If you look at most downtowns…

By Jon Li

Most downtowns have lots of jobs, and lots of people living downtown. Davis has neither.

The economic and business problems with Davis are outside the General Plan, which only deals in land use terms with housing and traffic. The Downtown Plan process is about how to make Davis “look” more appealing, as though that will work.

The merchants’ answer is a new parking structure so that people can drive their cars. But that is 20th century suburbia. What about re-thinking the downtown as an urban center, with six to ten story buildings, as high as UCD’s Sproul Hall which is 9 stories.

The problems with Davis have to do with the non-existent economy. Davis city staff with their grand salaries want to keep Davis just the way it is, as though the state hasn’t killed the Redevelopment Agency almost a decade ago. Amazon is transforming the world economy, and Davis needs to figure out how to respond.

Given what we know from cognitive science, and what we can do with the Internet, we need to re-design local government, so that it works.

Real-time daily accountability allows you to work in real time, rather than the past. The Davis General Plan is locked into decisions made between 1972 and 1974. The Davis General Plan is inches thicker than most cities’ plans, because the housing element is the historical record of slow growth. Most cities grow out, and then live with the consequences. Davis fights over not growing, wasting community human energy.

Stafford Beer’s model of real-time (daily) reporting was set up in Chile in 1972, with one computer in the capitol, Santiago, and telex, for 70% of the workforce of the country. Each day, 5 million workers received an updated evaluation of how they could personally improve their performance, based on standards negotiated with their supervisors. Every day, every single worker in most of the economy received a report on how they personally could improve their performance. In the U.S. today, most workers are lucky if they receive a personnel evaluation annually.

The real time accountability model focuses on the problems with the city, with its finances, with the economy, with how city hall is organized, with how the city council works, relations between the City of Davis and UC Davis, and the City and Yolo County, all things outside of the general plan.

We should become a charter city, and then create criteria to do daily evaluation of the performance to match the expectations laid out in the charter.

12 major criteria (each with 10 subcategories): education, residential housing, rental housing, the retail economy, the infrastructure economy, relations with UCD, relations with other jurisdictions, health and social services, recreation, transportation, law enforcement (including daily evaluation of the city council and all city staff), environment, and quality of life.

133 daily indicators add up to the measure of the well-being of our shared reality.

The next level are 12 Davis communities of around 10,000. Since the UCD campus is such an integral part of the city, there is a partial analysis of the campus as well. Davis is initially divided into 12 “communities”: West South Davis, East South Davis, Mace Ranch/80 Target, Covell East Nugget/Birch, Wildhorse, East 8th, West/U Mall Grad, Downtown/Business Improvement District, West/Anderson/Marketplace, Northcentral Davis, Far West Davis/Stonegate and UCD (for dorm residents and commuters who are excluded from city voting but an integral part of the daily life of the city).

By re-focusing on community sustainability, it would be possible for a defined local community to respond to its own problems if the rest of the regulatory apparatus wasn’t such a mess.

Kirkpatrick Sale, Human Scale: “Gandhi once said it was foolish to dream of systems so perfect that people would no longer need to be good. I would rather contemplate a system so simple that people would no longer need to be bad – that is to say, a system of support and sustenance, of rough equality and comfort, that would so guide and goad, chide and chivvy, prompt and protect, that individuals in it would be inclined out of sheer self- and community-interest toward morality and harmony. The small community has provided such a system – not molded through any special design, nor guided by any millennial genius, nor organized by any party or sect, but simply by working out the rough, hard problems of existence as they have come along for many thousands of years.”