Back in August, I wrote an article arguing for why people ought to vote “Yes” on Prop 50: “Fight Fire with Fire.” Today I write to dispel some of the misconceptions about Prop 50 that I have encountered. These will just be quick responses — more can be said about each of them — but at least this should be a starting point.
But first: be sure to turn in your ballots before November 4. And, importantly: if you plan to use the U.S. Mail, mail early because Trump’s cuts to USPS mean that your envelope might not get postmarked on Election Day, and, more generally, mail might be slow enough to cause your ballot not to be counted. On Election Day, use a drop box or voting center; see Yolo County locations here.
And some news since I wrote the previous article: It’s not just Texas who is trying to gerrymander to increase its Republican representation in Congress — Missouri and North Carolina are now getting into the act too.
[Note: This letter to the Planning Commission was sent by the author for posting. PIP = Project Individualized Plan]
October 20th, 2025
To Planning Commission for Meeting of October 22nd, 2025
FR. David J Thompson, Affordable Housing Advocate
Vote No on the VF PIP. My Arguments Against the PIP proposed by Village Farms
After reviewing the Village Farms PIP I do not see how what is being proposed meets the requirements of Section18.05.050 that is equal to or better than what the city would get under standard affordability requirements.
I urge the Planning Commission to vote no on the PIP before you.
For example,
Under Section 18.05.050 18 acres would be set aside to meet the standard affordable housing requirements. However VF intends to remove 50% of that required land and asks the city to accept 9 acres of land. Removing 9 acres of land for the use of affordable housing is more acres than any affordable housing project has received in the history of Davis’ affordable housing that began about 1980.
It does not seem equal to the PIP requirements that 18 acres is culled down to nine.
Or that, the number of affordable units required are stuffed into 9 acres (31 units per acre) rather than 18 acres (15 units per acre). The city requirement is for a project to host 15 units per acre.
It does not seem equal to the PIP requirements that the density of affordable units goes up from 15 to 31 units per acre.
The cities for sale units single family ownership units are usually about 5 + units per acre
No single family affordable homes meeting the city’s requirements are being provided.
I am trying to keep an open mind about Village Farms, a new housing development proposal for northeast Davis. But try as I might, there are a couple of new concerns that have surfaced which really bother me.
I am disturbed at two of the features being suggested for Village Farms: to wit, a fourth fire station and a city run down payment program. Our municipality is in so much financial trouble, that it is short more than $2 million a year just for pavement management alone. The estate of a deceased Davis citizen was just awarded a whopping $24.2 million because of the city’s negligence in not properly maintaining its trees. We face similar financial risks because of our neglect of other city infrastructure.
The harsh reality is the city cannot afford a $3.4 million annual hit to its budget to pay for operating another fire station. Nor can it afford the cost of construction of a new fire station, potentially in the tens of millions of dollars. Similarly, the city cannot bear the expense of running a down payment program for housing, and who knows at what expense?
Yolo Local maps sector, outlines challenges and opportunities
(From press release) Davis Media Access (DMA) announces the release of its “Yolo County News & Information Ecosystem” report, which presents ideas for addressing the reduced availability of local information and news in Yolo County.
The 70-page report follows months of research, conversations and contact with people throughout Yolo County to understand how the decline of traditional local media outlets affects both information providers and Yolo residents. DMA calls its effort to address this decline Yolo Local.
DMA worked with Impact Architects, nationally known consultants; jesikah maria ross of Davis, a community-engaged journalist, and the 11-member Yolo Local Working Group. The community engagement, which primarily ran from April to August 2025, included a bilingual survey, direct engagement at events, one-to-one interviews, and roundtable discussions.
The report is rooted in Impact Architects’ framework and methodology for large-scale ecosystem reports, and includes key comparative data about Yolo County, such as race and ethnicity, income, and civic wellness data. It describes the community engagement approach and strategies that Yolo Local used, and includes a list of organizations and individuals involved.
“Love is the only force powerful enough to turn an enemy into a friend” M.L. King Jr.
Next week, the Davis Hate Free Together program will hold an all-day strategic summit to evaluate its progress and plan its future direction. This collaborative effort—originating from the City of Davis, UC Davis, and Yolo County—was initially created to address bigotry and prejudice toward individuals based on identity (e.g., being gay, Black, Hispanic, or Jewish).
