By admin 
So much for being friendly neighbors. In Davis, the voters living closest the proposed 1,800-home Village Farms project are the ones disproportionately responsible for killing it.
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In this overdose of local democracy, citizens get to vote on city expansions since 2000, the lastest being Village Farms via Measure V. City-wide, voters barely rejected Measure V by less than 300 votes overall.
But the total tally obscures how there were basically two types of Davis residents, those living close to the project and those living elsewhere in town. In the precincts immediately east and west of Village Farms, these neighbors rejected Measure V by about 1,500 votes. In the precinct farthest away from the development, in West Davis, support was overwhelming, but not enough to overcome the neighbors.
Will Measure V be just another Davis rejection of housing, or will these NIMBY’s attract the attention of California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has sued other cities for rejecting needed housing?
A 26-year pattern, now extended
Since 2000, when voters approved Measure J requiring a public vote on any expansion of urban development into surrounding farmland, Davis has not approved a single new family housing project. Of the two approvals over the years, only one — the 150-unit Bretton Woods senior community, greenlit in 2018 — has been built. The other was a student housing complex that has not broken ground.
Over that same period, UC Davis enrollment has grown by more than 50%. The arithmetic of that mismatch has produced the predictable results: long commutes for university faculty and staff, escalating housing costs and declining enrollment in the Davis Joint Unified School District.
Measure V was supposed to be the inflection point. The 498-acre Village Farms project, on land off East Covell Boulevard surrounded on three sides by existing neighborhoods, included a mix of affordable units, townhomes and small single-family homes, with roughly half the acreage preserved as open space. It went through the city’s exhaustive planning gauntlet. The City Council approved it unanimously before sending it to voters.
It still lost.
Late-arriving ballots somewhat favored the measure. But it was not enough to change the outcome.
Voters will consider another expansion, the 1,250-unit Willowgrove project, in November. This project, east of the existing Wildhorse community, isn’t as surrounded by neighbors as Village Farms was. In the screwy world of Davis politics, because this isn’t as much of a smart-growth infill project, it probably stands a better chance of passing.
The Measure J exemption that wasn’t
Affordable housing is supposed to be exempt from voter-approval requirement in Davis. But the voter-approved exemption applies only to projects where every unit is offered below market rate — a standard so restrictive that no builder has come forward to use it.
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That structural problem has been visible to Davis leadership for years. As part of the Housing Element it adopted in 2024 after extended back-and-forth with the state Department of Housing and Community Development (HCD), the city committed to placing a measure on the ballot to broaden the affordable housing exemption. It is now mid-2026, and the council has twice declined to put the measure before voters.
Council members fear voters will reject the amendment alongside the pending Village Farms and Willowgrove projects. “I just think it dooms all three to failure if we were to do that,” District 2 Councilmember Linda Deos said, explaining the delay.
Mayor Bapu Vaitla has been blunter about the underlying stakes. “We live in a system of residential segregation,” he said at a December council meeting. “The haves, which is us, we are included in town. And there are have-nots.”
The Elk Grove precedent — and the silence on Davis
The contrast with how the state has treated other Sacramento-region cities is hard to miss.
Bonta’s office moved aggressively against Elk Grove in 2023 over a denied affordable housing project, ultimately settling the case in 2024. Newsom in March publicly warned 15 California cities about their inadequate housing plans. Davis was not on that list.
HCD did warn Davis of “glaring shortcomings” before eventually approving the updated Housing Element in 2024. But the agency accepted a plan that depended on a voter-approval workaround the council has now twice declined to actually pursue. The housing element, on paper, exists. In practice, not enough housing is being built.
What policy watchers should be watching
Does Bonta or HCD have an appetite for taking on Davis? ’s The Elk Grove action demonstrated the AG’s willingness to litigate against a city that denied housing. Measure V’s failure — following council approval — is a different fact pattern, but the underlying compliance failure on the Measure J exemption is squarely the kind of issue Bonta has said his office prioritizes.
And will the council finally put the affordable housing exemption on the ballot — and if so, when? There’s an election this November.
Davis is making itself a test case for how seriously California intends to enforce its own housing laws against politically sympathetic cities. The answer, so far, is: not very.
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