 Good evening, everyone. Good evening. My name's Lucas Farrux, a member of the Davis City Council. Thank you so much for being here this evening. Welcome to the eighth installment of the Davis Futures Forum. The Davis Futures Forum is a city, university community partnership that brings nationally known speakers to Davis, sort of like a speakers bureau or a commonwealth club of Davis, so to speak. Its goal is to prime the pump with new ideas about how Davis can better achieve social, economic and environmental sustainability here on the local level. We are really happy to have you all with us this evening. As many of you know, we've had some really excellent speakers over the course of the past year and a half. We have been continually drawing crowds, filling this room, certainly. I think we're getting to the point we're gonna probably have to, we're outgrowing this room. And also the Vets Theater, Vets Memorial Center Theater as well. We've had some pretty big crowds up there. So tonight's topic, the housing crisis and how we got here. We are really honored to have another excellent speaker with us this evening, David Garcia. He's the policy director at the Turner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley. He leads the center's engagement in local, state and federal housing policy and supports the generation of research-driven policy ideas, proposals and papers. He has a really great blend of both public sector and private sector experience prior to joining the Turner Center at UC Berkeley. He worked as chief operating officer of 10 Space, a real estate development company in Stockton, focused exclusively on infill projects in the downtown neighborhood. As the COO there, he managed various aspects of the development process, including development agreements, environmental review and project design. During his time at 10 Space, they won several awards for their projects, including American Planning Association's Award of Excellence in Urban Design for the California chapter. He's also worked as an advocate in the Central Valley, serving on numerous board and commissions related to a wide array of planning issues, including increasing cycling infrastructure, obviously relatable to Davis, implementing growth policies and developing incentives for infill growth. Prior to his work with 10 Space, he also was a research analyst at the GAO, the Government Accountability Office in Washington, D.C. At the GAO, David conducted evaluations and analyses of several different federal programs, using a variety of methods, both quantitative and qualitative. And those reports helped inform various policy debates and discussions at the national level. This evening, we're looking forward to his presentation, but providing some background on the problem of housing affordability, something that is acutely an issue here in Davis and throughout California. And we're hoping to see him suggest some strategies that other cities have used to address the need for more affordable housing. I think we're probably all well aware, sure, there's a wide array of opinions, certainly, but we're all well aware that the issue of housing, housing affordability, lack of housing, lack of affordability is something certainly that is very much on the minds of most Davisites currently. We are, of course, in the process of getting ready to update our general plan. We're a downtown core area specific plan underway, and we will strive to accommodate types of housing and certainly, especially increasing the affordability of housing for folks all across the spectrum, from millennials to seniors and everywhere in between. And then lastly, a couple just housekeeping items. We wanna thank Davis Media Access for they are recording this presentation this evening. And Cool Davis is also another partner. So Davis Media Access, always a big strong supporter of recording these types of events for the community to see later on, as well as Cool Davis, of course, all of these previous sessions are archived on the cooldavis.org website. So you can go back and take a look. If you haven't, if you missed out on a couple of the previous installments of the series. And then lastly, so David will do his presentation, of course, and then we will, again, as we have a variety of the previous iterations of the Davis Futures Forum, we will have a panel of a variety of local folks writing various levels and background and housing and policy and such, and we wanna have an opportunity for them to have some discourse and Q and A, of course, at the end as well too, of the audience. So with that, David Garcia, welcome. Let's hang out for a minute. It could be. Yeah, we'll be right back for what's going on. Well, good evening everybody and thank you very much, Councilman, for the introduction. He did leave out a very key part of my background that I wanted to bring up is that I actually started my academic career here at Davis, at UC Davis, my first semester. So I have a lot of fond memories of this city and it's one of my absolute favorite in the region. My wife and I love to visit and come here whenever we can. So you guys have an absolutely beautiful community and it's an honor to be here and to talk about housing, which as I understand is a topic of interest in the city of Davis. That's what I've been told. So tonight I'm going to focus a little bit more broadly. So I'm going to give you an outline of my discussion this evening. So I'm going to talk about, first and foremost, the state of housing in California, which is part of the title of the presentation, how we've got to the point we are now. And then from there, I'm going to discuss what can we do to address this housing crisis and it is by any measure a crisis and it is not simply in Davis or in San Francisco or in Los Angeles, it really is a statewide issue. So to build on to that, I want to talk a little bit about the Turner Center and what our mission and goals are. So the Turner Center is named after Don Turner, who was a former CEO of Bridge Housing and was also the director of the California Housing and Community Development Department who died tragically in the mid 90s in a plane crash and who was succeeded by Carol Galante, who is actually the faculty director for our center now. She was then the CEO of Bridge Housing and was actually tapped by the Obama administration to run the federal housing administration. So since she joined the Turner Center just a few years ago, she's really taken the impact and the scope of the center to the next level. So I'm excited to work with her and the team there. And as you can see, the mission of the Turner Center is to formulate bold strategies to house families from all walks of life and vibrant, sustainable and affordable homes and communities. And really the goal in achieving this mission is to create and generate actionable and impactful policies and research. So we're not simply a think tank that throws ideas out there in hopes that one day someone will listen to them. Our goal is to create and craft policies that we think are gonna be effective now and that are going to actually move into the dial on creating more and affordable housing. So we have several areas of focus. I'll run through these quickly, but the first is increasing supply and lowering the cost of housing. At the root of what we're seeing today is the fact that we haven't built enough homes for decades. And I'll get into some statistics of that later. So part of our focus is how do we increase the supply and increase the supply of affordable housing? Second is expanding access to high quality homes and communities to achieve greater inclusion and shared prosperity. And then also three, using housing as a tool to achieve sustainability goals. And this is really a key one for the state of California because we have very ambitious climate change goals, you know, the resiliency goals. And part of meeting those goals has a lot to do with our land use where we decide to build our communities and vehicle miles traveled and the like. So that is an area that we are particularly focused on. And lastly is supporting the improvement of housing programs and policies through impact assessment. So we do program evaluations of various programs and projects, not just in California but throughout the country to see if they are effective, what changes need to be made, so on and so forth. So that's just a little bit about the center itself. So like I mentioned, I'm really gonna talk about the state of housing in California and the state of housing in California is dire. There's no other way to really phrase it. It is, by any measure, it is very serious. And these two statistics here for renters and homeowners really are an indication of the depth of the problem. So on the homeowner side, only 29% of individuals can afford to buy a medium priced home here and that's down from 55% in 2012. And this is important because traditionally in the United States owning your home was a pathway to wealth, building equity. And now fewer and fewer individuals, particularly millennials, people graduated from college, they do not have that opportunity anymore simply because it costs too much and a number of other factors, student debt and what not, access to credit. Perhaps more impacted are renters and there's actually a majority of California renters which is about three million households that spend more than 30% of their income just on rent. So this is a term that we refer to as being rent burdened. If you have a community that is healthy, you should not have people paying more than 30% of their paycheck going to the rent. But in California, we see that that is majority. And of that three million, about half of them actually pay more than 50% of their income just to make rent. So clearly this shows that this is unsustainable and it is an issue that is not new. It has been at the building for several years but only now it feels like we're really trying to tackle this issue. So the effects of these statistics are that people are being uprooted. In a UC Berkeley survey, 56% of those polled said that they are considering moving because of housing costs. And of those, one in four are considering leaving the state. So this is important for several reasons. For those 56% of people who are considering moving, they're almost all of them moving further and further away from their jobs. So those are people who are working in the Bay Area who have to live in places like Stockton, who have to live in Modesto or Tracy and they have to commute two, two and a half hours each way to get to work because they simply can't afford to live near their places of employment. And I use the Bay Area as an example but really that is a similar story you hear across the state. These are no longer people that are at the margins. These are people that make up the fabric of our communities. These are our teachers, our first responders, our students or recent graduates, our blue-collar workforce that really have been relegated to the outskirts of our major job centers simply because their housing affordability is not tenable for them. So truly, I feel like we're at a point where California is becoming a state where you have the wealthy individuals who can afford these exorbitant rents and housing prices and then those on the other end of the spectrum who are fortunate enough to live in subsidized or de-restricted housing and more and more you are seeing that the housing stock available to the middle class is dwindling quickly. So that frames the issue and now we have to ask ourselves, how did we get here? Why is it as bad as it is today? And the simple answer is that we're simply not building enough homes. So as of late, I think the narrative in California is, well, we're building a lot now. We used to see it in Sacramento, see it in Oakland, there's cranes everywhere. We feel like we are building a lot. But if you look at historically, we're only building a fraction of homes that we used to build in the past. So if you look at the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, there were cycles, but at the top of those cycles, we were building upwards of 200,000 homes a year. And what's important to note is that there was a balance of homes. So I'll explain this if it's not clearly visible. It's a little hard to read, but the green indicates single family homes and the blue indicates multifamily homes. So 20, 30 years ago, we were actually building a good balance of multifamily single family homes today or in the run up to the recession, we were mostly building single family homes. And a lot of those were being built in far flung suburban areas where people were getting, as we now know, very bad mortgages. And that clearly turned out to be economically