When the Vanguard asked about what is the most important in our questions of the Davis City Council, everyone said—housing.
As Linda Deos put it, “I think it’s the most important issue facing our community. And I’m not surprised that all three of us are kind of on the same page here. We need more housing. We just downright need more housing.”
Dillan Horton added, “This housing crisis… it’s not leaving anyone untouched in terms of its impact over the past few years…”
For Victor Lagunes, “I think that affordable housing is a critical need for us, and it’s not just capital A affordable housing that people are qualifying for, but housing affordability as well.”
As one candidate told me recently, there really isn’t a huge difference between the candidates on any specific issue—but the approach differs.
In fairness, it’s hard to assess candidates in 90-second answers with a 30-second follow up (if they choose), but let’s look at how this plays out on the issue of housing.
Victor Lagunes, as most know, has been the DTA President and he has also worked extensively with DCAN (Davis Community Action Network).
He chose to focus on two specific issues in his 90-second answer.
He focused on “45% of educators that can’t afford to live in the community that they teach in.”
This of course is a real problem that impacts this community on multiple levels—one is that teachers are not staying in DJUSD and the second is that living outside of the community means that there is a disconnect between the teacher and the community and that has multiple impacts.
So what is the answer according to Lagunes?
He said that “there is a significant need for us to address not just capital A, affordability, affordable housing, but affordability as well.”
For him then, the answer is found in housing trust funds, “so that we can provide assistance to those with down payment assistance so that they can start building their own equity in those smaller size and more affordable units are really impactful ways that we can truly move the needle on the number of people that we’re able to include in Davis as part of our housing.”
Dillan Horton on the other hand, focuses on the fact that he is a renter and half the city’s population are renters and he believes that “they’ve gone unrepresented.”
The only two people who have served on council during my time who were renters were Robb Davis and Lamar Heystek (I might be forgetting someone)—but that’s over the last nearly 20 years.
Toward that issue, Horton said, “We really need to be sure that we are strengthening the Renters Resources program at this point. It levies fees on noncompliant landlords in town at this point. The fees are too small to be a credible disincentive to bad behavior or finance the program.”
Linda Deos is the only one of the council candidates who actually said, “We need more housing.”
She noted, “We stopped building those,” talking about split level duplexes. “We stopped building those small homes that people could start with. And that’s that affordability by design.”
She’s right of course—but the problem as we have seen is that affordability by design in a place like Davis is really difficult. Housing is incredibly expensive to build and getting worse.
During the 30-second replies, Horton talked about the district site that could become vacant, and said, “We stopped building those small homes that people could start with. And that’s that affordability by design.”
Victor Lagunes noted, “I actually was really happy that Workforce Housing was brought up by both of you because I think that this is something that I put a lot of work into as DTA president in partnership with D-J-U-S-D and the trustees talking about the issues that are really impacting our employees and what could get them into our community.”
And Linda Deos said that she is the one who can get this work done as “somebody who’s been part of this community for years and somebody who knows how to bring partners together to, again, get it done.”
In essence, I see everyone recognizes that there is a huge problem, and yet, I think a lot was left on the table in this discussion—which again in fairness, was a 90-second answer with a 30-second follow up.
One commenter noted that no one talked about the elephant in the room—Measure J. We are likely to ask a question in the coming weeks about support for some kind of Measure J work around.
It’s kind of an important question—where and how we are going to build more housing and how we are going to finance it? It’s one thing to say we need more duplexes and workforce housing, it’s another thing to figure out how to build that.
I am a fan of down payment assistance programs. That was featured in one segment of the Vice Presidential debate. But the problem that Davis has is it doesn’t have a lot of housing and it especially doesn’t have a lot of housing that’s available. As we saw when the last Housing Element was approved, the amount of housing sites in the city is small and dwindling.
Those are all issues that need to be addressed in the next four years or so. Those are hard questions to answer in 90 seconds, but that is the core of the housing crisis in Davis.
