acres of land to have built such a low density project when UCD needs so much student housing. This terrible planning of only 4-stories (with a rare 5th story) is how all the other new UCD student housing has been built which could have been twice as tall with twice as many housing units and beds.
As I have said before, UCD teaches sustainable planning but does not practice it. Complete hypocrisy.
Eileen
The difference in student housing is a trivial amount compared to the space for 50,000 more residents that is more appropriate for a city in our situation. Tim Keller’s analysis is a good indicator of what Davis should look like. Increasing on campus housing will do little to solve our community’s dilemma. Focusing on it is a distraction.
David, Tim and Matt are all correct. My wife Anya and I published one achievable vision in 2018 to follow Woodland’s lead and focus on sustainable food technology and provision. That could be the contents of Matt’s containers, and it fits quite well with outsiders’ view of Davis. But we need strong leadership and pushback against those who think they are protecting the status quo, when in fact they are undermining the very values that make Davis what it is.