unsustainable. So today we are building more than we have been in recent years, but we're not anywhere close to where we need to be to keep up with demand. HDD says that we need to build 180,000 homes a year as a state by 2025 or 1.8 million homes to keep up with demand. And we're just not there yet. Another way to look at this is to look at the progress in just the last few years. So these are numbers from the regional housing needs assessment. This is the housing goals that are given to cities from the area council, area metropolitan planning organization. So the very top bar you see there is the Sacramento Area Council of Governments for SACOG and that shows you that we, as a region, are way behind where we need to be in building the homes that we need to meet demand, particularly in the very low and low income ranges. And just last week, HDD actually came out with a report that said that 97% of cities throughout the state are not keeping pace with their housing goals. So this is another way to slice the data that we're just, again, not building enough homes. And this is of particular interest because we are adding jobs. California, thankfully, has a remarkably resilient economy and we've been adding jobs at a pretty good pace. The issue is that we are not building homes to accommodate those jobs. So this is just a handful of sample cities, LA, San Jose, San Diego, Sacramento. And you can see that it's about between four and six jobs per housing unit built. For context, other cities, Austin and Seattle, build between one and two, have between two jobs for every one to two homes. So they have a much more reasonable balance. So we've established that we're not building enough. I think I've made that point pretty clearly. So now the question is, why aren't we building enough? And one of the reasons is, and there's several theories out there, but one clear indication is that the costs to build homes is simply too high. The graph you see on the right is the National Construction Cost Index. And as you can see, from 2010, where the graph starts, we have increases of sometimes up to 25% per year just to build homes. That is a lot of money and it's not keeping up with wages. And a lot of people have their theories about why the costs keep going up. It's a shortage of labor or material prices are going up, but these are too high. And really, no one really knows for sure. It's most likely a combination of those factors. There's no one thing that's driving the costs. So this is actually something that Turner Center is interested in looking at. And we've started to undertake a study of over 100 construction projects, residential projects in California to see what are driving the costs here. So we can identify what the issues are and come up with solutions for that. So that's something I'm actually working on and we hopefully will have some preliminary results in the next few months. And then the chart on the right is really interesting because it shows the productivity for the residential construction industry. And it compares it to manufacturing. As you can see, manufacturing productivity has continued to grow at pretty good rates, but residential construction is flat or declining. And that's an issue because we do have fewer construction workers than we did during the boom years in the mid 2000s. And we need to figure out a way to build things more efficiently with fewer workers. So that's just a chart that shows that the productivity is not there either. So that is another issue. And specifically when it comes to affordable housing. So these are housing units that are affordable to individuals who are very low or low income based on area median income. Traditionally these are not housing units that the market has supplied simply because you can't build something and charge an amount that is reasonable enough for someone making minimum wage. So traditionally we've needed subsidies to fill that gap to create this affordable housing. Most in most recent years we've spent about $900 million per year to subsidize housing. And just recently with the passage of several bills in Sacramento, we are slated to increase that to $4 billion annually, which is a significant amount and that's gonna build a lot of homes. But the legislative analyst office actually says that that's not nearly enough. So we actually need $15 billion annually to build the amount of affordable housing that we need in California. So while, and I'll get into some of the recent legislation, while it's good that we passed that, there's a lot, there's still a huge gap to fill. And some of the individuals who worked in city government will appreciate this. We've been limited in the tools that we have now. So funding from the federal government is drying up. We have no redevelopment agencies in California. So it's becoming increasingly difficult to piece together the money needed to build housing that is affordable to certain groups of individuals and families. So that's the bad news. It's pretty bad. But if there is a silver lining, and I feel like there is, is that finally this issue is being addressed at the scale that it needs to actually make an impact. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about the housing package that passed last year. I won't spend too much time. I think it's been pretty well documented of what's been going on in Sacramento, but there were about 16 bills that were passed last year, specifically to address the housing crisis. And this is the most bills that have been passed in decades. So it is clear that housing has finally become a priority at the Capitol. So just real quickly, again, we have a few bills that are gonna bring new revenue to affordable housing. That's SB2, a real estate fee, and SB3 was actually an affordable housing bond that will go to the voters this November. So if that passes, that'll have $5 billion more to spend on affordable housing. We also had a number of bills that were created to incentivize cities to do upfront planning work so that they can streamline development approvals and get housing built quicker. And then we also have a number of streamlining and accountability bills. So the most notorious of them was SB35 by Senator Scott Wiener San Francisco that essentially said, if the city isn't building housing quick enough as determined by the RENA allocations that I showed earlier, then they have to streamline housing to get it built quicker. And then on top of that, we also had a pair of bills, SB166 and 167 that strengthened the Housing Accountability Act that essentially said, cities, you can't deny housing if it complies with all of your written rules and regulations. So, and we already see examples of this happening. Most recently, there was a project in Livermore for their downtown that fit within all of their approved guidelines and regulations, but the council was being pressured to deny the project. And they were considering doing this until their city attorney reminded them that because of these new bills, because of the Housing Accountability Act strength, they were putting them at risk of a very costly lawsuit. So, the council is now back-pendling on that. So, you're already seeing the effects of that. And one of my favorite bills that I think has had the most immediate impact is SB1069, which actually was two years ago. And that is the Accessory Dwelling Unit Streamlining Bill that essentially legalized granny flats or secondary units in single-family homes. So, since this was implemented last year, a number of cities across the state have seen a tremendous increase in interest of private homeowners interested in converting their garage to house a family member or to rent out to earn a little bit more cash to help pay the mortgage. So, this is an exciting bill, and it's one that we have seen has already had an impact. And I think you're gonna see more bills coming out of Sacramento, specifically around accessory dwelling units. So, those are all good measures that are gonna move us forward with regards to housing. But it's important to note that it's not going, these bills were not gonna solve the crisis. And a lot of the legislators who authored these bills understand that, and they frequently refer to last year's housing package as a down payment with an understanding that we're gonna be doing a lot in the coming years because we haven't built homes for decades at the rate that we need to. And it's gonna take years of policy changes and shifts to really get to where we need to go. So, that brings us to the question of, okay, well, what are those solutions? What are those bold status quo altering policies that are actually going to result in tangible change in California and create affordability? So, I'm gonna talk a little bit about what we're watching at the Turner Center and we can kind of discuss if any of these things could help be applicable to the city of Davis or just the region in general. So, on one of my previous slides, I showed a graph on construction productivity that it hasn't been keeping up with other industries. And that's an issue because of our limited resources and smaller labor pool. So, one innovation coming from the private sector is something called offsite or industrialized construction. So, this is the method of building units in a controlled offsite location and then bringing them to the housing site and stacking them essentially like Legos. And it is actually quite common in other countries. So, for example, Sweden has a lot of their housing built in modular factories and the Turner Center actually hosted the largest company of modular housing, Lindback's, last fall to share some of their insight and how the industry got started in Sweden and how we might be able to replicate that in the United States. So, the savings are quite real. So, if you can build offsite and you do it correctly, you can see 20% cost savings and a 40% reduction in construction time. And then if you think about it, this makes a lot of sense. You have control over the elements. You do not have to worry about getting your workers to the site. Everything is on a assembly line, similar to a car. And you're able to deliver housing in a much quicker, efficient way. So, this is actually something that's starting to take hold in the United States. There's actually a project in Midtown Sacramento called a Viva that was a modular project. And they think they use a factory in Idaho called Gearden that actually built the units in Idaho and then they trucked them over to Sacramento and built them here. So, this is not that far from reality. You're seeing projects actually start to utilize this technology and there's actually a mayor island in Vallejo is actually also creating something called Factory OS, which will be a modular factory here in the region. One of the things I also like to note is that we're not going to solve our housing crisis by building high-rises everywhere. That's simply not going to work in many communities and frankly we don't have enough urban core space to build that way. So really, we need to prioritize something that's known as the missing middle, which are accessory dwelling units. These are town homes, two to three unit buildings that can fit into existing neighborhoods that don't necessarily conflict with the existing character of a community. So, and most importantly, these can be built much more cost effectively. They don't require concrete, they don't require steel. They're wood frame structures that can be built quickly, efficiently, and at a price that is reasonably affordable when compared to other types of construction. So, this is something that we're really interested in exploring because we're essentially not going to build a bunch of residential towers to get out of this crisis. It needs to be a balance of different housing products. But right now, that's all you see. You see single family homes on the exerbs or you see high rise or mid-rise buildings in the urban cores, and there has to be some balance. And that brings me to the next slide, which is that we have a lack of places to actually build the missing middle housing. So, it might be a little hard to see, but that graphic on the left is actually put together by one of the Turner Center Fellows, Issy-Roman, with Build Zoom, and it shows that the bright red spots are where you see a lot of 50 unit structures being built. And it makes sense, you see them in Oakland, San Francisco, different parts of the peninsula, places you expect to have that kind of high-density housing. And then you see that single family homes, the very light blue, is happening on the outskirts. And then the rest of that dark blue is where nothing is being built. So really, again, we are building things at two ends of the