Why Is Davis So Expensive? (San Francisco, Sacramento: middle-class, rent, house prices)

[nomdad4life]

Move to Pheonix. I did and with all of the foreclosures, developers are giving away homes.

[bedys]

Why isn't there a wal-mart in Davis, or a Target? Well Davis voted few times already against wal-mart or Target, or also a huge construction project (Covell village)... They like to keep it upscale, it was rated 2nd most educated city in the US, so it'll stay always hippy, liberal, low crime, sooo different and apart from neighboring towns such as woodland, dixon, west sacramento and vacaville. They want to keep it an examplary college town. It's mostly for college professors and staff to buy houses here, anybody else just can't afford it (I mean both financially and intellectually, it can be very snob too).

[JakeDog]

Davis has top schools and is one of the few pleasant safe areas in that region.

[Truett Neathery]

Originally Posted by Paddington

I'm considering a position at UC-Davis. According to this, the average house price in Davis is $600,000.

Now, I can understand housing being expensive in LA, which has a limited supply of land being constrained by the mountains and the sea. And in San Francisco, a lot of the land outside the city is "natural" and thus protected from development.

What keeps the real estate cheap in the Midwest is that the cities are all surrounded by farms. Developers are always buying up farmland (which is already under human use), and putting houses on them. The fresh supply of new housing keeps the prices low. Same thing is also true in places like Phoenix and Houston.

Looking at this map, Davis is surrounded by nothing but farmland on all sides. And yet the housing prices are sky high. What gives? Are there laws against developing farmland in California?

That and Sacramento is also pretty expensive, with an average house costing $340,000.

It's not the location in Davis that's the problem, but the lack of new housing due to a "NO-GROWTH" policy - that keeps the existing homes up there in price.
By the way, in Sac., you would not want the $340 K house.
TN (RE Expert)

[MamaToThree]

Great answers! Davis is just a cool little hippie town. I'd love to live there!

[BearBranch]

Yikes. I would say it a quite a hippy town. I would say it is a academic town.

[inpd]

Originally Posted by bedys

Why isn't there a wal-mart in Davis, or a Target? Well Davis voted few times already against wal-mart or Target, or also a huge construction project (Covell village)... .

What are you talking about. They have already voted to build a target and
its going up near mace ranch.

[ukiyo-e]

I've lived in Davis for 7 years. The surrounding ag land can't be annexed without a majority vote and the last attempt to do that last year for the Covell Village development failed to come even close to passing. If you drive on the peripheral roads in town, ALL the surrounding land is ag land. People here don't want the city to grow, and as a result, the house prices stay high since demand is high.

I don't understand what people are saying about it flooding all around here. Only the Yolo Basin under the causeway floods, and that's controlled flooding when they open some of the flood gates in the Sacramento River north of here. It's done partly to lower dangerously high river levels, partly for migrating waterfowl habitat, and partly for growing rice. The other areas around town don't flood. Our main flood hazard is from Monticello Dam on Lake Berryessa bursting, not the levees failing on the Sacramento River.

Average home prices are always misleading. Remember the example: If everyone on a bus makes 40K a year and Bill Gates gets on the bus, the average income goes up to some billions of dollars, yet most of the people on the bus are still not making much money. You need to look at the median house price to get a real feel. There are a number of million-dollar plus homes here and when the market is slow, they actually sell better than the mid-price homes because people looking in that price range generally aren't so affected by economic conditions the way the rest of us are. Those expensive home sales can skew the average a lot, but the median, not nearly as much.

I wouldn't call the town hippie at all. It's more crunchy than hippie. It's a mix of mostly serious college students, faculty and staff, and some commuters to Sac who live here for the public schools. A couple people on my street sell medical supplies and can live pretty much anywhere, but came for the schools. The politics can be irritating, yet amusing at the same time. It's definitely not like any other place in the Sac area that I'm familiar with.

[Goncalves-Rouse]

I also used to live in Davis and I work for the university. Try going to Dixon (8 miles down the road). It has a new Wal-Mart, but no other big stores. It's a mini version of Davis, minus the huge price tag. Don't get me wrong...it's not cheap, but it's at least $100,000-$200,000 cheaper than Davis.

[inpd]

Originally Posted by Goncalves-Rouse

I also used to live in Davis and I work for the university. Try going to Dixon (8 miles down the road). It has a new Wal-Mart, but no other big stores. It's a mini version of Davis, minus the huge price tag. Don't get me wrong...it's not cheap, but it's at least $100,000-$200,000 cheaper than Davis.

Thanks. I understand that Davis is expensive because they restrict growth.

The measure that restricts growth is Measure J passed in 2000. That was
good thinking by the good citizens of Davis BUT ....

Measure J expires in 2010. It passed by just 53.5% to 46.5% in 2000 so
may not get renewed. Any *informed* insights (please give citations!)
when its going to get voted on again and if it has a chance of passing?

If it doesn't get renewed then developers will go crazy and everything that's
good about Davis will deteriorate if sprawl takes over.