Some Honest Thoughts on Measure V — Including the One Nobody’s Making

There are two flyers in your mailbox right now and they’re both lying to you a little.

The glossy one says Village Farms is family housing, parks, and a rescued school district. The other says it’s Covell Village in a new dress — same developer, same floodplain, same landfill — and you already voted it down once. Both are partly true. Neither one is telling you the thing that actually matters if you own a home in Davis or are trying to buy one.

So let me do that.

First, the thing both sides agree on (and bury)

This is the same parcel as Covell Village, which Davis voters killed in 2005 with a 60% no. Same development family — the Whitcombe / North Davis Land Co. group. Same ~498 acres at Pole Line and Covell. Same old landfill next door, which still tested positive for PFAS in one monitoring well as recently as 2024.

The Yes side’s answer is a list of twelve things they say are different this time. Some are real — a permanent conservation easement on 47 acres of wetland, engineering to a 200-year flood standard instead of 100. Some aren’t changes at all — “all-electric with solar” is already required for new construction under the state Reach Code, so putting it on the brochure is like advertising that your new car comes with seatbelts. And at least one is a downgrade: they cut the commercial space way down, which means less mixed-use and more driving, not less.

Twelve differences, sure. How many are material? That’s the honest question, and reasonable people land in different places on it.

The North Davis I fell for — the Strengs’ mid-century homes, the Covell Park greenbelts John Whitcombe helped lay out in the ’60s — was built by these same families. I’ve lived here ten years, in the part of town they built. I’ve never met them, never talked to a soul on either side of this measure. I had both my kids at Sutter Davis and raised them on these streets. I went looking for a reason not to trust them and didn’t find one — no abandoned projects, no broken promises, just a sixty-year record of building the town the rest of us fell in love with. They are Davis. I trust them.

The argument nobody’s making: what this does to your house

Here’s where I part ways with the standard talking points, and I want to walk through it carefully because it cuts against what most pro-housing people will tell you.

The usual line is: new housing nearby doesn’t hurt your home value, sometimes it helps. That’s true — in Sacramento, in Austin, in any big elastic market where a few hundred new homes are a rounding error and the new parks and retail nudge values up.

Davis is not that market. Pull up our own dashboard:

• 95616 (central and west Davis) sits at an $877K median — down 5% year-over-year — after peaking at $895K in mid-2025.
• 95618 (east and south) is at $804K, off its $840K peak.
• The real tell: Davis runs $537 a square foot in 95616 and $499 in 95618, against a Sacramento metro average near $310. That’s roughly a 70% premium just to plant your family inside the city limits.

That premium isn’t magic — it’s scarcity, and our data shows exactly where it comes from. Davis has rejected seven of nine projects under Measure J in a generation, and the rate lock-in gripping the whole country grips here too: about half of all U.S. mortgages are now stuck below 4% (FHFA, end of 2025), a “golden handcuff” estimated to have kept roughly 1.7 million homes off the market nationwide since 2022 — so the people who’d normally list their homes stay put. Almost nothing comes up for sale. That artificial drought is what holds your equity up.

Now drop 1,800 brand-new, modern homes — the exact 3-bed-with-a-yard-near-a-park product buyers actually want — into a market this small and this starved. Basic substitution: why pay $850K for a 1985 house that needs a $150K remodel when you can buy new construction with the layout you want? You wouldn’t. The new stock doesn’t float in its own bubble; it competes for buyers with the aging mid-tier homes most current owners are sitting on — and our dashboard already shows Bay Area relocators chasing newer housing stock over in 95618. Village Farms would be 1,800 units of exactly that.

Now the caveat, because our own data cuts both ways. That same rate lock-in that strangles supply also cushions the downside: if almost no existing homes come to market to compete, new supply fills a vacuum more than it floods a glut. And UC Davis is a permanent demand floor — a record 41,239 students enrolled in fall 2024 (UC Davis), plus thousands of faculty and staff, mean someone always wants to live here, recession or not.

So the honest version isn’t “Village Farms will tank your home value.” It’s: values are already softening on rates alone, and 1,800 units of superior product puts real downward pressure on the resale stock most of us own — cushioned, but not erased, by Davis’s frozen supply and UCD demand.

That’s the flip side of the affordability coin, and it’s the trade-off nobody will say out loud: you cannot promise renters cheaper homes through new supply and promise homeowners their equity is untouched. Those are the same lever, pulled in opposite directions. Anyone selling you both is selling you something.

Who actually buys a home in Davis

Full disclosure before I go further: I rent. I want more housing in this town as badly as anyone reading this. So when I tell you this project might not be your answer, it’s not a homeowner protecting a nest egg — it’s a renter who ran the actual numbers. Here they are.

Most of Davis rents. The homeownership rate here is 43.5% — meaning the majority of the town does not own — and the median household income is about $90,045 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019–2023 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates). Now look at what it takes to buy.

A median home in central Davis (95616) runs $877K. Put the standard 20% down, finance the rest at today’s ~6.8%, and the mortgage alone is about $4,560 a month — that’s our dashboard’s own figure — before property taxes and insurance, which push the all-in past $5,400. To carry that the conventional way, lenders want household income somewhere around $220K–$240K. Reach for the $1M-plus tier — the Cannery, Bretton Woods, the upper end of what Village Farms would sell — and it’s closer to $250K–$270K.

