BOARD: Infrastructure projects big on trustees’ agenda

From Page A1 service agreement of the School Facility Consultants' proposal for consulting services to prepare State School Facility Program eligibility and funding applications.

It’s also recommended the board approve the construction contract of California Singly Ply for the Multiple Site Roof Replacement Project at six DJUSD sites. These include Capital Operations, Da Vinci High School, North Davis Elementary, Davis High School, César Chávez Elementary and Emerson Junior High.

Following suit will be a presentation on Measure M Bond prioritization. Back on April 20, the board received an update from staff regarding Phase 2 on bond project prioritization. This presentation will feature discussion and is expected to finalize the prioritization of Phase 2 projects.

Further updates include the Local Control Accountability Plan (LCAP) development and the A-G Grant plan. The LCAP itself is the district’s commitment to locally developed programming and maintaining clear goals and processes. These LCAP updates come from the DJUSD Instructional Services Team to make the plan components accessible to the public as well as receive feedback for possible revisions.

Meanwhile, the DJUSD plans to increase A-G graduation rates through professional development and direct student services. The district has also hired consultants who will do comprehensive research on barriers to A-G completion to be completed in the 2022-23 school year.

Another update scheduled at the meeting regards the Visual Arts and Proposition 28 Program. Coinciding with that will be an update regarding the music program and Proposition 28. Originally presented during the board meeting on May 4, the item is being brought back for further discussion. The district maintains that staff is engaged with the community to gather feedback about programming and the use of Proposition 28 funding.

After that will be a public hearing of the declaration of need for highly qualified educators. This is an annual process that is guided by California Code of Regulations, Title 5, and requires all school districts that may need to use emergency permits that may be needed in the upcoming school year.

Shortly thereafter the public hearing will be the approval of the declaration of need for highly qualified educators.

Wrapping up the meeting will be the approval of the employment contract for the deputy superintendent of business services.

The meeting itself is scheduled to begin at 6:30 p.m. in the Community Chambers at 23 Russell Boulevard.

That Was Really

my goal.”

Consumer rights

With principal co-author Sen. Nancy Skinner, Dodd is writing a bill to stop junk fees. Dodd said consumers deserve to have the price they pay upfront. “If you’re staying at a resort, a destination fee, or your resort fee, all these different fees that are charged…I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been online, and I got a $25 or $30 product that ends up being, you know, $55.”

Reparations

Asked about his stand on reparations, Dodd said while a task force passed the recommendations to give each Black resident $1.2 million as compensation for slavery and other injustices, its passage created “even bigger expectations.” If this becomes law, it will cost California about $800 billion. “I mean, there’s just not enough money, and while I’m not going to say anything negative about the committee, they did their work, then gave a recommendation. We have lots of committees and give recommendations, and that’s that. I don’t think anything is going to happen in that regard.”

Thursday

n The Poetry Night Reading Series is excited to feature Lois P. Jones and William O’Daly at 7 p.m. Thursday on the roof of the John Natsoulas Gallery, 521 First0 St. in Davis. An open mic will follow the featured performers. Open mic performances will be limited to three minutes or two items, whichever is shorter. The open mic list typically fills by 6:50 p.m., so please arrive early if you would like to perform something during the 8 o’clock hour.

Friday

n The UC Davis Arboretum hosts a Folk Music Jam Session from noon to 1 p.m. Folk musicians can bring their acoustic instruments and play together informally during this jam session at Wyatt Deck (next to the redwood grove). Pull out your fiddles, guitars, mandolins, penny whistles, pipes, flutes, squeezeboxes (you name it) and join your fellow musicians for a little bluegrass, old-time, blues, Celtic, klezmer and world music over the lunch hour. All skill levels welcome and listeners are invited. Short-term parking is available in Visitor Lot 5 on Old Davis Road at Arboretum Drive. Hourly rates start at $1.75.

n The Davis Friends Meeting will show the movie, "The Most Dangerous Man in America."

The film is about the life of Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers to the public during the Vietnam War.

The free screening begins at 6:30 p.m. at the Friends Meeting House, 345 L St. in Davis.

Saturday

n The Davis High School Baroque Ensemble will feature Baroque violinist Michael Sand at the Richard Brunelle Performance Hall at Davis High School, 315 W. 14 St. in Davis. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the concert begins at 7 p.m. The concert is free, but donations are accepted at the door. All proceeds benefit the DHS Baroque Ensemble’s 2023 EnglandBelgium-France tour.

