What if:
- You believe Davis needs more housing, and you understand that there are not enough infill opportunities, which means we need to expand;
- You look at the developer proposals along Covell and think, “This isn’t what we need, it’s simply more expensive houses; a continuation of the failed pattern of ‘Urban Sprawl’ that we have long known is a failed paradigm”;
- You have thought carefully and long about development alternatives that better fit the livability and environmental goals expressed by Davis citizenry resulting in proposed alternatives, but the City is so far behind in the General Plan that there is no forum to get them into the public conversation;
You might get together with some like-minded souls and create your own platform to try to move the conversation forward. Because, otherwise, you might find yourself, a housing advocate, facing a Measure J/R/D vote that you cannot in good conscience support.
So that’s what a group of us with professional expertise in architecture, planning, affordable housing, transportation, and economic development have done. We have formed a small think tank here in Davis, hoping to stimulate some new thinking about what our city might look like if we were given the opportunity to master plan our community.
We are calling ourselves the Davis Citizens Planning Group and we have a website started where you can find some of our thoughts and see references to materials that can help Davis residents start to understand the options we have when it comes to developing more housing. (Hint: housing doesn’t have to come in the form of massive sprawling single-family housing tracts!!!)
We have been meeting for six months now, and the start of a website is up at www.plandavis.org
Ok.. now let’s back up.
How did we get here?
Our planning process is broken. The General Plan was last updated in 2007 (and even that was superficial), and has no provision for expanding beyond our boundaries.
The issue of city expansion is left to the mechanism of Measure J/R/D which requires developers to make proposals for what to do with their land. This has created a perverse situation where it’s the developers who do all of the planning, and with little citizen input. And, by definition, they only have license to plan for what is happening within the confines of their project. So no coordinated master planning is even possible under this set of laws.
Was this the intent of the proponents of Measure J? Probably not.
This situation creates a number of critical blind spots for the city: Planning questions that would be answered in any reasonable top-down master planning process:
- “Who” are we building for? ( local workers? or retirees? or outbound commuters?)
- Does the new housing mean new commercial / retail space is also needed?
- How do we plan for parks or community resources that serve the neighborhood in general, (not just one specific development)?
- What is the time period over which we should be building these new neighborhoods? Ten years? Fifty years?
- What broader transformations, e.g., electric vehicles, should we plan for?
- Can we plan in such a way as to reduce traffic?
- Can we pre-plan transit and bike path connections that work well among developments and integrate well with the rest of the city?
- How does this development affect our local economy and tax basis? Can we make changes to optimize it economically and fiscally?
The biggest problem of the situation we find ourselves in is that NOBODY is empowered in a meaningful way to ask these questions, and as a result the proposals we have seen thus far, in all honesty, are not very good (and are certainly not integrated with the rest of the city). They are just proposals to make “more of the same Davis.”
Nevertheless, the Council has moved two individual proposals—Village Farms and “Shriners” (no relation to Shriners Hospital)—into Environmental Impact Review. These projects are essentially barreling toward a Measure J/R/D vote with only the developer’s best guess as to what might pass.
True, the Council has started moving in the direction of finally beginning a new General Plan process, but unless it blasts off immediately and focuses on the Covell Corridor, we are unlikely to have much headway by the time the first vote is scheduled. So we will be forced to decide how to vote without the necessary supporting analysis and public input to make informed decisions. That leaves the community only with an up or down vote opportunity—a chance to veto the developers plan, but not to offer improved plans that might not only have a better chance to pass but better reflect the values of our community.
And that is the real point of frustration we feel: We are people who very much want our community to expand its supply of housing, and we even think these two sites are probably the right places to start building. But the plans we have seen thus far are pretty much the opposite of the type of growth that we really need, and we struggle to figure out how we might in good conscience support them.
This brings about a more sobering thought: In a city where most Measure J/R/D votes usually do not pass, and some of the most outspoken housing advocates are not on board, is there ANY chance these measures will succeed? We do not think so.
When the City Council discussed these proposals several months ago, the idea to create an East Corridor Specific Plan was indeed raised, but the Council decided that we “didn’t have time.” That was a mistake, because the way we see it, right now we are wasting time; working on a couple of uninspired proposals that do not meet our city’s actual needs and have little chance of passing, which means that we will end up starting over in any case.
If these proposals do get brought before the voters and are subsequently rejected, we will be bitterly wishing we had stopped to do a little more planning, a lot more community engagement, and created better proposals in the first place.
Bottom line: The Davis Citizens Planning Group is looking to foster the kind of community engagement and planning that is necessary for us to create a plan for developing our city into the future that addresses our real housing and sustainability needs, rather than simply repeating the suburban planning mistakes of the past.
The development along East Covell is really the only place for us to reasonably develop a significant amount of housing, and that supply of developable land has to last us decades. It is not something that should be rushed, and we can’t afford to get it wrong. We need to get it right.
So what do we do now?
We believe that Council should not take any action to put Village Farms (and Shriners) on the ballot until we have a chance to figure out how to have a better process, and at the very least have some amount of high-level master planning that enables us to come up with proposals that have a chance of actually passing at the ballot box.
We would prefer that this happen as the very first step of the general plan process if it were accelerated, and initially focused on the East Covell corridor, but there are other options to consider as well. We have some of our own ideas about what these neighborhoods might optionally look like if designed when employing better urban planning concepts, and we will be sharing some of those ideas and the reasons why they are necessary in a follow-up article in the coming days.
Let’s get the horse of planning back in front of the cart of development.
The Davis Citizens Planning Group
Alex Achimore – Architect
David Thompson – Urban Planner / Affordable Housing
Anthony Palmere – Transit
Tim Keller – Economic Development
Richard McCann – Sustainability and Energy
