By admin 
The city of Davis, with its booming university and its refusal to build the necessary housing, is now the Sacramento region’s capital of not-in-my-backyard politics. This has implications for all of us, and particularly for a city that deserves to lose control of its own urban planning.
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Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is supposed to police cities that have inadequate housing plans, needs to start paying attention.
City voters are on the verge of rejecting yet another proposed expansion for family housing in the city.
Measure V, which would have approved the 1,800-unit Village Farms project on 400 acres off Covell Boulevard, barely trails with nearly all the votes counted by Yolo County elections officials. The mixed-income project would have included badly needed affordable housing.
Measure V’s rejection keeps intact a pattern by city voters to reject expansions for residents of all age types throughout the 21st century. This is because ever since 2000, Davis has let city voters have the final say on urban expansion. And Davis voters have used this power with devastating effect to frustrate the city from building enough housing to keep up with the necessary growth of UC Davis as it serves its vital statewide mission.
Since 2000, only one senior citizen housing project has been built in Davis. The 150-unit Bretton Woods development was approved in 2018. For housing suitable for faculty, staff or adults who simply want to call Davis home, voters have an unblemished record of saying no.
And now, after 26 years of refusing to build the housing Davis needs, come some tough questions, and hopefully, actions.
There is no doubt that the Davis residents who have been resisting development have been doing so for what they believe are well-intentioned reasons. Growth will bring more cars, and reduce open space. And there is always concern that the city’s exhaustive planning process would fail to address community fears, such as flooding and toxic contamination that opponents of Village Farms raised, apparently to their great success.
But cities are supposed to develop plans known as housing elements to demonstrate to the state how they intend to build the necessary housing of all types. If the state finds a housing element to be inadequate, it can intervene so that builders can construct the necessary housing regardless of the local politics.
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Gov. Gavin Newsom issued such warnings to 15 cities throughout the state in March. The city of Davis was not on that list.
Equally silent about the Democratic stronghold of Davis is Bonta, who, with great fanfare, went after Elk Grove in 2023. The case was settled in 2024
The California Department of Housing and Community Development, after previously warning the city of glaring shortcomings, finally approved an updated housing element for Davis in 2024. But the immovable obstacle of public votes on housing projects remained, prompting the City Council to ask voters to give up their control of any expansions for affordable housing.
Fearing rejection by voters, the council has refused to place this measure on the last two ballots. And now these same voters have rejected Measure V. The prospect of Davis voters giving up control over housing seems as unlikely as President Donald Trump carrying this liberal city in an election.
The record is pretty clear Davis now. The city’s housing element isn’t worth the paper it is written on. The City Council, which unanimously supported Village Farms, is not in control of its city. Urban planning in Davis is one of the most time-consuming and fruitless exercises on Planet Earth. And it’s economic suicide for builders to propose the housing that Davis truly needs.
The campaign for Measure V was all about championing a complex of smaller homes and apartments and preserving open space. Something tells me that most residents in Davis have no idea how they have endangered local control of local land use decisions by saying no to necessary housing, again and again, for 26 years.
For the sake of smart growth in the region, so that people can live closer to their jobs, Davis is ripe for state intervention. The sooner, the better.
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