spectrum. We're building high-density housing in the urban cores, and we're building single family homes in the exerbs. There needs to be more housing built in between those areas. And again, a way to do that is to prioritize this missing middle housing. We're not talking about putting in 10-story buildings in a neighborhood like you see on the right, but allowing accessory dwelling units or prioritizing accessory dwelling units, or two or three unit buildings, as I mentioned. So this is an important policy that we're looking at in Seattle and Portland. They've done some interesting work on opening up their single family home areas to create more reasonable amounts of density to house more people. So one of the other issues as it relates to cost is particularly to California is that impact fees, which are fees that are charged to a development to offset the impacts of that development, they are quite high in California. So compared to the rest of the US, California charges about four times as much as other states. And there are several reasons because of that, and one of them is being that cities do not recoup as much revenue from residential housing as they do from, say, commercial development. So there's incentives to try and use entitlements or new units to raise revenues to pay for very important things like parks and schools and infrastructure. This has a negative effect on the ability to supply housing and to supply it at an affordable level. So that's something we've actually done a report on in the next couple of weeks we'll be releasing is what is the effect of these fees and the way that they are applied and accessible to the public? What does that effect on housing? And what can the state do to come in and provide some incentives for cities to right size their fees, provide them funding to pay for that critical infrastructure without putting it on the back of new residents? So that's something we're working on and actually that report, I was working on it today, is gonna be coming out in the next couple of weeks. And another issue is kind of touched on earlier is streamlining approvals and also reducing various requirements. So a lot of times we have a lot of discretionary processes to determine whether or not we want to allow a project to move forward but these can take a lot of time. And with interest rates inching up, with holding costs, that increases the cost to actually build housing and makes it harder to deliver projects. So we're really looking at seeing how can cities be incentivized to do upfront planning work and rather than judge each development on a project by project basis, judge the plan as a whole so that you already know what you're getting, you know what the parameters are and from there, developers will build to those parameters that the community has approved and has agreed to. That saves some time on the front end to do that planning work and to get the feedback and the buy-in from the community but then you know what you're getting and then you can streamline those projects and you can get units built much quicker. Another requirement that I think bears reconsideration in many communities are essentially the requirements for parking. Parking can add up to 15% to the cost of new housing. That's a significant amount and if there are areas where parking is not utilized where you have parking garages that sit empty or individuals who would rather ride a bike or take transit, these are very real options that more and more individuals are taking advantage of. So another way to reduce the cost to produce housing and to create housing more affordably is to reduce parking requirements. So that picture you see there is actually an apartment complex in Minneapolis that's eliminated or greatly reduced the parking requirements or the city reduced those requirements on projects and as a result, this project was able to be built and provide housing for about half the cost of what you see new housing here in California. So that is a one strategy that we see overwhelmingly adds a tremendous amount of cost to projects that can be adjusted rather quickly. So one of the data points I pointed to earlier was the loss of funding and the gap of funding to build affordable housing. So what are some ways that we can create new revenues or new incentives to get more affordable housing built and there's a handful that I think not any one particular policy is going to create a slew of new housing but I think together can create meaningful new supply of affordable housing. The first would be an expansion of California's affordable housing property tax exemption. So right now if I'm a nonprofit and I build affordable housing units, I don't pay property taxes on those units. It's an incentive. However, if I'm an affordable builder and I am required, I'm sorry, if I'm a market rate builder, a for-profit builder and I'm required to include on-site affordability, I pay property taxes on those units as if they are a market rate. So it's a disincentive for developers to include affordable units on their property. So one solution might be to expand that to allow developers who want to do the right thing to be able to offset some of those costs with reduced property taxes. Another is to bring back redevelopments and I think you're gonna see some traction in Sacramento. Our outgoing governor has done a lot of great things. And one of the things he has not done was to bring back redevelopment agencies after he dissolved them several years ago, which is a little ironic because when he was mayor of Oakland he actually used redevelopment quite robustly. So there's a lot of discussion about bringing back redevelopment agencies and the tax increment financing tool back to cities so that they can provide funding for affordable housing and the related infrastructure needed to support housing overall. And then lastly, the state has something called a density bonus, which allows developers to build more housing in exchange for having units on-site that are affordable. In conversations with several developers I've had, they note that with the exception of very few places that the density bonus, the way it's structured now doesn't really work and doesn't provide the intended incentive. So there may be an opportunity to revise the density bonus to get more on-site affordability and allow the developer to build more units. So it's an incentive to again have more units on-site. So those are just three ideas around the incentives and increasing revenue for affordable housing. And then you also have tenant support and protection. So this is a very important topic that I think needs a little bit more nuance. So particularly around the protection policies. We had a recent debate in Sacramento over a bill to repeal Costa Hawkins, which is the state's rent control bill that limits the ability of cities to create their own rent control ordinances. And it was a little disappointing to see that there is no nuance in this conversation. There was either you straight repeal the bill or you maintain the status quo. And it's clear that the status quo isn't working and there needs to be something done to protect the most vulnerable and those at highest risk of displacement. But on the other end, a full repeal of Costa Hawkins could have unintended consequences and there needs to be a discussion about how do we find a solution that doesn't impair the construction and new housing but also allows people to have some reasonable protections that they're not gonna get a rent increase of $1,000 next month. So those are conversations that we are looking to help to have over the next few months because right now we're looking at a ballot initiative that might repeal Costa Hawkins on its own. And there needs to be some discussions of all the stakeholders evolved about is this the best way to protect tenants or are there other solutions that we should be considering? And in my opinion, there are. So for example, we have discussed the possibility of something like an anti-rent gouging cap. So not rent control, so to speak, but making it very difficult for a landlord to raise rents at exorbitant prices. And also legal services to protect from eviction. This is something the city of New York has actually just implemented that you have a legal right to counsel now when it comes to issues of being evicted. And the research shows that just having that ability to have counsel greatly reduces eviction rates. So that's something I think could be explored as well. So those are the issues and the potential policies that we are looking at that could make meaningful progress on the housing front. And there's a lot of new policies already on the way. So in 2017, again, we had 16 bills. It was very ambitious. And most people following housing policy said, well, that was a great year. 2018 is gonna be quiet because it's an election year. And we already did a lot in 2017, so we were probably not gonna see very much. That has very quickly turned out to not be true. There have been several bills introduced that would have very significant impacts. And I'll just run through them quickly. The first of them is SB 827, which again is by Senator Scott Weiner. That would essentially up zone areas around transit. And that has sparked a lot of debate, pro and con. So I'm really interested to see what final iteration this bill might take and what kind of support that we'll have around this type of bill. Senator Weiner's also has authored SB 828, which is going to actually, what's that? Yes, it is. Thank you. Very observant, appreciate it. So this is 828, which again, Senator Scott Weiner and he basically has said we need to reform the RENA process. We need to reform the way that we determine what are the fair shares of housing that each city needs to be built. Right now, it's not necessarily evidence-based. So the bill doesn't have specific language in it now, but the goal is that they're going to develop some sort of methodology to create a better, more equitable process for RENA in the future, which is actually going to be a big component of AB 1759, which is Assemblymember McCarty, who's a Sacramento area legislature, who's actually introduced legislation that would tie transportation funding to housing production goals. So basically, this bill would require cities to meet housing production goals to receive transportation funding from the state. So I'm really interested to see how this bill plays out as well, because it's not always the case that a city isn't meeting their RENA goals because they're not trying. There are often many other factors that affect whether or not you have housing built in the community. So places in the Central Valley, they are not seeing the building boom, so to speak, that you have in other cities. And it would be, I don't think productive to limit their transportation dollars because the economics don't work in these places. You also have communities that very much want to build low and very low income housing, but again, there are no subsidies to help pay for that construction. So in concept, I like the idea of having incentives. I'm interested to see how this bill plays out. And my favorite bill, because I love accessory dwelling units so much, is SB 831 by Senator Wieckowski, who authored the previous accessory dwelling unit bill as well. This takes what he did in 2016 and it just expands it. So it eliminates several standards like floor area ratio, sit backs and tries to remove any of the remaining barriers facing homeowners who would like to create accessory dwelling units. So there are a number of indications that we're gonna see several other bills come forward before the middle part of this month, which is the deadline to introduce new legislation. So I anticipate that 2018 will be just as focused on housing as it was in 2017, which again is really needed because there's no one year of legislation that's gonna fix this housing issue. So that's pretty much it. As I noted, the situation is not good right now, no matter what statistic you look at or how you wanna frame it. People are being uprooted and they're paying way more out of their paycheck to rent than I think is sustainable. But I will say that I am quite hopeful. I work with a lot of the leading voices and minds around housing in California and in the nation and I'm hopeful that we have reached a point, not just in California, but in other high cost areas across the country where we need to start looking at some of the policies that we've laid out and figuring out what can we do to make meaningful change. And yeah, so again, I'm hopeful. I guess I kind of have to be, otherwise my job would be really difficult. But that's it. And I wanna thank the community. I wanna thank Georgina with