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In the Davis Future, the Climate Crisis and Housing Affordability Crisis are Conjoined

By David J. Thompson

This piece is a slightly longer piece based upon remarks my remarks to the Social Services Commission on Monday, August 21, 2023.

Since 1983 in a professional role, I have helped gain approval of and the building of over 500 units of affordable housing in Davis.

With the Social Services Commission now reviewing the two annexation proposals I wish to remark not on the specifics of the rubric you have been asked to review but on the overall status of key elements of affordable housing in Davis.

Here are some key facts the commissioners should consider;

  • The Regional Housing Needs Assessment (RHNA) of the Sacramento Area of Governments (SACOG) directed the City of Davis to show where 530 Very Low Income (VLI) and 350 Low Income (LI) units could be built within the city.
  • To get those 930 VLI and LI affordable units (@ 15% of market rate units requires building 6.200 new market rate apartments within the City of Davis. Can anyone see 6,200 market rate apartment units being built in Davis over this RHNA cycle? I do not.
  • VLI units can only reach affordability with the deep subsidy projects get from competing in the California Tax Credit Allocation Committee (TCAC). Statistically, you can only win a subsidy for VLI units if you have a free site of two acres on which you build at least 50 plus VLI and LI units. How many free sites of at least two acres are there in Davis? Certainly not enough (about 23 free sites of two acre needed) to build 930 VLI and LI units.
  • When David Taormino asked me to do the affordable housing for Bretton Woods I said I would if he doubled the land required for affordable housing. Taormino donated land for 150 VLI and LI apartments instead of the required 68. I and Delta Senior Housing Communities (DSHC) are no longer doing the affordable housing at Bretton Woods but that one act had great impact on gaining voter support and approval. 150 VLI and LI units are being built there.
  • In the proposed Village Farms development of 378 acres about 2% of the land is reserved for affordable housing.
  • However, also in the Village Farms proposal there are 149 acres set aside for parks.
  • So 39% of the land for parks and 2% of the land for poor people. Given the differences in the percentages of land use you’d think we had a park crisis rather than an affordable housing crisis.
  • Another few acres of park transferred to affordable housing would substantially address the affordable housing crisis in Davis.
  • There is an even greater problem in terms of the VLI, LI and Moderate (MOD) income people in Davis who are already rent impacted. For over 30 years Davis has had a very low vacancy rate which means that most renters in Davis overpay the HUD 30% guidelines. The small number of market rate rental units in either of the two proposals ensures that for another ten years the 35,000+ renters in Davis will continue to have no savings by living here while over-paying on the rent. That’s a whopping hit on the monthly budget of the working families and students living in rental housing.
  • If these two proposals are approved by the city then overpayment is guaranteed and enshrined by the action of the City of Davis.

However, Davis is in the same boat as most cities in California. We are not generally to blame for this situation which is statewide and somewhat nationwide. There are many reasons why housing costs and affordability are out of control. And most of those are caused by economic actors not under our control.

Yet a few actions are under the city’s control and that is where we can make a difference.

The City of Davis is pressured to meet the RHNA goals on paper but the reality is that while we may be able to meet the task of identifying land to meet those numbers, in reality we are not going to build that number of units.

The two proposed projects by their content continue the old forms of development of car centric single family homes with less land set aside for affordable housing than any proposal ever brought forward for a city vote.

There is a Climate Crisis and an Affordable Housing Crisis that are hastened by and completely ignored by the two proposals. Without substantial changes in these two proposals they should not be put forward by the City of Davis for a citizen vote.

These are my own individual thoughts and not representative of the Twin Pines Cooperative Foundation or Neighborhood Partners, LLC.

