{"id":688,"date":"2019-10-04T09:37:00","date_gmt":"2019-10-04T09:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mutualhousing.com\/blog\/?p=688"},"modified":"2022-09-23T09:45:37","modified_gmt":"2022-09-23T09:45:37","slug":"home-prices-shot-upwards-after-mutual-housing-built-moore-village-in-this-davis-neighborhood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mutualhousing.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/04\/home-prices-shot-upwards-after-mutual-housing-built-moore-village-in-this-davis-neighborhood\/","title":{"rendered":"HOME PRICES SHOT UPWARDS AFTER MUTUAL HOUSING BUILT MOORE VILLAGE IN THIS DAVIS NEIGHBORHOOD"},"content":{"rendered":"

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If you walk too quickly past the Moore Village Mutual Housing Community in Davis, you just might miss it. Oak and sycamore and other trees and shrubbery surround it, hiding it in green along a quiet and curvy street, between two parks and around the corner from a golf course, in a neighborhood where more than a few homes come with price tags north of $1 million.<\/p>\n

In the evenings, when the hot days of summer give way to the comfort of early evening, elderly couples and moms and dads with their kids take their walks on the leafy streets through the Wildhorse neighborhood, around and past Moore Village. Most of them don’t know that the 59 townhomes in Moore Village even exist, the structural design fits in so well with the neighborhood. Even fewer express an awareness that the Moore Village townhomes are “affordable housing,” meaning they were built for people who make less than the area median income, to keep them from having to decide between paying for food or medical care or the rent. All they know is that Moore Village totally fits in with the neighborhood vibe.<\/p>\n

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“They’re an example of how low-income housing could be a non-issue,” said Davis City Council Member Dan Carson, of Moore Village and its 146 residents, and how the community that is set within a wider neighborhood of high-priced suburbia defeats the stereotype that affordable housing somehow attracts problems and is itself a problem.<\/p>\n

“When I was walking precincts there last year, I saw that it was a clean, very nice-looking place. It’s almost right next door to that very beautiful park there in Wildhorse. I’m not hearing about any problems out there. And,” speaking of Wildhorse, Carson went on, “its property values, like much of Davis, at least until recently, have been escalating like crazy.”<\/p>\n

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A price map put out by the real-estate data mining company Zillow shows that as of the end of July, the 10 houses that back up to the Moore Village property line are worth an average of nearly $792,000 each. The next block over, backing up to the Wildhorse Golf Club, Zillow estimates that there are five homes worth more than $1 million. According to Zillow, the five detached, single-family homes currently for sale in Wildhorse have been listed at prices that on average are 74 percent higher than what they were worth when Mutual Housing opened the doors to Moore Village in 2005. The big increases of home values in Wildhorse far outstrip the overall Davis housing price hikes of 41 percent over that same 14-year time period, according to Zillow.<\/p>\n

“There’s always a fear” that an affordable housing development for low-income people can hurt the values of surrounding homes, said Jason Taormino, a developer who recently built six single-family homes just a couple of blocks away from Moore Village. “But I think in the long run, those fears dissipate.”<\/p>\n

They sure did with Taormino’s project. His company last year began construction on the six new homes on a newly-created cul-de-sac only 450 steps from the entrance into Moore Village. During construction, Taormino & Associates put the six homes up for sale with list prices of more than $1 million. Each of them sold by the time construction had been completed.<\/p>\n

“That has not happened in my 10 years of real estate development,” Taormino said. “I did this project with my father. He’s been building for 40 years, and he’s never seen it before, either. It was quite surprising.”<\/p>\n

Taormino said the fact that an affordable housing community was located just down the block “was not a consideration whatsoever” in his and his father’s decision to go upscale with their project on Moore Boulevard.<\/p>\n

“We haven’t seen any community outrage,” Taormino said. “I think Moore Village integrates into Wildhorse well enough that one doesn’t look at it and say, ‘What is that?’ It’s just another type of housing that’s in the neighborhood.”<\/p>\n

Moore Village, the numbers show, is mostly made up of working families that earn an average annual income of $32,175. Nineteen of the 59 households in Moore Village rely solely on employment income to pay the bills. At least one person draws a paycheck in 18 other residences where the household income is supplemented by disability payments, or Supplemental Security Income, or some other form of assistance. Twenty-eight Moore Village residents receive Social Security. Forty-five of Mutual Housing’s 146 residents are children under the age of 18. Nineteen people in Moore Village are over the age of 62.<\/p>\n

“I’d say that for me, Moore Village is clearly a great example of what inclusionary zoning can be,” said Fernando Cibrian, the Mutual Housing director of organizing, of governmental policies that require developers to set aside a certain percentage of a newly-built housing for low-income people. “It is a community that provides affordable housing right in the middle of some very expensive homes – and we’re good neighbors.”<\/p>\n

Not that everybody in Wildhorse immediately embraced the thought of an affordable housing community in their midst.<\/p>\n