Davis Futures Forums for allowing me to come share some of this information with everyone here. And I believe we're gonna go to a panel and we're gonna take questions. But again, thank you very much for this opportunity to speak to everyone here this evening. Great, thank you so much, David. Judy, do you wanna run the mic here? We're gonna do. Judy Corbett's gonna be out here in the audience taking questions. I'm gonna get up here at the Dias. Eric Rowe, I think, is joining us. So we're really fortunate to have a great panel this evening. So thank you, first of all, David, again for your talk. We have a great panel assembled here representing a variety of segments of the community. I'm gonna do a little bit of a brief bio on each of these folks. And then we would like each panelist to speak for about four minutes each. I'll got the timer here, certainly. And then we'll have Q&A from the audience and to either questions for either David or members of the panel as well. So we'll get going first. Down the far end of the Dias, Susan Perez, tonight is representing the housing consumer. She is first navigated the housing system as a UC Davis undergraduate, then as a graduate student and now finally as a postdoc married with children. Today, she is purchasing a home in Davis. So she knows it all because she's done it all. So we're glad to have Susan here with us. Georgina Valencia is a local real estate broker through her experience leaving Davis and then returning with fresh eyes back to town here and to the current housing crunch. She's developed a passionate concern about our affordable housing situation. Georgina is also a member of the city's social services commission, which is responsible for making recommendations on affordable housing. And frankly tonight's focus on housing is due in large part to Georgina's initiative. So thank you very much, Georgina. Eric Rowe down here to my, just to my, my left, but everyone's right. Eric was born and raised here in Davis as in the second generation of a family of highly respected Davis developers and builders for the past five years. He has operated the Red Door building company doing new construction remodeling and folks may be aware of his most recent infill project. The Del Rio live work lofts at the corner of Fifth and Pena. Really great new addition to our housing stock and probably able to talk a little bit about that himself. John Meyer over here as well to my left came to Davis as an undergraduate student and never left and that was just two years ago. So it's amazing. He served as our highly respected city manager between 1990 and 2000, then became vice chancellor at UC Davis. His accomplishments there include West Village, excuse me, development and now a national model for energy sustainability and a critical addition to student housing. He's also recently retired from the university but it continues to contribute to the Davis community as a volunteer and now serving on the Davis downtown sort of plan update committee. And we're really appreciative of that. And so with that, and you've heard a little about David of course already appreciate that and we'll get going. So whoever wants to start off Susan if you want to start down there. Good evening, I'm Susan Perez. I came to Davis as an undergraduate student so I lived in the dorms, I'm Segundo. If anybody's familiar with Segundo. And then my last year here at UC Davis I met my husband and then we started a family as undergraduate students where we subsequently moved into Solano Park and we brought home our first son to Solano Park. After that we graduated into the recession and so we as a family we moved back in with my parents. When my husband then got a job, it was the option of we could afford a $250,000 home and having lived in Davis and having been familiar with the schools we really, really wanted to come back to Davis. But with $250,000 it was an 1800 square foot two story home or a one bedroom apartment. And so knowing we wanted to grow our family we bought a home in Sacramento. I actually was then accepted into a PhD doctorate program at UC Davis and then so I chose to, that afforded us the opportunity to move back into student housing and we moved into Orchard Park. And let me tell you it was 590 square feet of bliss. That is a great community, it was small. We then had as a family of five in a two bedroom 590 square foot apartment and it was perfect. It was the happiest time of our lives. Then we found out, and I'm not even being sarcastic, like it was amazing, I mean the community, I'm such an advocate of that idea of community. And then when we found out that they were gonna close Orchard Park, I then became involved in the Chancellor's Graduate Student Advisory Board and I took on causes related to student families. And as a part of that we just kind of wanted to help. We were in a position to say this is what our student family experiences are. This is our income. We, I think you were actually there at the time and you were such a fantastic advocate. I never really got to thank you for that. Yeah, I kind of wondering about that, but we'll talk later. So we kind of brought them data. We as students, we did our own survey and we kind of, they brought us into the process and as a result of that I think we stalled the process. But of course, and then we decided we rented and our landlords wanted to move back home. So we were there for nine months and then we loved our community. We moved around the block and then we still rent and then now just last month we put a down payment on our first home. So that is my journey through Davis. I'm gonna, I have a few notes that are prepared so that I remember to say, get a little nervous in front of groups. But some of you may know I wrote an article for the enterprise about a week ago and the headline was housing policies reflect our values as a community. I believe this and I think there's a lot of you out there if not all of you that believe that as well. And what we believe as a community actually needs to be formalized in our housing policies so that values are reflected in the projects that we will be considering as we move forward to reexamine our general plan, our specific plan and our core area specific plan. Excuse me, our housing element and core area specific plan. So I'm gonna wax a little philosophical here and share with you that my life actually benefited as a result of Davis's housing policies. I purchased a home in Davis in 1981. It was an affordable home and you could say that the housing policies in Davis in the 1980s actually affected my whole life. As a 20-something, I graduated from UC Davis. I was able to purchase my first home, earn some equity here, sell it, move on to the next home, the American dream and then on to the next part of my life's trajectory. I worked throughout the state for various home builders as it turned out and more recently have come back to Davis to kind of bring everything full circle in my life. Last year, February 2017, I actually represented the builder that purchased the school site on Grande Avenue. The school district, I think, negotiated a really good deal there and was able to offer a wonderful opportunity to their teachers. Their teachers and staff had first shot at the lottery for 14 affordable homes and I have to tell you, like much of my career, I've been very privileged to work with a lot of people, hear their stories and understand that they really just want an opportunity to own a home and for a lot of us to own a home in Davis, which is nearly impossible to do, especially for young people. That lottery, there was 137 applications for 14 homes, 137 applications, 14 of the homes that were offered for sale, all 14 sold immediately. Seven of the 14 sold to Davis Joint Unified School District employees, four of them sold to UC Davis employees, two sold to self-employed people here in the community and one was an employee from another school district. Defining the numbers a little bit more for you, seven were young, single professionals, two were single-parent households, four were young families with children and one was a mature family without children. In my career, I've worked with a lot of builders and a lot of cities and I've had the privilege to work on a number of affordable housing projects. I can tell you in my career, nobody's ever said that affordable housing is easy, it's not and I can also tell you, there are a few if any people will say to you that affordable housing is a great way to make money, it's not. It's really about giving back and providing opportunity, that's what affordable housing is about. This may be a little hokey, but I'm gonna do it anyways. I don't know if you remember, but when John Kennedy was trying to convince the public to endorse the Apollo program, he made a statement that I think is really apropos to deny. He said, we do these things not because they're easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and our skills. And I think that's what we need to consider as we're talking about affordable housing. Housing policies and programs that are inclusive, that serve diversity of needs are not easy things to do or accomplish, they are very hard. No one, no one wants to pick up the tab for the cost of building affordable housing, whether it's rental housing or for sale housing. But affordable housing is an issue that we all have a stake in, and it's, we all need housing. And it's my belief that we all need to contribute to the solution of affordable housing, so. Great, thank you very much, Georgina. John, you wanna? I think that's a good segue. So even though I'm representing the public administration voice in the room, I tend to think of housing as a moral issue. I mean, like healthcare, I think providing housing choice is incumbent upon us to do. But I would like to first just talk briefly about the bucket of irony we're in at the moment. So you have the state that's passing legislation, and the last two great recessions transferred huge amounts of local government revenue to help balance their budget. So they've got a multi-billion dollar surplus and local governments have been stripped from the tools to have housing and affordable housing make sense. So the reason you have the fee chart is because for every dollar property tax, the city gets sense, sense. So they've sort of stripped the economics out of market rate housing, let alone affordable housing. So while I appreciate the goodwill of legislation, it feels to me a little bit like a city council passing measures that highways shouldn't have potholes. I mean, cities have nothing to do with that, and it's interesting, but really not relevant. So I wish them well, but I think they really need to help cities get tools. And I do worry a bit about broad stroke issues of if it's compliant, it can go, because as we've seen just with the future eyes at infill in the community, the definition of compliant sometimes can be in the eye of the beholder. I think it's also important to realize that the Davis housing ecosystem isn't just us. So I think we have to proceed with some caution that increasing supply when there's insatiable demand is not necessarily going to result in affordable housing. I think affordable housing needs more supply, but I think it takes radical intervention tools to make sure some of the projects remain affordable. Later on, if we have time, I'd like to just give you one example of Aggie Village, how that has increased in affordability over time, because I think it will cause a few people to pass out just in terms of how radical that is. So I also think that the Bay Area's hyperinflation of housing cost does not bode well for us. I think Sacramento and Davis and nice communities are becoming an affordable option. We have amazing transportation assets. I mean, being able to take capital corridor to the Bay Area is fantastic, and I think we should build adjacent to transit modes. But I do worry that a lot of folks moving to Bay Area finding an $850,000 new house and a new project affordable, and then they can take a million and a half of equity out of their current house may not bode well for us. So that's why I think we really need interventions to make sure the units we do build a good portion of those stay affordable. I think we're also a community, this is gonna shrug a lot of you, have some conflicted values, right? So compact small town, but we've just had spurts of growth, and that does have sometimes a pretty radical limit on supply, and that has its effects. We all believe some of these home prices are absurd, but everyone loves their equity as a major savings account. So just a little internal conflicts. We really pledge ourselves as a community all the time and have been a leader