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Comments

11 responses to “In the Davis Future, the Climate Crisis and Housing Affordability Crisis are Conjoined”

  1. Tuvia ben Olam

    What I would love:
    1 – Dear City, this is called “Village Farms”. – Developer
    Dear Developer, this is not really a village, and obviously not farms.
    Dear City, Discussion of irony is banned in Davis, because #Davis
    Dear Developer, Upon further consideration, we find no objection.
    Too many people in city: Cars are okay, making poor people drive electric cars is inequitable, trains are nice in Europe, we buy local tomatoes at Costco because we can’t find parking at the Farmers Market, just paint a rainbow crosswalk*!
    2 – Build Californian Northern freight line into passenger rail of some sort, allow essentially no private car parking in Village Farms [sic], and no loopholes like e.g. renting car parking spots in Wildhorse [sic] or actual “farms” nearby. Re-name development “Electric Yo-lomes”. Better: Re-locate I-80 south of Davis and build new stuff in restored space near everything, move people from sprawl to there. Easy peasy.
    3 – Go-cart and paintball mafia sue to prevent development of Village Farms [sic], “will destroy unique quasi-suburban edge environment of central Yolo County”.
    * Direct, concrete and also symbolic pro-LGBTIQ actions are always welcome and encouraged and the anti-royal we need to do a lot more to provide protections and rights for these and all protected classes, inclusive and far beyond what’s constructed within or possible with the US Constitution. But the ‘crosswalk” is a prison many now grovel for in its nominal transportation function – a bit of dynamic, episodic and temporary space given to people who used to actually own the entire space between buildings nearly all of the time. See this primer about the dirty sibling of the crosswalk, jaywalking: https://tinyurl.com/5djed334

    Reply
  2. Alan C. Miller

    “In the Davis Future, the Climate Crisis and Housing Affordability Crisis are Conjoined”
    No they aren’t 😐
    Who do you think you are, David Greenwald ?

    Reply
  3. Ron O

    Alan: I would probably disagree with you regarding the “conjoining”, since “affordability” is the reason that so many Bay Area residents are, and have been moving to places like Davis and the entire Sacramento region.
    Those living in the Bay Area likely create less environmental impact (e.g., better public transit, no need for air conditioning, buildings which already exist), compared to accommodating additional sprawl in the Sacramento region.
    The accommodation of sprawl is working in the opposite direction from what the state claims to support. If the state was serious about the connection between climate change and housing, they would take action to contain sprawl. The fact that they don’t tells you all you need to know regarding how concerned the state “actually” is regarding this conjoining.
    And for sure, they wouldn’t require local politicians to support freeway expansion as a condition to receive state funding for infrastructure needed to support even more development and sprawl.
    So I think we can come to some pretty solid conclusions regarding what the state actually supports, at least when development interests are involved.

    Reply
  4. South of Davis

    David writes:

    Since 1983 in a professional role, I have helped gain approval of
    and the building of over 500 units of affordable housing in Davis.
    I’ve also spent a lot of time in Davis ovr the last 40 years and seen things really change in housing (some fixer-uppers in town sold for ~$50K in 1983 when you could rent a small room for <$100/month) but I have not really seen any changes in the climate (each decade has been hot in the summer and colder with rain in the winter with some years having more or less heat and rain).
    I’wondering if David (or anyone else) can tell me what they have personally noticed changing in the climate in Davis over the last 40-60 years (and if they think banning gas stoves 20 years ago would have prefented the change).

    Reply
  5. Roberta L. Millstein

    I have personally noticed an increase in the severity and length of bad air quality days as a result of fires in the region, which are larger in area and hotter — I’d say in the last 10 years or so, give or take. And it is not just my impression — the measurements all show that fires have been increasing in area and severity in CA, and the air quality data reflects this as well.
    Global warming –> bigger swings in the weather (drier dry years, wetter wet years) –> more fires & higher intensity fires, especially with higher temps –> worse air quality
    If I can’t go outside without risking my health (it’s not easy to keep good air quality inside, either, fwiw) that severely curtails my quality of life and of course everyone’s quality of life is similarly curtailed.

