Consultant outlines Davis general‑plan update; commission presses on housing density and environmental‑justice screening

Consultants and city staff briefed the commission on the city’s general‑plan update, describing outreach to date, demographic and housing analyses, and environmental‑justice screening required under state law. Dara Dunbar, principal planner, introduced the item as a continuation of spring workshops and asked commissioners for input on the project vision and outcomes.

Eric Ericovich, the city’s consultant, said the update is finishing the listening phase and will move next to land‑use and mobility concepts. He pointed commissioners to the project website, davisgeneralplan.com, where technical reports and summaries are posted. Eric said the team held a community workshop with roughly 175 attendees, launched a survey that just closed and provided ‘meeting‑in‑a‑box’ toolkits used by neighborhood groups.

Why it matters: Davis faces constrained land supply and growing housing demand. Eric told commissioners the city identified sites to accommodate roughly 2,000 additional units for the current housing‑element cycle and that general‑plan work needs to look multiple cycles ahead to anticipate longer‑term housing needs. He noted UC Davis has capacity in its long‑range development plan but the university’s timing for delivering on‑campus housing is uncertain.

Key findings and numbers: The consultant said the city has grown about 44% since 1990 but slipped about 1% in the last 3–5 years. UC Davis accounts for about 48,000 students, faculty and staff, of whom roughly 23,000 live within the city. The team reported that roughly two‑thirds of city land is devoted to housing, about 50–55% of housing area is lower‑density single‑family and about 57% of dwellings are renter‑occupied. Vacant land is small—about 1%—and the city’s land‑use tables show built‑out figures near the high‑90s percentile depending on accounting for rights‑of‑way.

Environmental justice and SB 1000: The consultant reviewed the screening approach required by SB 1000, including use of CalEnviroScreen and a separate income/pollution overlay. He said the screening did not flag city tracts as extremely high across all measures but identified pockets—particularly in south Davis and peripheral census tracts—with higher relative exposure to pesticide use, impaired water bodies (including the Willow Slough Bypass and Putah Creek), landfill buffers and other pollutant‑related burdens. The environmental‑justice technical report and a public summary were described as forthcoming.

Commission questions and staff responses: Commissioners focused on how climate‑related harms (heat‑island effects) will factor into environmental‑justice analysis; the consultant said climate and hazard mitigation will be addressed through the safety element and cross‑cutting policies, but that available temperature datasets often lack microscale resolution. Commissioners also asked how major pending projects (Village Farms, Willow Grove and others) will be treated; the consultant said the general plan provides a framework to evaluate such projects collectively and that only approved or voter‑approved projects can be included in site inventories for state housing purposes.

Policy discussion: Commissioners debated levers to meet projected housing needs in a largely built‑out city. Options discussed included citywide increases in allowable density or targeted upzoning, encouraging vertical mixed‑use in specific areas, reviewing development standards (allowed heights, densities and development‑standard changes), and using minimum‑density overlays or other regulatory tools where appropriate. The consultant cautioned that financial feasibility is central: many higher‑density prototypes are currently marginal or infeasible under present market and construction costs, and feasibility testing is part of the next analytic phase.

What’s next: Staff and the consultant will publish the environmental‑justice report and a public‑facing summary of technical reports; the team expects to return in the spring/early summer with land‑use and mobility concepts for further commission and public review. The commission requested further analysis of growth projections, displacement risk, redevelopment opportunities (shopping centers and large commercial nodes) and potential strategies to accelerate naturally affordable housing types such as ADUs.