in sustainability, but an increasing number of people that work here are commuting, and so it just seems contrary to sustainable values. We don't wanna be just a bedroom community, but do we have enough emphasis on job growth in town? We can build subdivisions, we can build student housing, but to get balance, I really think we need some of that non-government job growth to help give us a more balanced portfolio. I worry a bit about our policies. I tend to think sometimes we have faith-based affordable housing, that if we have radical policies that say, bring 35, 45% affordable rental or single family, we can take a lot of pride in passing those, but I think the proof in a policy is what is your outcome? And if you got a great policy, we can all celebrate, but you don't get the outcomes of units, I think it's a conflict we have to reconcile, and so maybe a policy in search of the perfect may be preventing just some incremental growth in affordable units. So I'll stop there, I would like to talk about Aggie Village a little bit later. Great, thanks very much, Eric. I'd like to talk a little bit about those 16 units. Oregon, and brought them in on a truck, similar to the way David said from Idaho, it's just cheaper to build an Oregon. The materials are there, the labor's cheaper, they brought them into Davis, dropped them off, and the carpenters in Davis assembled the walls like a modular project, that saved a lot of money. It made the construction costs more affordable, so I think that's a possibility for the future. One way to keep costs down or to provide affordability is through larger size, so if your project is larger, you're able to provide more affordable housing. When Davis adopted the growth ordinance, I think it took away expansion on our borders and focused on infill, and infill just by nature is more expensive. It's hard to provide more affordable housing when you do infill. Let's talk about downtown, for example. Downtown is totally built out, we'd love to provide a variety of new housing down there, we'd love to provide affordable housing down there, but housing, when you're redeveloping, when there's a complicated process involved, we all saw the complicated process that Trackside Center went through this year. They've been working on that for almost four years. That just raises costs and it prohibits affordable housing. One way that our next generation can hopefully stay in town are our college grads or our high school grads that wanna stay in Davis is mom and dad can hopefully lend them some money or an aunt and uncle, a grandma and grandpa can lend them their first $50,000 or whatever it takes to get them in the door because California is so expensive at this point that kind of gone are the days of moving into your dream house the minute you get married when you're 30 or 28 years old. But if you can get your foot in the door, the way you were describing, get your foot in the door and buy that fixer upper and live there for five years and fix it up and then sell it and hopefully buy something a little nicer and then eventually when you're older, you can finally have the home of your dreams. It's complicated, it's different than it was for my parents and their generation. I'm 45, I was one of the last people I think that was able to buy a home that was semi-affordable in town. I bought my first home in 2000 and it was a reasonable price and soon after that the value of homes took off in town. Let's end with that. Great. No, thanks very much. There's all excellent opening comments by each of the panelists. We'll start from side to side, Q and A. Judy Corbett's got the mic there and we've got the first question for any or multiple of the panelists. Good evening, David, thank you very much. Appreciate the work Turner Sooner's done over the years. Darrell Rutherford, I'm Executive Director of Sacramento Housing Alliance. I'm also a city planning commissioner. I'm really interested on your take here. We're in the midst of getting a report back from some consultants soon to revise our current affordable housing ordinance. Last night council took some steps into an interim revision that will sunset at the end of the year. But given that we have a lot of challenges here in town and as far as developing and having a land that's developable, our current ordinance, land dedications there, in lieu fees are there and we're really grappling with how do we deal with building inclusive communities? We don't have a lot of space to grow, so how are we gonna build and make sure that everybody has an affordable home to live in? Recently, this year, everybody knows that the Trump administration signed into the law the new tax bill. It was a huge tax break for our corporate entities. Over the last 30 some odd years, the best piece of what we've had to build affordable housing is low income housing tax credit. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the implications of this new tax law, how it's going to affect communities as far as being able to finance projects on land dedication or even utilizing the in lieu fees that are accumulated and just kind of expand on that and kind of help everybody understand what some of those challenges are gonna be. Yeah, those are, it's a very good question and there are some very important implications from the tax bill that I'll get into to your first question about inclusionary zoning. I'm generally a believer that you can have inclusionary zoning, but it has to be thoughtful and how it's applied. So, to the point made earlier, you can have it as high as you want but at some point the trade off is gonna be so great that you are not gonna get any affordable units. So, there really needs to be an understanding of what is that threshold? What can we create as far as a policy that doesn't hinder the development of units overall but does provide some level of affordability? So, I'm not up to speed necessarily on the inclusionary ordinances in Davis. What I have seen is the cities that do this effectively, they do take the time to understand what is this gonna have, what kind of impact this is gonna have on the supply of housing and the pipeline of housing. So, it is not an arbitrary number, it is what is feasible and what's going to keep supply coming. So, to the point of the tax bill, it's not as bad as it could have been as crazy as that sounds. There was talk for a long time of eliminating a really key component of low income housing tax credits and that's the 4% private activity bonds which funds the majority of affordable housing in California that ended up not being eliminated. But to your point, the fact that the corporate tax rate is now much lower, there is less incentive for companies to buy these affordable housing tax credits. So, right then you have lost a ton of equity and now I forget the number but the New York Times just had an article saying that we're gonna lose 200,000 units a year, something similar to that because of the loss of equity, because of the tax bill. So, that's a significant problem facing an already difficult type of housing. And thankfully in California, I think the legislatures understand the need that you need that subsidy or that programming to provide that affordable housing. So, unfortunately, some of the revenue that is going to be coming from the legislation past, last year is gonna have to now be used to backfill the loss in equity and tax credits. Moving forward, I think, and I mentioned this in my presentation, the return of redevelopment agencies is probably something you're gonna see in the next few years. Every major gubernatorial candidate has said that they would favor bringing back redevelopment agencies and that could be a tool that can help fill that gap. But as far as kind of fixing and expanding or doing anything at the federal level, you know, there's just not that much hope at the moment, you know, but I think we're fortunate in California that we do have leaders that understand the need to create that revenue stream to help actually build affordable housing. Maybe I can credit to the elected people. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So I think the role of marker rate developers as far as the creation of affordable housing is gonna be very key. But again, it also goes to if you're going to require a developer or hope that a developer has on-site affordability or they paying in a louffee, what are the incentives that allows that to work? So I laid out a couple ideas and I don't think any one particular one is a silver bullet, but they all kind of add up, would be an expansion of the welfare property tax exemption and would be a revision of the density bonus law that that could help too. So again, none of those are foolproof, but I think having a good inclusionary ordinance that does not kill projects altogether could help create that supply of affordable housing or at least some of it. Great, thank you. We've got next questions over, I think on this side. Judy, just got that. Hi, being that you're talking about market rate housing, this raises a really important question. The private industry has only been coming forward with four and five bedroom apartment complexes that are specifically for students. Right now what we have in the pipeline like is almost 5,000 of these beds that are specifically for students with, again, four or five bedroom suites with the locks per bedrooms, bathrooms per bedroom, and so it's luxury housing. So the issue is what about people who are not students that need housing as well, the workforce and our families? So why is the city not supporting more one, two and three bedroom apartments is what our concern is here in this city? Because the biggest impact here in the city is that the university, UC Davis, is not providing enough on-campus housing. They have 5,300 acres and yet they have not provided nearly enough on-campus housing as they promised to over the last three decades. So I mean, what are the solutions here? Susan, the question is to you, I really appreciate your journey and what you've been through. And I hope that you agree that the university needs to provide a lot more on-campus housing because that's the only solution to providing more off-campus housing. Do you have any comments to that? I mean, I do have to say that I and my family, we absolutely benefited from that on-campus housing. In fact, when we found that Orchard Park was gonna close, we went and tried to live in West Village and we couldn't, mainly because they rented by the room and we just couldn't afford it. There weren't a lot of options for us. I mean, all I can say is that that community meant the world to us and I joke that it was a really small quarters but knowing the international families there, we didn't need a lot and we weren't asking for a lot and I thought when we were looking to redevelop it, they were offering amenities that were beyond what students and student families needed or wanted and so, yeah, absolutely. I would definitely agree that student more housing on campus. I also did benefit from living at the colleges and that was a great experience to as an undergrad as well. Yeah, did I answer your question? Go right ahead. Hi, my name is Jake Sedgely. I'm an ASUCD senator here at UC Davis. A lot of students come up to me all the time about housing in Davis. Tonight I've heard a lot about long-term solutions and I had kind of more questions like, what do you suggest for more short-term solutions? Because some students can't even afford to eat. Many are sleeping in cars, sleeping in living rooms. It's not an uncommon occurrence here at UC Davis. So what do you suggest the city of Davis do? The UC Davis administration and ASUCD in terms of short-term solutions. Sure, that's an excellent question. So, probably the best solution was to have built a lot of housing 20 years ago. I don't mean that to be flippant, but that is kind of the sad reality and building housing does take time and there is no overnight solution and it affects a lot of the university campuses across the state. This is not necessarily UC Davis issue. At UC Berkeley, students are guaranteed a year and that's it, they're on their own. So Berkeley is starting to become a commuter campus because of the rents around there, much like here, are just unsustainable for those individuals. On the short-term side, I would say something that can be done quicker than traditional development would be the prioritization of things like accessory dwelling units or junior accessory dwelling units where individuals can create housing or units on their own property to house students or to house family members. So those are units that can be built fairly quickly. The Turner Center has actually looked extensively at accessory