Sunday Commentary: Time to End These Smear Attacks on a Housing Advocate

By David M. Greenwald

Davis, CA – A series of articles have been published over the course of the past two weeks—several of which the Vanguard has declined to publish because of factual errors, misstatements of the law and overall personal attacks.  Nevertheless, since the Housing Element Commission put forth recommendations, at least one member has found himself directly in the line of fire of slow growth forces looking to discredit the effort.

Don Gibson, a recent PhD recipient at UC Davis studying Genetics, served not only on the Housing Element Commission (appointed by Dan Carson) but also the Chancellor’s Affordable Housing Task force back in 2018.

Gibson has not been hidden about his views on housing—he has put forward public comments, guest pieces, and more pushing for additional housing opportunities in Davis, especially student housing.

He has put forward some good work, pushing for a campus-wide housing survey to quantify the previously anecdotal and qualitative claims about housing insecurity and lack of affordability of student housing.

One of the charges put forward by some of the articles is that the city improperly failed to require a Form 700 disclosure for the HEC.  Maybe they should have.  That is certainly a matter of some debate.  For their part, the city argued that (a) this was strictly an advisory committee, and (b) it was temporary and short-term.

As City Clerk Zoe Mirabile explained to me, “Commissions that have Form 700 requirements have been determined to have decision-making authority of some kind.”

They either: “Make a final decision. Compel a decision. Prevent a decision.”

Or they, “Participate in making a decision: Make recommendations that are regularly approved without significant modification.”

In a response to the authors of one of the pieces, the city attorney indicated, “A member does not include a person who performs duties as a part of a committee, board, commission, group or other body that does not have decision-making authority.

“The Housing Element Committee is a purely advisory committee,” she added. ” Since the HEC is a purely advisory committee, its members are not required to disclose conflicts of interest in a Form 700, nor are its members required to recuse when ‘public officials’ in similar circumstances would be required to recuse under the Political Reform Act.”

Is the city wrong about this? Maybe. But that is not on the members of the commission.

It also is worth noting that the council last week rejected much of the proposals from the HEC—certainly the most controversial of their proposals is off the table.  But the attacks continue.

In a piece the Vanguard did not publish, the authors, cited work done on the University Commons project and the DISC project as some sort of a conflict.  They noted that Mr. Gibson did not disclose these relations on his application for appointment.

They wrote: “It is telling Mr. Gibson chose to ignore these direct developer ties in his HEC application. While these omissions in an application for a City appointment might not be technically illegal under California law, they certainly present an obvious appearance of impropriety by not fully disclosing these conflicts of interest to the public and his fellow Committee members; even more so in light of his subsequent advocacy for developer-friendly recommended amendments to the Housing Element.”

From my perspective, there is no conflict here.  Both projects are completed—one passed by the council while the other was defeated last November.  None of the considerations by the HEC bore on those projects.

I understand that the writers disagreed with the recommendations from the HEC—that’s of course not only fair but their right.  But attacking the messenger isn’t a good way to oppose it.  Rather, we should be debating the ideas, not the people involved.

And yet, Don Gibson was portrayed as being at the center of some sort of elaborate conspiracy web, under the column entitled, “What is fueling the push to radically rewrite Davis’s laws on development?”

(We ended up right in the middle of this web because we published some duly submitted pieces and generally supported both Nishi and DISC.)

The piece was highly speculative and undersourced, and overplayed a lot of very loose connections.

I was disappointed to see an attack post on NextDoor.

The author writes: “Astroturf YIMBY organization proposes disastrous recommendations for our Housing Element Update. Just a ‘heads-up’ to folks in case you are not aware. There is an ‘astroturf’ organization (‘Sustainable growth YoloYIMBY’) whose head organizer lives in Sacramento, who was able to get appointed to serve our City of Davis Housing Element Update Committee.”

Also she misleadingly states: “As a result, 8 disastrous recommendations were approved.”  Most of the “recommendations” by the HEC were actually not supported by council comments on Tuesday, though they did not vote on it yet as the process continues.

But what evidence is there that Sustainable Growth Yolo is somehow an Astroturf Group?

“Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants.”

The implication is that there is some sort of monied interest supporting the formation of Sustainable Growth Yolo.  There’s a lot of speculation on that, but as I understand it, it’s largely untrue.

Certainly there should be affirmative evidence of malfeasance before accusations are made.  Where is the evidence that Sustainable Growth Yolo is a front for any interest or receiving any funding?

There seems to be a “shoot first” mentality here, as embodied in the fact that one of the attack pieces that was submitted to the Vanguard was received after 6 pm one day and they submitted questions or accusations to the city at 8 am the next day.  The city then largely dispelled the attacks—and yet, there was no apology, there was no retraction, and there was no acknowledgement of wrongdoing.  Indeed, they simply doubled down on those attacks with two more pieces—both of which were roundly debunked.

But it is actually a good deal worse than that.  Ironically, one of the submitters requested that the Vanguard not publish his article if he would be subject to personal attacks, and another complained that in the past she has been subjected to personal attacks on the Vanguard.

Yet, they had no problem with the current line of insinuations and attacks based on, at best, an incomplete understanding of the information.

Frankly we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t.  When we did not immediately publish one of the attack pieces, we were accused of censorship on NextDoor.  Yesterday, we were criticized for not censoring enough.

I understand that one of our critics felt we were giving print to false and misleading allegations—I agree that they are so.  However, the NextDoor post had 128 comments the last time I looked—the accusations are out there.  If we have learned anything, unresponded conspiracy theories get air and fuel to germinate when they go unresponded.  The stuff is floating out there—largely unresponded to and refuted and most people are accepting it at face value.

In my view, as I expressed in the commentary on Friday, there is a simple explanation for the views people have.  It is not rocket science and certainly not some sort of elaborate conspiracy.

As Don Gibson posted on Twitter: “A generation was screwed by a lack of housing leading to housing insecurity/homelessness and are upset about it. It’s kind of that simple.”

Former Mayor Robb Davis added: “Why is it a scandal when 1) people who want to see more housing built; 2) connect to people who can build it; to 3) advocate for it to be built?”

There is a large divide right now about how to resolve housing issues.  As we showed on Friday, there is a huge generational component to that.  We are not going to address these issues by insinuating secret and malevolent forces are guiding it.  As I wrote on Friday, sometimes the simple answer is best.  The reason young people support housing is that they remain housing insecure, especially in this community.  The reason longer term residents are less supportive is that they already own their own homes and do not have to worry about where they are going to live next year.

Where will this all end up?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that we are running out of good options to solve our housing needs, and we might consider figuring that out rather than pointing fingers at each other.

—David M. Greenwald reporting

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