Don’t take my word for the math — run it yourself:

And here’s the brutal part our affordability chart lays bare: even though prices flattened, the monthly cost to carry a median Davis home is up 58% since early 2022 — because the thing that moved was rates, not price. Affordability collapsed even as the sticker number stalled.

Here’s the gut-punch: Davis’s highest-earning age group — established professionals aged 45 to 64 — has a median household income of about $168,398 (Census ACS, 2019–2023 5-Year Estimates). That’s still short of conventionally buying the median house in their own town. The peak earners can’t afford the middle of the market. Let that sit.

So how does anyone do it? Two doors: (1) a down payment so large it papers over the income gap — which almost always means outside money: family help, inheritance, equity rolled from a home bought decades ago — or (2) all cash, which sidesteps the income question entirely.

And this isn’t a Davis conspiracy theory — it’s the national market, just concentrated here. All-cash buyers hit ~29% of U.S. sales in late 2025, up from 19% five years earlier — an all-time high — while the first-time-buyer share collapsed to a record-low 21%, with the typical first-timer now 40 years old (National Association of REALTORS®, 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers; Realtor.com). The market has split into two: people with equity or cash, and everyone else watching from the sidelines.

Here’s what I’ve actually seen, and what people tell me when the conversation turns honest. The folks I know who own homes in Davis didn’t mostly buy them the way you’d think. Some took over a house that was already in the family. One had parents who just bought it — cash. More than one UC Davis professor has told me, point-blank, that they’d never have gotten in without down-payment help from family. Business owners doing genuinely well have told me the same thing, usually mid-rant about this exact topic. And yes — there’s also real, independent wealth here, plenty of it. What I almost never see is the thing the brochures imagine: a regular family, on regular Davis income, buying a regular Davis house on their own. I’m still one of the ones on the outside of it, trying to be creative about how to stay in Davis. That’s not bitterness — it’s just the math from the last section, with faces on it, and it’s the open secret everybody in this town already knows.

The point isn’t to make you hopeless. It’s to be honest about who a project like Village Farms actually serves. If you need a ~$220K income or a suitcase of cash to buy here, then 1,800 homes starting in the $400Ks-and-up don’t magically fix that for the median Davis renter — and the genuinely affordable piece, the 360 subsidized units, is the part with no guarantee it ever gets built. That’s the affordability question stripped of the flyer.

And if buying is off the table, renting has split into two markets. A wave of new mega-complexes — built for students and young professionals — has flooded Davis with studios and one-bedrooms, so those rents have held flat or even fallen: roughly $1,600 for a studio, $1,900 for a one-bedroom. If you’re single, you’ve genuinely never had more (or nicer) options. Family-sized rentals are the opposite story — three-bedrooms run about $3,000–$3,250 and climbed roughly 20% in the past year (RentHop, RentCafe, 2026) — because almost nobody builds them. And here’s what the bedroom counts hide: most of the newer multi-bedroom units lease by the bed — each room its own lease with assigned roommates — so a “4-bedroom” is student housing four people share, not a home a family can rent as one household. The true whole-unit family pool is thinner than the listings make it look. The housing Davis has added isn’t for families. That gap is the single strongest argument in Village Farms’ favor. The catch: its guaranteed-affordable units are apartments, and its for-sale family homes start in the $400Ks — so whether this project closes the family gap or just adds more of what already sells is the question on your ballot.

Want the real numbers, not my summary of them? Our Davis Real Estate dashboard tracks median price, price per square foot vs. Sacramento, days on market, and the mortgage-rate squeeze across both ZIP codes — sourced from Zillow, Redfin, Yolo County MLS, and FRED, updated weekly. Go look at the actual market before you vote.

Steelman both sides

So where does that leave us

My honest scoreboard — opinion labeled as opinion, so you can disagree cleanly:

The real question on your ballot isn’t “do you like housing.” It’s: is this the housing, in this place, on these terms? Answer that one and you’ve got your vote.

A note from a dad in Davis — and questions for your kitchen table

I have kids in this town. They can’t vote on Measure V. Neither can the roughly 9,000 Davis kids under 18 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2019–2023 ACS — about 13.8% of the city) who will spend the next decade living inside whatever we decide on June 2 — the schools, the bike paths, the version of Davis this vote helps build.

They don’t get a ballot. They get the consequences. The least we can do is talk to them like the outcome is theirs — because it is.

You’ll notice none of these tell your kid what to believe — including what I believe, and I’ve made my view pretty clear everywhere else in this piece. That’s on purpose. The kitchen table isn’t where you manufacture a tiny copy of your own opinion. It’s where you raise someone who can look at a yard sign, ask what’s really behind it, hold two sides in their head at once, and decide for themselves. Teach them that, and Davis is going to be just fine — whichever way the vote goes.

So where do I land? Honestly — I don’t know. I rent. My lease is up next month, and I’m writing this with a heavy heart, because the question this whole thing forces me to ask is the one I can’t answer: can I afford to stay in the city where I had both my kids? Can any of us? No yard sign fixes that. It’s bigger than one vote, and it’s been coming on slow for years. This is just where we are.

So don’t take my word for any of it. Read the actual ballot arguments and the rebuttals before you fill in that bubble — they’re in your voter guide and at the Yolo County elections site. Sit with the hard question yourself. Then vote like the people who can’t are counting on you. Because they are.

— Brandon

MyDavis covers Davis straight — no developer money, no slate, no agenda but getting it right. If we got something wrong, tell us.