dwelling units and they're overall cheaper to build and they're quicker to build than traditional housing units. And I believe that, and everyone here knows more about this than I do, but I think the housing stock in Davis actually lends itself quite well to accessory dwelling units, so from detached garages to extra lot-sized spaces that could go a long way towards providing supply relatively quickly to house students or other members of the community that are having difficulty finding affordable housing. So it's not obviously a solution that's going to help tomorrow, but it is something I think in the relatively short-term is something that could be pursued. And the other thing is it's really grassroots too. That's driven by property owners, people who want to provide housing for someone, people who need a little bit of extra revenue to, or cash flow to pay for their mortgage or to house a family member. So to me, accessory dwelling units represents a really unique opportunity for California to create low-impact housing in areas that already exist. It doesn't take, doesn't go over farmland. It doesn't create structures that are out of character with the surrounding community. So I would say, I would point to that as a solution that could be implemented relatively quickly. Look, can I ask a question? Yes, sure. Since I have the microphone. Go ahead, June. I have space on my property to do an accessory dwelling unit. I don't have any time. I don't even know how to begin the process. Is there some way that we can make it easy for people like me to move ahead? Absolutely. So action to add into David's comments. Actually, it's been probably about four years ago at this point, the city planning commission at the time and then city council at the time. We passed a streamlining ordinance for ADUs for accessory dwelling units. So actually we really, really simplified the process for and it made a lot of them much more ministerial in nature as opposed to having to do the planning commission and then in sometimes even having to be approved at the council level. And so there's certainly I think probably more we could be doing in terms of publicity and sort of making sure that that is more widely known. It is a really good type of housing to be added to the stock. In actually interestingly, one other quick point, it's down in Santa Cruz. This is a number of years ago now, but Santa Cruz did a, we didn't quite get this far as the city of Santa Cruz, but Santa Cruz did a sort of initiated program where they had essentially eight different granny flats or ADUs that were pre-approved plans. So you could literally go into the planning department and say, I want a granny flat and they'd say, great, come on in, take a look, see which one you want, the blueprints and the plans, and then sort of you were expedited through the process. The thing that was even most amazing about this is that Santa Cruz at the time, I don't know if it was before the Great Recession, so I'm not sure if it's still in the, this next piece is in effect, but they actually partnered, the city partnered with the Santa Cruz Community Credit Union to do the financing as well. So you could go to the planning department in the city of Santa Cruz, pick out which granny flat you want and then go down the road to the credit union and they had the financing options available as well for that. So that's something that I think we could be doing more of certainly in Davis, both the city's streamlining side, but also then engaging with our local financial institutions to the same type of program. I have to add that we've been, I guess I inadvertently did not realize that we better brand it, my husband and I, the home we just put a down payment on, we're benefiting from that. And what made living in Davis affordable was that option of that ADU and knowing that we could have that and as we're building it, we knew that was the only way we could actually afford to live in the community we wanted to and I did not realize it was a thing. I just realized we were doing it to make ends meet, but so thank you. So just one more point along those lines, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Davis, their streamlining actually predated the state legislation. So yeah, so I think Davis has actually been kind of one of the leaders in trying to find solutions to increase ADUs. Kind of to the point of making it easier, I think you're going to see in the next year to some entrepreneurial people start to look at accessory dwelling units the way that kind of the solar industry has evolved where they'll go door to door and they'll say, would you like this product? We'll take care of all the permits for you, we'll build it because most people are not general contractors, they're not developers, they've never been to the permit center and it's a daunting task, it's a construction project. So I think in the very near future you're going to see organizations that are going to try and take that burden off of the homeowner and create streamlined opportunities where they do all the heavy lifting and maybe you just give a portion of that rent and that pays for their services or something like that. So that's coming, I think sooner than we realize. And I just have to add too, is my husband and I did the math and the ADU with Davis Friends pays itself off in a year to year and a half. It was, yeah, it was pretty fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, ribbon. I wanted to go ahead and hear Mr. Meyer talk about Aggie Villa, but also answer my questions about the development. Why can't the university achieve that level of density in their new detached lots in West Village? And more about the decisions that were involved in Aggie Villa. How did the university come to housing paid employees on campus when their students are asking for housing on campus? So Aggie Villa, just so people know where that is, that is the project that's been up for I don't know, a couple of decades now probably that's right across First Street. So nestled in between the market formerly known as Whole Foods. Sorry, so Aggie Village is the project just between the freeway and First Street. So it's a mix of townhouses and single family homes and the university calls them grad flats instead of granny flats. So that's the ADU. The interesting part about that product was the university was increasingly concerned that they could not recruit faculty. So you could recruit from the center of the country but when you're, you could recruit from the coast where housing costs were high but trying to get someone from Texas or the middle of the country when you tell them, yeah, you have to sell your four acres and your 2,500 square foot house and the guest house and the trout pond and all that stuff. And they're gonna sell their house for 115 and you tell them that's the down payment here. The university was looking at challenges in recruitment. So that was the purpose of the project. It wasn't student-centric, it was faculty and to a certain degree staff-centric. But the interesting part of that project where I think is a trick when I talked about, you can't just build product, you need sort of major intervention. The major intervention on that project is the university retains title to the land. So it's ground lease which allows them the ability to cap equity gains. So school district could do it, city could do it. I think you have to be a government entity to I think have those powers, but it is an interesting tool if you had a project that you could do a carve out of some lots that are ground leased and owned by a public entity that allows you to do that. So an example, not the townhouses, although the example is the same, but just the one example of the largest single family houses there which are 1,900 square feet with a grad flat sold originally for 224 back in the day. They would be allowed to sell now for about a little under 400,000. If a new faculty member comes in, market rate we would estimate 850. So almost a 50% discount over time. So originally they might have been 20% under market, but also they need to be priced below market because you're not gonna get the equity ride that you're gonna get. So we had a lot of residents petitioning the university to sort of lift that. That sort of was silenced when the last recession hit because it was sort of a protection from them. Their values didn't go down like everyone else. But I think that tool is an interesting thing to consider for the toolkit. The grad flat, the lesson that I think no one thought about, and they thought about, yeah, you can get a grad student or two in there, was the affordability for the faculty member because then they're getting rent that might buy down their mortgage by 40, 50% by the grad flat rent. That was the magic that we had never, I think the original project proponents had never thought of. So I have a one, two, three, four over here. Equal amounts on this side too. Okay, so we want to go with the first one over here. Hi, this is a question for Mr. Garcia. You had mentioned SB 831 that was potentially gonna be altering some of the maybe setback requirements for ADUs. I grew up in Davis. My fiance and I were in our early 30s, millennials. We are looking right now at building an ADU in my parents backyard. For example, it's taken a lot of effort to dive into the building codes. And so I just want a second to, I think the lady that over there that said, you know, oh, right behind me. Making it easier and more, you know, not having to go and read, I mean, obviously you have to read through the stuff, but having it be a little bit more digestible would be great. My question is, is that in Davis, my understanding is that it's a, and on our lot, we can't even build something within the last 20 feet of our lot, which if you look at our backyard, we have quite a big backyard, would mean that there would be a unit in the middle of the backyard completely making it unusable. So my question to you, Mr. Garcia, is with the, what is SB 831 potentially gonna do as far as setbacks? And the gentleman to your left, Mr. Meyer, you had mentioned something about that maybe not being great in some or some negative effects of relaxing, you know, those type of requirements. I'm wondering how do you deal with that issue? Particularly last point, because with the streamlined administrative use permit process, my understanding is that I have to notify all neighbors within 500 feet of our house, which in Davis, I'm not sure that I could get, you know, 20 neighbors to sign off on something like this, so. Yeah, thanks. David, David, what's that, just a minute. I'll just respond in part. So here's my card, email, phone number, cell phone number. We've got a couple of city staff here as well, so let's connect after this specifically so we can try and specifically address your exact issue in the neighborhood, because you know, it's, there has been streamlined and you know, there is some work involved certainly to it, but it's also, you know, I think it's, we can work on solving the issues for you, so. So should I do those four and then go over there? No, no, I think they wanna still have a response, yeah. Yeah, real quick. So 831 does a lot of things and it removes things like floor area ratios. It does remove requirements for setbacks, because you have had some cities that still will use these tools to make it very difficult to build ADUs. So, and I don't think that's necessarily the case here, but you do have some cities that still don't want them and they will use those requirements as a de facto ban on ADUs. So ADU, so 831 is going to eliminate the vast majority of those. It's also going to eliminate many of the fees that would be charged to an accessory dwelling unit permit. The administrative fees would still be paid by things like utility water hookups, things like that. Those would be eliminated as the bill stands right now. It is new, so it could be amended. So I'd keep my eye on that. I'm sorry, we built one 10 years ago. I love secondary units. We live in Old North, which is probably a neighborhood that has more per capita added in the last 10 years than most places in town. I give you great flexibility. My objection was just to the slide of the four-story, you know, 40-unit project that if approved can go. I just think there's nuance to those that a community like ours just needs to be sensitive to. The accessory units being the solution, I'm a little hesitant about because that's a lot of onesies to get to scale, to resolve this both moral and social issue we're talking about here. How do you house people with demands and how do you get a more diverse population in your housing stock? A lot of our housing stock, I mean, people are aging out, so