However, the program now needs to evolve beyond addressing individual prejudice and begin tackling the deeper and more complex challenge of intergroup conflict.
UC Davis is currently under intense pressure from the Trump administration to dismantle its diversity programs and respond to what has been labeled an “epidemic of hate” focused on one group: Jews. This new directive highlights the limitations—and potential harms—of the Hate Free Together framing. Not only may it be ineffective, but it might also worsen group conflict.
More fundamentally, the “Hate Free” framework contradicts well-established findings in cognitive science about how the human mind works. If I tell you, “Don’t think of an elephant,” you will, of course, think of an elephant. Similarly, if a government tells people, “Don’t hate those other people,” the instruction may backfire. Talking about the Holocaust has not ended antisemitism.
The program also treats hate, prejudice, and bigotry as if they were medical conditions, rather than social or psychological phenomena. But tribalism is something all humans are susceptible to, especially under certain environmental and cultural pressures.
The choice of this “don’t think about hate” framing was likely unintentional. The Hate Free Together branding emerged in 2022, created by a PR team just coming off the Healthy Davis Together COVID testing initiative. Indeed, the hatefreetogether.org website describes hate as a virus, setting a goal of “total eradication”—implying the program will functions like a vaccine.
But when hate exists at the group level, this disease/victim metaphor sets the stage for a dangerous contest: Who will be politically defined as the viral “haters,” and who as the innocent “victims”? This dynamic incentivizes groups to highlight their own trauma and victimhood while blaming others—rather than accepting responsibility for working to a safe, welcoming, and pluralistic community. There is even an incentive to traumatize your own people: stoking fear is a well-known political tool. This is not ‘victim’ blaming (again who is the victim?) but suggests the tactics “victims” choose count.
[The following letter was shared for posting to the Davisite by the author]
October 12, 2025
Dear Mayor Vaitla, Social Services Commission Chair Sverdlov, Planning Commission Chair Weiss and to all the council and commission members and Community Development Director Sherri Metzker.
I saw last week in a recent Davis Enterprise the city’s public notice re
The Lumberyard Revised Affordable Housing Plan.
The core elements of the revision are as follows;
The number of units will drop from 226 units to 205 units
A reduction of 21 units
However, the number of bedrooms will increase from 322 to 444
An increase of 122 bedrooms and therefore at least 122 more people at one person per bedroom but many more if any of the bedrooms allow 2 people
If various fees are based upon people and vehicle usage, then the project will;
Reduce project income to the city by about 10%
While increasing the number of noncontributing municipal users by 37+%.
It appears to me therefore that the reduction of 21 units, the city will have a measurable loss of project-based income to cover the long-term costs while substantially subsidizing and increasing dollars spent on the wear and tear on the city.
I would like one of you to pose this question to the Community Development Director;
There was a pretty lively discussion that transpired on social media recently. Many citizens in this town don’t understand why Village Homes is getting a complete pavement makeover, while arterials are going to pot(holes). Some suspicion was expressed that there may be political leverage involved in the decision making. Neither do voters understand why their streets are so riddled with alligator cracks, fissures and pits, while the current City Council seems relatively unconcerned about maintaining basic city infrastructure. This is especially true when a recently approved sales tax hike was supposed to help solve the pavement problem. In fact, someone was concerned enough to reach out to both the City and the City Council for an explanation. The City finally responded.
However, the reply seemed contradictory. The City’s representative justified prioritizing repairing Village Homes inner streets over major arterials by saying: “Most of the streets in Village Homes are in failed condition”. Yet later in their explanation the City made the following contrary statement: “Pavement preservation—proactive maintenance of roads in fair or good condition—helps extend pavement life and maximize the value of each dollar spent. This is why some streets may receive treatment even if they appear to be in better shape than others.”
The city can’t have it both ways, especially when it comes to fixing very small neighborhood streets in poor condition, at the expense of not repairing main thoroughfares in fair condition. First, considerably more citizens in this town use the thoroughfares than tiny side streets. And secondly, those major arteries are fast deteriorating from fair condition, and are a good portion of the way to degrading to poor condition.
