We are Facing Two Paralell
& Related Crises:

#1 The Climate Crisis

Climate Change is real and demands action.

As individual citizens, two things drive the vast majority of our personal carbon footprint:

  1. How we live

  2. How we get to work

Single family houses are exposed on all sides to the environment and require twice the energy to heat and cool. Yards with lawns mean they consume twice the amount of water as well.

Single family homes are also designed to be accesed by cars, and building our cities out of single family housing means that every time you do anything outside your home, you have to get into an automobile.

The low density aspect of single family housing also spreads everything in our community out over large distances, even further making the automobile a necessary aspect of everything we do every day.

By contrast, citizens living in more urban settings often have only a fraction of the carbon footprint of their suburban peers. Their homes are more efficient because of shared walls, and higher density neighborhoods make transit more effective

The housing we build and where we build it, is the biggest driver of our personal impact on our climate. We cannot afford to be building the same way we did in the 1950’s.

#2 The Housing Crisis

The housing crisis is something that is being felt state-wide, but is especially bad in Davis.

Davis voters have long sought to avoid Davis turning into yet another example of urban sprawl, but their opposition to sprawl has effectively curtailed city expansion for decades to the extent where according to census and campus transit surveys, we now have over 23,000 local workers, university staff and students commuting into town every day

This shortage has driven up prices to the point where Davis’ real estate market is 40% more than the neighboring cities of Dixon and Woodland, and low-quality level homes are going for almost a million dollars and put home ownership outside of reality for all but the most wealthy among us.

Davis needs to produce our fair share of housing for our local economy, but that doesnt mean we need to give in to urban sprawl either!

Unfortunatley, developers most want to build the kind of housing that will make them the most money: Single family housing.

In Davis, single family housing in any form is not going to be affordable to the working class adults and young families we most need to house - so we need to start thinking very differently and coming up with solutions for how we can manage to build what is called “missing middle” housing: Townhomes, Condos, Co-Ops and apartments. Those are the kinds of homes that are affordable by nature and are most needed