The Davis Vanguard published an article about the need to set out a vision for where the City of Davis wants to go if we want to have a coherent set of residential and commercial development decisions:

How do we continue to provide high quality of life for the residents of Davis, as the city on the one hand faces fiscal shortfalls and on the other hand continues to price the middle class and middle tier out of this community? A big problem that we have not addressed is the lack of any long term community vision. 

The article set out a series of questions that focused on assumptions and solutions. But we should not start the conversation with choosing a growth rate and then picking a set of projects that fit into that projection.

We need to start with asking a set of questions that derive from the thesis of the article:

• – What is the composition that we want of this community? What type of diversity? How do we accommodate students? What are the ranges of statewide population growth that we need to plan for?
• – To achieve that community composition, what is the range of target housing price? Given the projected UCD enrollment targets (which are basically out of our control), how much additional housing is needed under different scenarios of additional on campus housing?
• – What is the jobs mix that supports that community composition under different scenarios? What’s the job mix that minimizes commuting and associated GHG emissions? 
• – What’s the mix of businesses, jobs and housing that move toward fiscal stability for the City in these scenarios? 
• – Then in the end we arrive at a set of preferred growth rates that are appropriate for the scenarios that we’ve constructed. We can then develop our general plan to accommodate these preferred scenarios. 

My wife and I put forward one vision for Davis to focus on sustainable food development as an economic engine. I’m sure there’s other viable ideas. We need a forum that dives into these and formulates our economic plan rather than just bumbling along as we seem to be doing now. This is only likely to get worse with the fundamental changes after the pandemic.

I’ll go further to say that one of the roots of this problem is the increasing opaqueness of City decision making. “Playing it safe” is the byword for City planning, just when that’s what is most likely to hurt us. That’s why we proposed a fix to the fundamental way decisions are made by the City.

There’s a long list of poor decisions created by this opaqueness that shows how this has cost the City tens of millions of dollars. He points out symptoms of a much deeper problem that is impeding us from developing a long term vision.

It may seem like so much “inside baseball” to focus on the nuts and bolts of process, but its that process that is at the root of the crisis, as boring as that may seem.