Commentary: More Housing Discussions Coming

In recent weeks, the Vanguard has had a number of housing discussions with various folks in the community.  Projects in Davis continue to come forward, including Lincoln40 which seeks to address student housing needs, Trackside which seeks to address needs of young professionals, West Davis Active Adult Center which seeks to address senior housing needs, and an emerging project along Chiles Road that could address work force housing.

Increasingly the focus has shifted to the fact that California itself is in the midst of a severe housing shortage.  Experts estimate that statewide, about 1.8 million new units must be built by 2025 just to keep up.  However, currently only about 80,000 units are built in California annually rather than the needed 180,000.

The result?  Hundreds of thousands of Californians are now housing insecure.  They are being pushed out of their homes, and evicted from apartments due to inability to afford to stay.

Housing advocates are now focused squarely on Davis for a number of reasons.  First is that, while housing is a regional issue and a regional crisis, the housing crisis is more severe in Davis than anywhere else in the region.

Second is that UC Davis’ growth is rapidly adding to the housing crisis, as they have added, and continue to add, thousands of students along with thousands of faculty and staff to support those students.

As we have presented in previous installments, the university has stepped up somewhat by agreeing to provide for 6200 beds.  However, the city of Davis, Yolo County and citizens have pushed for the university to house 50 percent of all students by 2027.  That means, in addition to the 6200 the university has committed to, they would need to find housing for another 3800.

As discussed at the previous Vanguard Conclave, the university does not have existing space to accommodate that housing, which means that the university will be paving and building over green fields in order to accommodate the necessary housing.

While activists have repeatedly pointed to the number “5300 acres of land,” the developable land for the university is far less than that.  Additional questions will arise if the university ends up building for 6,200, let alone 10,000 students.  Will they also put in retail and restaurants to serve the growing population?  Does Davis end up with a city on its periphery, outside of the city limits, directly competing with downtown businesses?

A third point is that Davis not only has the most severe housing crisis, it also has very restrictive land use policies.  Measure R has effectively prevented the city from developing outside its borders since 2000 when Measure J was first passed.

Three projects have come before the voters since then – all three have failed.

Current conditions are bad.  A vacancy rate of 0.2 percent is an unsustainable situation that leads to substandard housing and exploitative rent and housing conditions.

In April the City of Davis heard the desperate cries of students, as one student put it: “I struggle from April to August to find a place to live in Davis and I had to prepare myself to be homeless if I could not find a place.”

Back in April, during the Sterling discussion, Georgia Savage warned that “from a student perspective, not passing this project is risking homelessness for students, which I would argue is a significantly more pressing issue.”

As ASUCD Senator Daniel Nagey put it, part of making education affordable is making housing affordable because, “without affordable housing, students will spend all of their hours working and not studying to afford their house.  Then the whole point of attending college is moot.”

Samantha Chiang, ASUCD Senate President Pro Tem, said that many students are “forced to start their housing search in November of their first year, only to not find a house and be forced to couch surf in the following year.  We cannot be pawns in the game between the city and the university – we are consistently advocating on both ends to increase housing.”

Without access to peripheral land, where does the city go?

One answer has been to push for UC Davis to take on more housing.  UC Davis has to this date said it would consider adding to its planned 6,200 beds, but has not committed to actually increase the number.

On the other hand, the option for the city is to go to infill, which means increasing density in existing city boundaries.  That has, across the board, led to resistance from neighbors.  We have seen projects come forward at Paso Fino, Mission Residence, B Street Residence, Sterling, Lincoln40 and Trackside – all of them have seen considerable neighborhood opposition, much of which stemmed from the high density that has embodied the projects and the perception from the neighbors of an incompatibility between current uses and proposed uses.

Infill that increases density will invariably have pushback.  On the one hand, council maintains control over the process and the ability to approve projects.  On the other hand, these projects have caused headache and consternation in the community.

The other option is to revisit Measure R itself.

Ron Glick has been pushing this point on Measure R for a long time and I think he has a point – if the city cannot grow outward because of the constraints of Measure R and the housing needs continue to expand, the city will have to find more creative ways to pack more housing into the existing city limits, and that means infill projects and the conflict between the existing residents and new development.

Ron Glick back in July noted that one of the reasons for unaffordability of housing is lack of supply.  While there are natural reasons for lack of supply that will constrain a market, there are also “artificial reasons why you get lack of supply,” and in Davis that is Measure R.

“What’s driving everything,” he said, “is the risk to people in the mobile home, Sterling, Trackside, and B Street projects – all of these things – is Measure R because we can’t spread out.”

“You talk about densification as though densification is some great thing, but every time you try to densify something, there are people down here saying don’t densify my neighborhood, please don’t densify my neighborhood,” he said.

He said it’s a de facto thing that “if we can’t spread out, what are we going to do?  We have to do infill.  As long as we have this limit line – conversion on ag land is $15,000, Sterling $1 million an acre.”  He said that “because of Measure R, land inside the line is now worth 100 times land outside of the line.”

He argued if we had built Nishi and Covell Village “maybe there wouldn’t be so much demand.”

But my sense is that Measure R is not going anywhere, which probably means more infill and more clashes between existing neighbors and developers.

The Vanguard will look to continue this discussion on September 27 from 6 to 8 pm at Sophia’s Thai Kitchen on E Street, as we hold a discussion featuring, among others, councilmember Lucas Frerichs on student housing.

—David M. Greenwald reporting