Where are we? Where are we going? 

By Matt Williams

Davis has a history of building only large footprint, rich amenities homes on large lots.  As a result, as a community we have excluded the vast majority of the Davis workforce (a workforce that educates our children and provides us with the suite of services that provides us our high quality of life) from the opportunity for home ownership.

The numbers tell the story.  Since 2004, Davis added 1,261 units of high-priced, detached, single-family homes on large lots for the economic elite, and at the same time has built zero (or close to zero) small-footprint, low-priced, owner-occupied homes for its citizens with modest economic/financial resources. 

We are all to blame for this classist approach to owner-occupied housing, and it calls into question the motto on so many lawns that Davis Is For Everyone. 

There has been very little leadership from either the citizens or our elected leaders illuminating our classist pattern of (A) catering to the elite while (B) throwing our workforce under the bus, and (C) providing no proactive guidance to developers on project concepts that could be providing “Missing Middle” housing designed and priced for the members of the workforce, rather than the elite.

To escape our classist (and earlier racist) pattern we need to honestly and forthrightly assess our internal and external environments. It isn’t a pretty picture. In addition to our discriminatory practices we have an abominable financial situation. The City Budget (on pages D-13 and D-18 and D-19) reports a $264.7 million unfunded liability for maintenance of our streets ($78.8 million), bikeways ($12.5 million), buildings ($28.1 million), parks ($64.3 million), traffic ($76.4 million), and parking ($4.7 million). 

Over and above that the reported Pension unfunded liability is $178.3 million and the Retiree Healthcare unfunded liability is another $38.4 million.

Add those numbers up and our City’s “credit card balance” is $476.4 million. That is just under $7,000 per person.

But it gets worse. As reported in Sunday’s Sacramento Bee, in the current Budget just adopted by City Council, “the City is about $20.7 million short of funds needed to complete construction projects that are already underway.” Adding that $20.7 million to the $264.7 million unfunded subtotal as well as to the $476.4 million total total, means our credit card balance is half a billion dollars.

That brings us to the title of this article.  If you don’t know where you stand right now, you won’t know where to go next. 

Our elected leaders need to help us establish our community’s identity. Once upon a time that identity was “a university town” but we have largely abdicated that identity and replaced it with “a bedroom community that supports an outflow of its employed residents to jobs that are outside the City Limits.” 

Intellectual Capital creation is at the heart of a university town, and compared to 25 years ago the number of Davis residents with jobs creating intellectual capital is less than half of what it was, and some of our key businesses that built intellectual capital every day have moved out of town.

We need to clarify why we exist (our Mission). Clearly understand and state where we are going (our Vision). And restate the principles that guide us as a community (our core values).

Our Vision should capture a broad but simultaneously concise picture of what Davis wants to achieve and become. Developing this Vision can help us write a Mission statement as well, which lays out our reason for being. 

Having clear, coherent Vision and Mission statements in place will provide a solid foundation for our decisions moving forward … and hopefully enable us to transcend our current and past elitist and classist patterns of behavior.