    Reply
  6. South of Davis

    We have had more bad air days related to fires, but I don’t think the “climate” made the PG&E lines spark near Paradise or this lady start a fire near Tahoe
    https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/Bay-Area-woman-Tahoe-fire-Echo-Summit-arson-arrest-16392428.php
    Compared to the (pre smog check) 70’s the overall air quality everywhere in the state is better than ever (in the 70’s you would fly into a brown haze when landing at SMF, SJC and LAX. My friends and family members that work in firefighting have told me over and over that firefighters are safer today, but not as aggressive at fighting wildfires as we used to be (when most firefighters had spent time in the military fighting guys with guns trying to kill them).
    I am really looking for something I can actually see with my own eyes that tells me the climate is changing (so almost everyone in Davis won’t hate me and call me a “climate change denier”, but I have not seen it yet).
    I’ve been keeping detailed records of Tahoe snowfall at our family cabin for 50 years now and some years we have more than average and some years we have less than average but I don’t see any trend of more or less snow (last winter we had a lot of snow, but just slightly more snow than 2010-11 and 1983-83. We have had a Nest thermometer at the cabin and here in Davis for over ten years and there is no real trend up or down in our heat and AC use (“global warming” took this past June off since Nest says we used the AC for just 22 hours all month (compared to 66 hours in 2013 and 44 hours in 2018).
    This chart shows even wider swings in snowfall in the 1880’s (before I80 was packed with SUVs) than in recent years (when I80 is packedfull of SUVs).
    http://www.donnersummithistoricalsociety.org/pages/HistoricSnowfall.html

    Reply
  7. Roberta L. Millstein

    Note that I didn’t say there were more fires. I said that the fires were bigger and hotter. So yes, climate change doesn’t generally spark fires. * Rather, the fires that do happen — whether because of human actions or natural ones — burn bigger and hotter as a result of climate change.
    Here is a relevant although not perfect analogy. Imagine someone trying to set their house on fire. Now imagine them doing the same thing, but they douse it with gasoline first. We are metaphorically dousing the state with gasoline via climate change.
    Yes, air quality used to be horrible for other human-caused reasons. Just as that was clearing up, things have gotten worse again for climate change. You want to go back to that?? I’m not getting the logic here.
    If you haven’t seen that there have been more bad air days here — more particular matter due to forest fires in the region — in the last ten years than in the 10 years before, I am not sure where you have been living.
    *caveat here that climate change might also increase the number of fires if it causes more electrical storms during the dry season

    Reply
  8. Ron O

    Rather, the fires that do happen — whether because of human actions or natural ones — burn bigger and hotter as a result of climate change.
    One of those “human actions” has been the suppression of fires over the years.
    A primary cause of the fire in Hawaii was the abandonment of agriculture, largely allowing “weeds” to grow in their place.
    One (positive?) recent development which is the refusal by insurance companies to insure properties in high-risk fire zones. (In fact, a couple of major insurance companies are no longer issuing ANY policies in California.) Part of the reason for this is due to a “standoff” between companies that want to raise rates, vs. a state insurance commission which won’t allow them to do so.

    Reply
  9. Roberta L. Millstein

    Agreed, fire suppression is another cause, and yes, in Hawaii, replacing the native grasses with agriculture and now with the abandonment of the ag land, more flammable non-native grasses. There are multiple causes. Sadly, Maui was a “perfect storm” of them.

    Reply
  10. J

    “Compared to the (pre smog check) 70’s the overall air quality everywhere in the state is better than ever”
    While it is true that smog checks along with catalytic converters, higher vehicle mileage standards, diesel emissions changes and electrification have all led to better day-to-day air quality the increased size and intensity of fires due to climate change has led to far worse peak particulate readings.
    “I’ve been keeping detailed records of Tahoe snowfall at our family cabin for 50 years now…”
    Weather and climate are two different things. You are keeping weather records and using it to deny scientifically supported climate studies.

    Reply
  11. Ron O

    “You are keeping weather records and using it to deny scientifically supported climate studies.”
    Aren’t weather records (kept over time) the same thing as a record of the climate?
    If not, how are they measuring climate change?

    Reply

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