how do you get turnover? How do you get kids in neighborhoods? How do you keep feeding that school district? Which is one of, frankly, the symptoms are success that drives prices. But I think, yeah, I love them, but I think we just need to have some caution that I don't think you solve the insatiable demand of that bar on the bottom of the one slide with onesies. Yeah, it is a solution, it is certainly not the solution. And it presents a major opportunity in a sort of category that mostly doesn't exist currently. Good evening. Just wanted to check on something. Were any university people invited to be part of the panel discussion tonight? You can ask Judy Corbett right there. The question is, were any university people invited to be part of the panel? Any people responsible for housing at the university asked to be part of the panel to be, so they could engage in the conversation because they are the elephant in the room. And to have, but let me finish. So then, what's the question I have is, David, as you've gone across the state, there are 10 UCs. Each city seems to try and negotiate with each UC independently. Lucas, I don't know if there's been any conversation with the other nine cities who I happen to know are facing very, very similar problems and challenges. And it may take a legislative response to get the universities to build what they have committed to build and also have a corollary policy that says, if you're going to invite students onto campus, you need to be sure that there's a certain amount of building that goes measured with your expected enrollments. So one, is any of that happening? And David, your question, have any communities successfully negotiated a relationship with any of the UCs that you've found have made an impact on some kind of fairer and balanced system? So real quick answer to that question is, I have not seen a good solution coming from any university on what the balance of responsibilities should be. I think that conversation needs to happen because there clearly are some serious issues. And again, not just facing students of UC Davis, but every single UC. I see it every day at Berkeley and the state schools as well. I mean, and they have even less leverage to build their own housing. So it's my understanding that there is legislation in the works to address the issue specifically of student housing. It's not clear exactly what form it'll take, but I have been told that this is something that's going to be forthcoming that will help address, I don't know if we'll solve it, but it does speak directly to that issue of making sure students of these universities are housed, not just UC, but also the CSU system as well. So yeah, and I'll just respond as well. I mean, yeah, we are engaged with, certainly conversations with UC Davis are the sister communities, the sister UC cities around the state, are we as engaged with San Francisco and Berkeley and Santa Cruz and San Diego and such, not as much as we probably could be. So that's a, I mean, there are certainly town and gown efforts for a lot of, not only the UC college towns, but also just college towns across California that also include private universities as well, like Palo Alto. But I would say that we, you know, two more recent examples of that where sort of the ante was ratcheted up were the, you know, the ultimately the settlements between the city of Berkeley and UC Berkeley as well as the city of Santa Cruz and UC Santa Cruz. And it was, you know, the sort of last resort for both of these other communities when they were redoing their long range development plans, the both cities ended up suing or citizens group, you know, citizens group, excuse me, end up suing the universities and basically bringing them to the table and there were mediated settlements from, you know, the sort of the updated long range development plans of both UC Santa Cruz and Cal. And so that is, you know, we have not reached, we have not officially reached that point in this community. I think we've been working, putting pressure on the University UC Davis about, you know, taking on additional growth on campus. They just recently re-released their updated numbers, you know, and don't get me wrong, talk is cheap, okay? I mean, over the years, you know, these UC Davis has said they're gonna take on a lot of new housing and it's not ever exactly lived up to the percentages and the numbers that they've said, but we have a new chancellor, Chancellor May has indicated, you know, recently released, you know, documentation that they are going to take on more housing than they have ever before. Is it enough? I'm not sure. We're, but you know, we're in that process of a good faith effort with UC Davis to try to get through, you know, sort of move to the next steps and make, we're seeing progress right now. Orchard Park has just been, you know, after several years of being vacant has been torn down. They're in the process of building, they were, the plans were to rebuild from a two story to a three story. It's looking now more like it's gonna be five stories. So that I think is potentially progress in terms of density and such, but is it enough? I'm not sure. You know, I think the answer is probably no. So we have a lot of next steps with them. There's no question. Yeah. Question? Yeah. And that's a great suggestion. I would say one really explicit point and I think John Meyer certainly could speak to it better than anybody. University of California is a, you know, is governed, is a constitutionally sovereign entity in the state of California, okay? I mean, it just, you know, I mean, the legislature certainly controls the purse strings, understood. But there are provisions in the state constitution which prevent sort of just a you shall do this University of California. And if I'm mistaken, please let me know Mr. Meyer or any other members of the audience. So it's not just as easy as, you know, the nine or 10 UC communities banding together and saying UC, you shall do this. It's just not as simple as that. So, and I'm not suggesting you're saying it's simple. Yeah, understood. Okay. Yeah. So, okay. So a couple of things. First of all, I did say that settlement worked. So, but I also, we are, we are, you know, trying to have a good faith effort with the university. I mean, in dialogue and negotiations on this, they have, you know, responded to the pressure that the city has put, the city and the county and a number at ASUCD and others have been, you know, the administration has responded, been responding, at least, you know, on paper and such, you know, obviously I said it already, talk is cheap. You've got to see action now, right? And so we are starting to see some amount of increased density of campus housing. Again, is it enough? I'm not sure. Are we, are we sort of done with the conversation? No, absolutely not. But it's, you know, I think that we're, you know, I personally am not opposed to going in the direction if there's, if we ultimately need to, you know, get to where we have to have a sort of a settlement agreement with them, right? To sort of be binding. But I think there's a long way, you know, to go before we just go the legal route. That's my own personal opinion. I don't know how the, my other four colleagues feel about it. Okay, hi. Two cents on that? I'm sorry. So two cents on that. So I've sat on both sides of the street, right? City, university. You know, in saying it's complicated is not a fair response. I mean, it's a totally fair issue and it's in every college town across the country, not just in the state, right? So I've given presentations of Boulder and Chapel Hill and shown slides of couches on the street and red cups and, you know, college towns have a certain character and those same pressures and everyone has the neighborhood where the couches are out and things are trashed a little bit and every, you know, I was the kid on Chestnut that was playing ping pong at two in the morning, you know, and couldn't wonder why the neighbor's called, right? So, you know, we've sort of all been there a little bit, but it is a totally fair issue. I think the campus, you know, does need to provide more, but it is under constraints that are just otherworldly in terms of the cost model. So, you know, there was a plan originally to have, you know, an expansion of Aggie Village in West Village for faculty and staff. The recession hit one, but then state standards are put on for, you know, prevailing wage requirements and other things to treat it as a commercial lab building when that's not how single family housing is done. So, if you want affordable, you're not going to deliver it that way. I also think we just need to be a little thoughtful and just do the analysis. I'm not pretending I know the answer, but to the extent how much of the student housing do you want to be on campus? Because I'll tell you, it's not generating any revenue for the city. So, I think there's some balance there and, you know, maybe appropriate locations, but I just think that should be tested a little bit. So, yes, the campus, you know, should provide more because it's also interesting that there's this insatiable appetite for college applicants too. I mean, you would have thought with tuition rise and all those economic pressures that applications would dip, every system is hitting record applications. So, there's also, I talked about, we have some value conflicts. There are also some goal conflicts in some of this too of how do you rapidly provide education to California's high school graduates and, you know, how do you do that in time to provide all the housing? So, it's, yeah, it is a totally fair issue to tackle. I just think there needs to be a little analysis on. Sure, I, yeah, thank you, appreciate that. And actually just so the comment was just about the previous forums have been much more of about an exchange of ideas as opposed to just a political debate about, you know, whether more or less or, you know, too much, too little. And so just the comment was about, can we get back to just the sort of exchange of ideas? I appreciate the comment. Todd, one sec, it's 8.45, so I wanna just do a time check with Judy Corbett, who is the, you know, pent ultimate decider. What time are we going to? And, you know, and so just wanna decide and it's probably, we're getting close to being done, I assume, so people of course can go as they need to, but just want to check and see if you have a sense of. Nine o'clock, okay. Okay, nine o'clock, great, so go right ahead. Okay, hi, I do have some ideas, hopefully. My name's Todd Edelman, I'm a member of the Bicycle. And I apologize for interrupting, we're hoping for a question, a question, as opposed to just, but you could, if you just wanted to have a list of ideas, that's fine too. It can be a good question. Okay, look, I promise. Okay, great, so I'm a member of the Bicycle Transportation and Street Safety Commission here in the city of Davis. And I think my question's mostly for you, Lucas, as a board member of CACOG and also of the Capital Corridor Joint Powers Authority. And also, I think also for David, whoever else can answer it. Kind of start with a little briefly, Northern California history, back in the 1980s, as I understand it, when the so-called Manhattanization of San Francisco downtown was happening, representative of some Berkeley were going to city council meetings in San Francisco, saying, please, please, please, this is gonna really put so much pressure on housing in Berkeley. Can you stop it? I think like city officials were just kind of going across the bay and speaking kind of as a citizens at these meetings. More recently, of course, the machinations, jobs and things created by the tech barons, for lack of a better term, in the South Bay, in the Silicon Valley area, of course, have displaced people from San Francisco to Stockton. And then on the regional level, we have organizations like CACOG, ABAG, and MTC in the Bay Area, and so on. And even organizations that overlap due to two different areas where there's regional transport, regional governments, like, for example, Yolo Solano Air Quality Management District. There is, of course, we all talk kind of informally about this place called the Northern California Mega Region. So I'm wondering if there's been discussion either at kind of a think tank level or any other place about forming this actually into a real new political entity, like I would kind of describe it as a super counter and super county entity with a face, with a person who's accountable for things like this. So who could possibly be the person responsible for saying, oh, we can't build the housing, the job's here because it's gonna affect the housing in Stockton or whatever. And, or