University Mall and the Davis General Plan

Dear Davis City Council,

I am running for City Council in District 2 – the district that the U-Mall is in.

First, I want to state that I believe a mixed-use project can be a good fit for the University Mall location. I certainly remember my mom buying me Star Trek pajamas at Lawrence’s department store there when I was a kid, and more recently I have taken my daughter to shop at Forever 21, also now closed. I have seen a lot of change here, and welcome that it will evolve and change again to better meet current demands.

What I would look for in a project for this site is something that fits better with the surrounding neighborhoods. This project has been compared to the Davis Live project. However, this project is significantly larger in scale because it is 7 stories spanning an entire city block. You can see in the image from Brixmor that the project is 75-80 feet tall (7 stories) across the entire east west axis of the project with almost no set back from either Anderson Road or Sycamore. It is certainly out of scale to the neighborhood University Mall is in. 80 foot tall buildings immediately adjacent to the sidewalk might be expected in a dense urban area, but is out of scale with this neighborhood.

As Brixmor states in its project description, “The site is designated in the General Plan as Community Retail. Under the Community Retail designation, residential uses are allowed with approval of a Conditional Use Permit and the maximum floor area ratio for retail is 0.50 with an additional 0.15 allowed for the residential component in a mixed-use project.” Floor area ratio is the amount of floor space in the buildings when compared to the size of the lot the project is being built on. For example, a single-story building that takes up half the lot has a floor area ratio of point .5. The current proposal is to increase the allowable floor area ratio from .65 to 1.56. This is a little less than tripling the size of the project from what is allowable under the City of Davis General Plan.

This type of massive increase in scale of the project from the Davis General Plan gets to the heart of the problem with this project. The Davis General Plan came from a community process and sets the parameters for how the city will grow and change. It is understandable that the neighbors of this project are upset that something 3 times as large as what is allowable under the Davis General Plan is being advocated for by the developer and staff. We have seen this again and again in recent years and the Council scarcely mentions in its discussion that project after project allows developers to rewrite the community written general plan. My approach is to start with the plan that we have set as a community. Anything outside of that plan needs more than just developers’ desires to build bigger to justify altering the General Plan.

A better approach is to revisit the Davis General Plan as a community and evaluate it through commissions and committees and update it to include new community standards for growth as the community decides. By allowing developers to drive that process on a project by project basis disregards the plan our community has set out for itself, and disregards community input on how our city should grow and change. This type of developer-driven process understandably causes unnecessary conflicts with the neighborhoods, because it is well outside of anything the neighbors would have expected to be proposed. In this case it is literally 3 times the scale of what neighbors might have expected, because it is 3 times the size of what is allowable under the general plan.

In evaluating a project like this, I would also look for a project that is available to a wide variety of people. Many people have pointed out that this is a good place for student housing. I agree, but I would add that UC Davis is one of the largest employers in Northern CA, and those employees are mostly NOT high paid professors. Over the last several years Davis has approved several projects that are focused on student housing. This project with its heavy focus on 4 bedroom apartments and rent-by-the-bed agreements is also focused on student housing. But what about UCD staff?

The Davis vacancy rate survey shows that 1, 2 and 3 bedroom apartments are actually what is in the highest demand. That is because they are the most flexible. They work for students, couples, families, single working professionals., and others. It would be far better to create housing – including more affordable housing, not just luxury housing as in the current proposal – that is flexible so the people who work immediately across the street can live there too. 

I also want to point out that the chart that was shown at your on July 21 meeting as slide 22 of the Brixmor presentation showed housing demand and number of beds in future projects. This chart left out the UC Davis West Village project that is currently under construction on campus. This project will add 3,300 beds and will be only for students. If the 3,300 on campus beds had been included the charts would demonstrate that already approved projects exceed the housing deficit the developer is claiming by over 2,000 beds.

With such a huge influx of student beds, clearly the City should be building projects that are at a minimum flexible enough so that many types of people can live there.

So in short the University Commons project is the right idea, but the wrong execution, and I urge you to follow the Planning Commission’s recommendation. Please send this back to the drawing board so it can be a better fit for our community in terms of the types of apartments, the number of apartments (traffic and parking in the local neighborhoods are also an issue), and retail that will be broadly appealing and generate tax revenue for the City.

Sincerely,

Colin Walsh