Why Do Democratic City Councils Plan Housing That Republicans Will Live In?

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Doug Paul Davis

As I confess, the title of this article is not mine. It was in fact donated to me, the name has been erased to protect the guilty. Many would be in fact, surprised to hear the source of this title, particularly people on the Davis City Council itself.

The title comes from a debate that stems from the county general plan update proposals and well beyond that. The notion has come down from the county that the city of Davis opposes such growth proposals because this is a rich, white, elitist town. While in a number of ways, that is arguably true, I have argued against this point repeatedly because I think the center of the motivation against growth has been concerns about not only protecting agricultural land and open space, but also procedural points that the city of Davis and not the county use have land use authority on the city edge.

Where this issue begins to gain resonance in terms of housing developments, is that as we look at proposed housing we see designs that are increasingly for less dense, large homes, on large lots. Even affordable housing requirements have a number of problems. There number of set-asides is fairly small. Those that are set aside end up being limited equity homes, which make it easy for an individual to buy a home but difficult for an individual to improve their lot in life and buy another home down the line. The alternative to the limited equity model has been basically the policy whereby a person would purchase a house for a given price and could sell it two years later at an at market level for a huge expenditure. Needless to say, that is not a sustainable policy and it results in a loss of affordable homes.

However, in between the true affordable limited equity home and the market price home is basically no man's land. If Davis wishes to produce more affordable housing to the average middle income person, this is the bridge they need to gulf. How do you produce the $300,000 to $400,000 home rather than the $150,000 or the $600,000 plus home?