if you think something like that, if there actually hasn't been discussion, if something like that you think would be effective to actually have a more really regional wide formalization of the mega region that will be a benefit of everybody. Sure, okay, thank you, I'm happy to answer that. So a couple of things. A new term has sort of surfaced in the past couple of years called the Northern California Mega Region and it's basically the San Francisco Bay Area as well as the Sacramento Metropolitan Area. And sort of between the two, it's about nine million people. And it's also includes San Joaquin. The three sort of Council of Governments, so the one primary one from the Bay Area, which in this case MTC, it's Print Transportation Agency as well as SACOG, Sacramento Area Council of Governance as well as the San Joaquin Council of Government. Have all been meeting regionally for the past probably two years at this point, but it's a pretty new sort of new arrangement. There's no specific face to the sort of entity yet. Really it's just trying to figure out how to partner, better partner especially in terms of planning, transportation needs, the ACE train, the Capital Corridor train, the San Joaquin trains, things like that. So we're seeing a lot more of that. It's certainly the future as for us as a sort of regional, not just the Sacramento region or not just the Bay Area, but sort of working together much more collaboratively. The Capital Corridor is a perfect example of that, where you have a 170 mile train, passenger train line, intercity rail line that has members of the board all the way from Placer County down to Santa Clara County. And so you're gonna start to see more and more of that. So I'll leave it at that for now, but there's a lot more to be desired. And I think we're gonna see a lot more collaboration across the sort of mega region. So just to add on to that, so to your question really is, can there be a big kind of regional governance that kind of helps dictate at least from a... So this is kind of a big goal in the kind of the urban planning world is having kind of a regional governance to the scale that you're referring to. I don't know how feasible that is because we already have several MPOs as the councilman said that are communicating together, whether or not that's as effective as it needs to be. I'm not sure. I will say there are examples from other states where they do have kind of oversight to ensure that cities are doing what they're supposed to do. So to your point about the citizens of Berkeley lobbying against San Francisco because they don't want to affect their own communities. There has been several examples. So we put out a paper, a Turner Center on Massachusetts 40B which is their governance board that ensures that if something is built or is proposed to be built in a city of Massachusetts, but is denied on grounds that are outside of it being consistent with original plans, they can appeal to this board and have that overturned. So it's a way to hold all these cities accountable and make sure everyone's building their fair share of housing so you don't have a couple of cities that are getting away with not building anything or denying projects that are consistent with all of their goals and policies. So that's just one example and I refer you to our website to kind of look at what we put together for Massachusetts 40B because there has been some discussions of whether or not something like that makes sense in California. But you also, to one of the slides I had in my presentation, you have seen some legislation that tried to get at the same goal of holding cities accountable through the strengthening of the Housing Accountability Act and I think you will have a lot fewer cities that are recalcitrant on approving projects that are otherwise consistent with their stated goals and policies. I have a couple of quick questions. One is in response or a question that this gentleman from ASUCD brought up and he had to leave but I'm wondering why the response or the solution to the housing crisis always has to be build more. We have a really large senior population in our communities as many communities do and those people have, you know, there are one or two people in huge houses that could use renters to help them around the house or to pay extra money and stuff like that. Rather than building an ADU, why don't we look at solutions outside of building and look internally? So that's one of my questions and you can respond to it after. And then the other one is has the Turner Center done anything as far as assessing the changing desires of homeowners for sizes and styles of housing? I know, you know, Susan I think was talking about how the 590 square foot housing for her five member family was the best housing experience she's ever had and I think that just like Zipcars and Uber and other Lyft have brought a change in transportation, I really believe that millennials will be desiring different things. So if you can kind of respond back to that as well. Yeah, absolutely and that's a very good point is making the most efficient use of the resources that we already have and I can't recall the name of the company but there is actually some startups out there that are trying to connect homeowners that have excess room in their home to students or young professionals who need housing. So to help so much in the same way that though if I'm not using my car right now to go to work, I can use it to give someone a ride and make a little bit of revenue. There has been some movement on that front with regards to housing. So I completely agree with you there. If we've done some work on the average number of individuals in households and it's gone way down but the sizes of those houses hasn't gone down. So we still have that excess capacity. So that's kind of where something called junior accessory dwelling units can be leveraged. So that's basically you're not building anything new on the property. You are making a portion of your house another unit. So rather than building a whole new accessory dwelling unit it's a ability to create housing within your own house within the building envelope. So that's absolutely right. We do need to make more efficient use of the resources we have and what are the incentives to get people to do that. But I will say I don't think that is going to be enough. I mean if you, going back to that chart, I mean we haven't been keeping up with housing for 30 years. So on some level supply does need to increase and especially because we keep adding jobs, we're not stagnant in California. We continue to grow in that respect. So in addition to creating more efficiencies with the resources in the housing we already have at some level we do need to build more housing as well. I had one brief comment on yours too. I can't think of communities that are more ripe for intergenerational housing approaches than a college town because we have a demographic barbell, right? We've got this huge side of 18 to 25 and the rest of the population that arrived in the 70s is aging out. So I mean it's really interesting to look at that especially in a college town I think. Good evening, David Thompson with Neighborhood Partners. We probably have built more affordable housing in Yolo County than anybody else and it's not easy. Last night in these council chambers I believe that one of the top affordable housing policies of the state was dropped. Is that correct? Didn't we stop doing it last night? No. Sorry? 80% or about 15%? Yeah, yeah there was a big drop. Well it's all, and yeah, what we had worked and what we had was taken away last night. One of the people who was willing to come to the city of Davis and do housing was willing to give one of our organizations a non-profit $2.1 million in Luffy's to meet the 35% requirement and that has now gone away. That will not be happening under what happened. We have Cesar Chavez Plaza which is 52 units, mainly for workforce housing and for people with disabilities, various disabilities. It is regarded by social services as the Cadillac in Yolo County. Everybody that has some relative or has some problems is on the waiting list. We have 284 people on the waiting list. We only have four turnovers a year and yet last night Nishi was approved and not one of the people on the waiting list at Cesar Chavez Plaza is gonna be able to live at Nishi. They're not eligible to live at Nishi and there's no unit affordable to them at Nishi and there was not $1 in what was passed in Luffy's to go towards housing money to help that 280, sorry, that 384 people that are on there. I really truly wish and ask the council to revoke what you did last night and let us have a community conversation about what is possible and what can be done because that really was one of the biggest shames of my life in Davis last night. Hi, not as dramatic as that. But I'm wondering it seems to me there's not enough housing in the whole of Northern California basically in the center. And why isn't there more instead of single family households more emphasis on multifamily? I'm not sure of that area that was the school district. Is that all single family homes? And why isn't it multifamily homes? It seems like it seems like a... I can tell you for personal experience. I can tell you why too. I'm multifamily for sale properties. You're talking about homeowners associations and all kinds of things that... I see, okay. Builders get very nervous about it. The neighbors around the Grande school site. Yeah. The three different neighborhood associations didn't want any multifamily there. I see. The one single family only and pretty low density and I understand that. I can see that rationale, but the council then approved, the then council approved approximately 45 houses there on that eight acre parcel due to those reasons. They were being responsive to the neighbors' concerns. Yeah, I see. Yeah, I think it was a shame. One last addition is I think the drought problem is gonna complicate things because water in the central valley is gonna be, if you don't have water, you can't build housing. Okay, so we're at basically nine o'clock. Maybe I'm one minute shy. Oh, we gotta get one more political statement in. David, I wonder if you know how widespread the practice of developers building units that lease by the bed with a very high rent. How widespread is that? That is happening frequently in our town. I do not have an insight into that. So one thing I would say to that point is that's 5,000 beds that aren't gonna take up existing housing in Davis, right? That aren't gonna what? That aren't gonna take up other existing units in Davis. So when we talk about these student units, I think we need to be cognizant of the impact it's going to have on the overall supply. So if you have 5,000 beds, and I don't know what the real number is or for whatever particular project, those are students that now don't have to commute in from Woodland or don't have to commute in from Sacramento. And that has an effect on the existing supply of housing. So I don't have a sense of what the dynamics are for the student housing per se, but as a general rule, I would think that more student housing would be good. I don't know if it comes at the expense of other types of housing. I don't think it's affordable. I think it's a rent-gouging scheme. And students need housing, but so do families, so do employees that work in the city. And these projects are for students only, primarily. I'll just add a comment. One of the reasons I invited Susan here tonight, and I just to put you on the spot, is that I wanted people to see the face of who students are and what their challenges are too. It's not just the 18-year-old going off to college, partying and drinking and carrying on. They're also married with families. So as we're considering some of these projects in our community that are student housing, maybe what we should be thinking about is the profile of those students. Maybe it's not all just for single, young, 18, 19-year-olds. Maybe it's also in consideration of families. I mean, it's clear that we need student housing. It's clear, but we don't really think about who are those people. What are their challenges? And that's why I had Susan here. She's like the perfect profile, if you will, for us to understand better. And maybe what we do is we look at not just across the board one type of student housing, which the university is looking at different types of student housing too. I mean, they've got married student housing, and anyways. So great, thank you. Any last final comments from panelists? Appreciate all of the participation. If folks are willing to give a round of applause to our panelists, that'd be great. That's very much.