As it turns out, a case was just handed down in May of this year from the California Supreme Court, which gives a harsh lesson to cities allowing their roads to unacceptably worsen. In a 7- 0 decision, the California Supreme Court ruled that the plaintiff could sue the City of Oakland for serious injuries sustained as a result of bicycling on crumbled or cracked pavement. It said the City was obligated to “maintain its streets in a reasonably safe condition for travel by the public”. In a statement announcing the $7 million settlement in favor of the plaintiff, the attorney representing the injured party indicated the court’s ruling sent a clear message to California cities that “safe streets are not optional”.
More than 4,000 Yolo County residents gathered in Woodland in June for the first NO KINGS march and rally. Indivisible Yolo is organizing the next NO KINGS event for Oct. 18 in Davis.
Countywide event will be held alongside 5 million people and 2500 protests nationwide
(From press release) Drawing on momentum from the first Yolo NO KINGS march and rally in June that gathered more than 4,000 participants, Indivisible Yolo and Davis Phoenix Coalition will host a second Yolo NO KINGS event Saturday, Oct. 18 from 1:30-3:30pm at Civic Center Park at 6th and B streets in Davis. The event, themed “We the People,” is part of a national mobilization expected to exceed 5 million nationwide as people gather to protest Trump administration policies and remind the president that America is a democracy.
The event will begin with a march from Civic Center Park through downtown Davis, looping back to the park for the rally at approximately 2:30pm where Yolo County speakers will address the crowd. Learn more and RSVP: https://www.mobilize.us/indivisibleyolo/event/840116/.
At least 4500 attendees are expected. Here is a list of speakers, with additional speakers are still being confirmed:
Gloria Partida, Davis Phoenix Coalition
U.S. Representative Mike Thompson (CA-4)
Dr. Dawnté Early, West Sacramento city council member
Deger Carda, UC Davis post-doc UAW 4811
Thomas Alvarez, UC Davis, Davis College Democrats
Steve Murphy, Indivisible Yolo
Renowned activist and former U.S. secretary of labor, Robert Reich, sent a video message for Yolo County participants in the upcoming NO KINGS march on Oct. 18: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZFOb7fpIHY
(From press release) The just-released documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy dramatically details the damage inflicted on the global environment by the U.S. military. The film director and producer, Abby Martin, is an American journalist, television presenter, and activist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abby_Martin). Short introductory comments on the links between militarism and climate change will be presented by Veterans For Peace volunteers who are participating in the Wake Up to Climate Crisis and NO MAS (NO Military Air Shows) Tour – https://www.veteransforpeace.org/take-action/climatecrisis/wake-climate-crisis-tour
Free and open to the public!
Where: Guild Theatre @ 2828 35th St. Sacramento, CA
Time: 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm
Date: Wed, Oct. 15, 2025
Organizers are Veterans For Peace – Climate Crisis & Militarism Project Climate Crisis & Militarism Project | Veterans For Peace
I have good news — we are back! For those who care about such things, we are now hosted by the popular blogging/website platform WordPress.com, which will hopefully give us a stable home for many years to come. And more good news — we believe that all of our old posts and comments were imported successfully from the old site.
In the coming days, expect that we will be working out some of the kinks: maybe tweaking the design a bit, maybe learning some of the new features. I ask that you bear with us through this process. I think it should be fairly smooth and straightforward, though.
We have a bit of a backlog of posts to get through, and we’ll post a couple a day until we get through them all. After that, we will return to our more or less typical posting rate (which has waxed and waned and waxed again over time, and will probably continue to do so).
For those of you who are subscribed to our email list – and I encourage everyone to do so — your emails will now be coming directly from the site (WordPress.com) rather than the 3rd party email delivery we had used in the past (Feedblitz). That will give you a few more options than you had before, like the ability to get one email per day, one email per week, or even subscribe to get email notifications of comments for individual posts (if you like a lot of email). We are hopeful that this will work better for most, if not all, subscribers.
Thank you again for reading the Davisite! And please remember that you are all potential authors, too, so send us your articles, event announcements, etc. There’s a lot going on in Davis, the state, and the world right now, and we hope to provide a platform where ideas and information can be shared.
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