Ruliff Andrean via Unsplash
In what might have seemed less than a decade ago impossible, Berkeley, the poster child for unaffordable college town, is now being held up nationally as a case study for what happens when a city dramatically increases housing production.
After decades of building relatively little housing, Berkeley became one of the most expensive college towns in America by the mid-2010s. Then the city shifted course. YIMBY activists and pro-housing policymakers pushed through zoning reforms and approved a wave of multifamily construction.
In recent years, Berkeley has added housing at levels not seen in generations.
As a result, tent growth slowed dramatically, and according to recent reporting, many Berkeley rents have fallen back to roughly 2018 levels even after years of inflation.
It confirms something economists have argued for decades: in high-demand markets, sustained housing production can relieve upward pressure on rents.
Like Berkeley, Davis has been a slow growth to at times nearly no growth community, that pushed housing prices up and created a shortage of beds for college students to rent.
Unlike Berkeley, Davis has not experienced a broad housing boom. In fact, Davis has barely built ownership housing at all.
According to recent housing production data, Davis has permitted only 805 single-family homes over the last 17 years. The city has added housing units during that period, but the overwhelming majority of them have been student-oriented multifamily rental projects and apartment developments.
However, the combined increase of supply, from both the community and the university of student housing, has enabled Davis to also see rents decline.
While Davis did not solve its housing crisis broadly, it alleviated one segment of it, student rental housing.
After decades of dangerously low vacancy rates—often hovering near zero—UC Davis and the city finally added thousands of student housing beds through projects like Lincoln40, Ryder, Sterling, and major on-campus expansion.
The result was predictable but politically significant: apartment rents declined for the first time in more than a decade.
The average apartment rent in Davis fell 1.8% from fall 2024 to fall 2025, according to the UC Davis vacancy survey.
For years, many local housing skeptics insisted that building more market-rate apartments would not help affordability, but when Davis finally added substantial student-oriented rental inventory, vacancy rates improved, competition increased, and landlords lost some pricing power.
The market responded exactly as supply-and-demand theory would predict—despite skeptics who argue such dynamics do not apply for housing.
But there is a crucial distinction between Davis and Berkeley—Davis’ remaining housing crisis is no longer primarily a student rental crisis.
It is an ownership housing crisis.
The problem now is family housing, workforce housing, and ownership opportunities for middle-income households, young families, and UC Davis faculty and staff.
This explains why Davis can simultaneously experience softening apartment rents while still suffering from extreme home prices and deep affordability problems for ownership housing.
Davis addressed part of its housing crisis—student rentals—while largely failing to address the shortage of ownership and family housing.
Student apartments helped stabilize the rental market but did little to expand homeownership opportunities or increase the supply of family-sized homes for teachers, university employees, researchers, health care workers, and younger families seeking to buy into the community.
As ownership opportunities constrict, Davis increasingly risks becoming economically stratified by age and wealth. Older homeowners remain protected by Proposition 13 and decades of appreciation, while younger households face near-insurmountable barriers to entry.
The result is gradual demographic stagnation.
Families leave, young professionals struggle to enter the market, UC Davis faces growing difficulty recruiting and retaining employees who can afford to live nearby, workers increasingly commute from surrounding communities, and the city gradually becomes older, wealthier, and less economically diverse.
The current Davis housing debate increasingly centers around projects like Village Farms and Willowgrove rather than student apartments alone and that puts pressure on Davis because Measure J has for 25 years severely restricted the city’s ability to build housing that sustain the community.
The question now is whether Davis is willing to address its ownership housing shortage.
That is a more politically difficult conversation because ownership housing necessarily raises questions about peripheral growth, Measure J/R/D, farmland conversion, infrastructure expansion, and long-term city planning.
But the Berkeley and Davis experiences together point toward an increasingly unavoidable conclusion: housing shortages are not monolithic. Different housing markets experience different forms of scarcity, and solving one segment does not automatically solve another.
Berkeley increased multifamily housing broadly and saw rents cool.
Davis increased student rental housing and saw apartment rents decline.
But Davis still has not meaningfully addressed ownership scarcity.
The evidence increasingly suggests that supply matters, meaning the next phase of the debate is no longer whether Davis should build housing, but what kind of housing it is willing to build—and for whom.
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Categories: Breaking News Tags: Affordable Housing California housing policy Davis housing Homeownership Housing Crisis Measure J/R/D Student Housing UC Davis