Davis is afraid to ask voters to give up power over affordable housing | Opinion
.jpg "A rendering shows one of the conceptual home design for the Village Farms Davis project, which goes before city voters in June. The City Council is delaying plans to ask voters to relinquish their power to approve certain affordable housing projects.")
With the state breathing down its neck to build more affordable housing, Davis is trying to delay a day of reckoning over its growth governance that has long been overdue.
At stake is nothing less than the highest values of this city.
Its long-held tradition of promoting preservation and open space are in conflict with the quest for economic diversity that requires a level of housing construction that would expand the city footprint.
Which will prevail in Davis?
“We live in a system of residential segregation,” Mayor Bapu Vaitla said at a council meeting in December. “The haves, which is us, we are included in town. And there are have-nots.”
How Davis voters got in charge of growth
It was at the very beginning of this century, when growth was rampant in the Sacramento region and speculators were buying up parcels on the edges of town, that Davis voters sought to control their own development destiny by approving Measure J Reaffirmed in subsequent elections in 2010 and 2020, the measure requires a majority of voters approve urbanization of zoned farmland.
Measure J exempted affordable housing projects if the developer would charge below-market costs for each and every unit. But this restriction is so severe no builder has come forward.
Meanwhile, Davis voters have rejected six expansion projects and approved two. And of those approved, only one is being built, an adult living community.
“Davis has done the best of pretty much any California city at keeping a firm line on sprawl,” said Stephen Wheeler, a retired UC Davis professor who specialized in environmental design and landscape architecture. How has Davis done it? By making many types of developments nearly impossible to build.
“More process,” Wheeler said, “does not equal more democracy.”
One of those projects voters turned down (in 2005) was Covell Village, a 1,515-unit development on farmland sandwiched between two existing neighborhoods. Some 21 years later, its owners are back with a new project, Village Farms, with about 1,800 homes.
The City Council has approved the project’s design and environmental analysis, setting the stage for public vote this June. Another project under review, the 232-acre Willowgrove project along East Covell Boulevard, may be ready for a public vote by November.
Meanwhile, there is this city plan to some day ask voters to relinquish any say on certain expansions that involve affordable housing. A council majority believes that if these two projects were put to a public vote this year along with this scaling back of the original Measure J, everything would go down in flames.
“I just think it dooms all three to failure if we were to do that,” said Linda Deos, the District 2 councilmember.
An affordable housing commitment — delayed
In 2024, after much back and forth with the State Department of Housing and Community Development, Davis approved a growth blueprint known as a Housing Element. It included a new policy calling to exempt affordable housing from voter approval. And now two years later, the city is failing to follow through.
“Our commitment was to put something on the ballot for voters to vote on by 2024,” Vaitla said. Cities that defy their own housing plans can run into all kinds of problems with the state, everything from litigation to the loss of funding.
That council members are nervous about following through on their affordable housing pledge, because they are afraid of the public, says something about today’s Davis that isn’t particularly flattering.
Davis democracy: A Commission Palooza
Progress to amend what started as Measure J has been slow. The first big city meeting to discuss amending the measure was last fall. But it was big. It was what is affectionately known in Davis as a Commission Palooza, the simultaneous convening of five city commissions in a single meeting.
This particular palooza came up with all kinds of new city goals, such as new communities that were carbon-neutral, producing no new vehicle miles travelled and operating under electricity micro-grids. Davis residents are full of all kinds of green ideas that have nothing to do with affordable housing. If voters are to give up approving such projects, they’re clearly going to have to go above and beyond a standard building code.
“If it’s going to pass, there needs to be broad community support,” said Josh Chapman, District 5’s councilmember. “We need to have this conversation.”
Deliberations would have to take a Davis form of hyperdrive to craft something for a 2026 ballot. That doesn’t feel likely.
State housing officials have been patient with this city, perhaps to a fault. It may take the heavy hand of Sacramento to convince Davis, hopefully sooner rather than later, that some vital affordable housing projects don’t need quite so much democracy.