David J. Thompson, a principle in Neighborhood Partners LLC, worked on the development contract with the Yolo Mutual Housing Association back in 2005 to help get Moore Village built. He remembers a couple of neighborhood meetings, each attended by over 100 people – some of them with their lawyers – that took place before construction got underway. “Vituperative” and “vociferous” were a couple of words he used to describe the meetings, where some Wildhorse residents claimed that there already was one affordable housing complex in the neighborhood and that a second low-income community would be overdoing it. Thompson said that some residents spoke up at the community meetings “about low-income kids sneaking through the neighborhood, stealing things.”<\/p>\n

And, of course, many of them expressed the common, if proven unfounded, concern:<\/p>\n

“They said it was doing to depress the value of their homes,” Thompson said.<\/p>\n

To assuage some of the worry, Thompson said that Neighborhood Partners and their architect came up with the unique Moore Village design of detached triplexes with one larger townhome in the middle of each with a front door and a path to the sidewalk that looked like it belonged to a single large home, with two smaller units entered from the right and the left. The street view and the measurements of the width of each triplex, Thompson said, mirrored those of the single-family homes that surround Moore Village.<\/p>\n

“We also placed all of the parking for Moore Village in the center of the
\ndevelopment rather than on the exterior,” Thompson said. “This way all traffic movement occurs within the development and does not interfere in any way with the neighborhood. The neighborhood does not have to look out onto any parking lots.”<\/p>\n

Moore Village’s designers, meanwhile, built in only one automobile exit-entrance into the community to keep traffic off the side streets and direct it onto larger, busier Moore Boulevard. The homes on the other side of Moore Boulevard all back up to the street. To ease their minds even more, the developers redesigned
\nand rebuilt neighbor fences so that the lights of vehicles exiting Moore Village at
\nnight would not be visible. They also hauled in four large boulders to protect their back-yard fences.<\/p>\n

“They were afraid that people were going to come flying out of Moore Village and come across the street and run into their back yards,” Thompson said.<\/p>\n

Fourteen years later, nothing has flown out of Moore Village – except invitations its residents have extended to their neighbors in Wildhorse and beyond to come join them in some assorted community activities.<\/p>\n

Twice a month, Moore Village holds a “crafts night” gathering in its community room and opens the doors to anybody who wants to knit or sew and drink tea or work on any other sort of artistic project that sparks their imagination, with the goal of getting to know the neighbors a little better.<\/p>\n

“We’ve had a handful of people come out, and it’s been very positive,” said Moore Village resident Jen Higley-Chapman. “We’ve been able to make a few connections in the community.”<\/p>\n

More recently, Moore Village residents have organized a Saturday morning food distribution that is open to everybody. Linda Garcia, who lives in a nearby apartment building, took them up on the offer.<\/p>\n

“I think it’s really great,” said Garcia, who works as a substitute paraeducator and lives with her son, his two small children, and two college students in their four-bedroom apartment. “It’s wonderful to be able to supplement our food budget.”<\/p>\n

Moore’s biggest link to the surrounding community, however, has occurred on the natural.<\/p>\n

“One thing I heard from the (Moore Village) residents is that the main way they’ve gotten to know people in the community is through their kids – going to school, being on sports teams, that kind of thing,” Higley-Chapman said.<\/p>\n

Nancy Stone and her husband, Barry Tharp, who live across Moore Boulevard and around the corner, routinely walk their big French poodles in the neighborhood. They’ve since gotten to know a man who lives at Moore Village who also has a dog and whom they have met on their walks. In the meantime, they got to know another woman at Moore Village that they met through another neighborhood friend.<\/p>\n

“We’ve known them for a long time,” Barry said, of his Moore Village acquaintances. “I had no idea until fairly recently that even was an affordable housing complex. I think it’s been very, very successful. They’ve done a good job.”<\/p>\n

Neither Barry nor Nancy were aware of any controversy when Moore Village opened, and they said they haven’t seen nor heard of any problems coming out of there since.<\/p>\n

“Not at all,” Nancy said.<\/p>\n

Over on Hartley Street, Wildhorse resident Chris Bowman remembers some of his neighbors sounding the alarm back in 2005 about Moore Village, with their predictions of blight and junked automobiles on cinder blocks lining the street. Such scenarios, Bowman said, never materialized.<\/p>\n

“There’s been no impact at all,” Bowman said. “The people seem like any other residents of Wildhorse. The landscape blends in. The housing itself blends in. It’s just another Wildhorse development.”<\/p>\n

Moore Village is one of five Mutual Housing communities in Davis, in a city that already has 22 affordable developments that contain 1,800 housing units – and it’s still not enough, according to the city’s own residents.<\/p>\n

“We had an open-ended city poll that asked you, without a prompt, what city issue most concerns you,” said Carson, the city council member. “The one that stood out by leaps and bounds was affordable housing – 31 percent of voters cited it as the main concern. Next on the list was growth and development, 10 percent, and homelessness, 7 percent. The top three items all related to housing concerns, and affordability was off the charts.<\/p>\n

“So you can see,” Carson said, “that we do need to focus on this.”<\/p>\n

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Click here to learn more about their low-income assistance programs.<\/a><\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

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