Tuesday n The Holmes Jr. High Orchestra Program presents its Finale Concert 2023 at the Richard Brunelle Performance Hall at Davis High School, 315 W. 14 St. in Davis. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the concert begins at 7 p.m. The concert is free, but donations are accepted at the door. All proceeds go to benefit the Holmes Orchestra Program. n Spice o Life, a trio with a musical repertoire including pop, folk, country, Broadway, and boleros, are the featured act at the Village Homes Performers’ Circle in Davis. Therese Llanes (lead singer), Mike Elfant (guitar and vocals) and Wendy Silk (keyboard, accordion and vocals) had such a good time playing together at a party in 2021 that they decided to rehearse and play as a group. No tickets or reservations are required. The event begins with an open mike from 7:15 to 8:15 pm and concludes with the featured performance from 8:30 to 9 p.m.

Signups begin at 6:45 for the short performances (less than 5 minutes per act). For information, visit https://www. facebook.com/village homesperformers.

Thursday, May 25 n The Davis High School Orchestra Program presents its Finale Concert 2023 at the Richard Brunelle Performance Hall on campus at 315 W. 14 St. in Davis. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. and the concert begins at 7 p.m. The concert is free, but donations are accepted at the door. All proceeds go to benefit the DHS Orchestra Program.

Sunday, May 28 n The Cache Creek Nature Preserve is planning a “nature-themed” Sunset Scavenger Hunt in late May. Felicia Wong, restoration biologist at the Nature Preserve, about 4 miles west of Woodland, says the event is set from 8 to 9 p.m. Sunset is expected at around 8:20 p.m. People don’t have to arrive at the preserve, 34199 County Road 20, promptly at 8 p.m., but the scavenger hunt should take about 30 minutes. People attending are asked to park in the main parking lot and check in at the green gates leading to the wetland. Bring a flashlight, binoculars, hiking/walking shoes, bright-colored clothing and bottled water. Sign up at https:// cachecreekconservancy. org/sunset-scavengerhunt/.

Thursday, June 1 n The Davis Odd Fellows Thursday Live! concert series presents Spike Sikes and His Awesome Hotcakes. All ages welcome. The Davis Odd Fellows Lodge is at 415 Second St. in downtown Davis. Doors open at 7 p.m., with music (and dancing!) starting at 7:30 p.m. Thursday Live! shows are free, but cash donations are encouraged to support the musicians. n The Genealogy Society of Vallejo-Benicia will host Stephen Morse as a guest speaker on Thursday, June 1. The topic is, "The 1950 Census One Year Later." This meeting is not on Zoom. The inperson event will meet at Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum, 734 Marin St. in California. Masks are encouraged but not required. The meeting starts at 1:30 p.m. The 1950 Census was released on April 1, 2022, after being sealed for 72 years. Since the release date, many who have tried to find records in the census have run into various quirks.

Wednesday June 21 n The Woodland League of Women Voters is pleased to host its first Summer Solstice Event featuring dinner followed by a presentation by Mindy Romero, Ph.D., the founder and director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy, formerly known as the California Civic Engagement Project. Romero is a political sociologist and received her doctorate in sociology from UC Davis. Her research focuses on political behavior and race/ ethnicity, and seeks to explain patterns of voting and political underrepresentation, particularly among youth and communities of color in California and the U.S. The event will take be at the historic Woodland Hotel. Doors will open at 5:30 PM. Dinner tickets are $32.00. The League’s annual meeting for members, which the public may also attend, will follow the presentation. More information is online at https://my.lwv. org/california/woodland.

By Ben Christopher CalMatters

This month Californians worried about the cost of housing were offered the rarest of gifts: a glimmer of hope.

New numbers released by the Newsom administration show that California added homes to its housing stock at a faster clip than any time since the Great Recession — 123,350 additional units, or an increase of 0.85%.

Over that same period, the state’s population declined, marking the third year in a row that it’s fallen from one new year to the next.

Put those two numbers together and a surprising statistic emerges: There are now more homes per person — 3,770 units for every 10,000 Californians — than there have been since at least 1991.

For a state that has long suffered from too many people trying to cram themselves into too few homes, that’s an encouraging number at first glance.

It’s also the kind of news that might lead a person to wonder: Does this California exodus mean the state’s perennial housing shortage is finally coming to an end?

The long answer is “it’s complicated.”

Though many analysts have tried, no consensus exists on just how many more homes the state would need to build (or how many more people would need to leave) before we can call an end to the crisis and start to see rents and home prices fall within reach of working and middle class Californians.

But the short answer is “almost definitely, no.”

Much of the outflow of residents is itself driven by the high cost of living. In March, the median price of an existing single family California home was $791,490, more than twice the national median of $375,700.

“When house prices go up, people leave,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said as much in a recent interview with UCLA’s Blueprint, naming the cost of living as the “principal driver” and its chronic shortage of homes “our original sin.”

And while experts don’t agree on exactly how much additional housing the state might need to attain an ill-defined “affordability,” they do agree on this much: it’s a whole lot more.

Scale of problem

In 2000, a report issued by California’s Department of Housing and Community Development estimated that the state would need to build 220,000 additional units each year for two decades to meet the needs of what was then still a growing population.

Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Even last year, a relative high-water mark for home construction, the total was roughly 100,000 units below that goal.

The department published another estimate in 2018 urging 180,000 units per year through 2025. And last year, in putting together housing goals for regions across the state, the department’s total prescription added up to 2.5 million new homes over the next eight years (or 315,000 per year).

The administration acknowledged the state’s sluggish population growth in its latest proposed budget for next year, which gauged the need at 148,000 new units per year.

One of the reasons these estimates vary is because there’s no single definition of a “housing shortage.”

In 2015, for example, the Legislative Analyst’s Office, an agency that serves as a think tank for state legislators, framed the issue with the following question: How many units would the state have had to build between 1980 and 2010 to keep the median value of an owner-occupied home increasing at the same rate as the rest of the nation, rather than skyrocketing so much higher, as it has for the last half century?

That definition of the state’s shortage led the office to estimate 210,000 each year. Alas, the state has only hit that annual mark five times since 1980 — and not once since 1990.

A year later, the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company, put out its own figure — 3.5 million homes by 2025. Newsom took that eye-popping figure as a rallying cry during his first gubernatorial run, when the then-candidate vowed that California would reach that total by the end of his second term. He’s since scaled the pledge back to 2.5 million, a goal the state is still unlikely to reach.

McKinsey based its estimate on its own version of the state’s housing problem: the number of new units required to bring California’s houses-to-people ratio in line with that of the rest of the country.

The common thread behind all these estimates is they are all very, very big. And whichever shortfall estimate you choose, the state has never hit the mark.

A moving target

But the numbers have been moving in a more encouraging direction in recent years. The totals since 2020: roughly 430,000 new homes and some 821,000 fewer Californians competing to reside within them. That necessarily narrows the gap, however we define it, said Hans Johnson, a researcher at the Public Policy Institute of California.

If the shortage is relatively modest, he said, and “if we continue like this for another decade, with very slow population growth or essentially no population growth, and with fairly robust housing construction, then it should start to eat into that lack of housing,” he said.

But if the state needs to hit McKinsey-esque levels of new production, counted in the millions of units, “we’re still a long, long way off,” he added.

That’s in part because the size of the hole is so large. But it’s also because the shortfall is “a moving target,” explained Len Kiefer, deputy chief economist at the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. The building industry booms and busts. Young Californians grow old enough to live out on their own while older ones begin to die off. And people’s housing wants and needs change, too.

COVID effect

A particularly dramatic driver of such change: the pandemic.

Eager to keep COVID at bay and seeking more space to work from home, Californians dumped their roommates when they could and sought out places to live on their own, resulting in a great “spreading out,” as analysts at the Public Policy Institute of California put it. The trend toward fewer people living in each home is nationwide and long term. Over the last 40 years, the number of people living alone doubled across the country. But the pandemic put the trend on overdrive.

That worsened the state’s housing shortage. Even if the total number of Californians continues its gradual downward drift, more homes are needed to house the roughly 38 million sticking around.

tarting in June 2020, the median price of an existing single-family home shot up from $626,170 to a peak of $900,170 in May 2022, according to data compiled by the California Association of Realtors. That’s an increase of 44% in less than two years. ince then high interest rates have brought California’s housing inflation back down to earth slightly. But the median price in March was still 29% above where it was three years earlier.

Whether Californians will begin clustering together again as COVID concerns ease is an open question. But there’s no sign that’s happening yet.

By the beginning of 2023, with the worst of the pandemic presumably behind us, the number of Californians per household hit a record low of 2.77.

A shrinking population, driven largely by outward migration, provides an escape valve for some of that extra pressure, said Meyer, the USC demographer. But based on analysis he and his colleagues conducted for the California Association of Realtors, it’s easy to imagine demand for homes staying strong, given how large the millennial generation is and how many are now reaching a baby-having, roommatejettisoning age.

Plus, if the California exodus is a cure to the state’s housing shortage, it’s also a symptom, said Dowell.

“The ones who are older are leaving because they’re (homeowners) cashing in their gains,” he said of the nearly 8 million exCalifornians who exited the state last decade.”The young people who are leaving, we now think, are leaving because they can’t buy a house here.”

And even if those departures do ultimately alleviate the state’s scarcity of homes, it’s not the solution to the problem that anyone should want, adds Johnson from Public Policy Institute of California.

“I don’t think any of us who have been advocating for building more housing in California — to help alleviate the shortage of housing we’ve had and to improve affordability in the state — thought that the best path was just to have the state start to depopulate.”