Davis Downtown Plan Update
City of Davis
BAE is serving as economics subconsultant to Opticos Design for the Downtown Davis Plan Update. This plan covers the City’s vibrant urban core, updating the original Core Area Specific Plan adopted in 1995. BAE prepared a market assessment that identified the potential for downtown to capture additional demand for downtown retail, office, residential, lodging, and entertainment uses over the next 20 to 25 years.
While the downtown remains Davis’ commercial focal point, its function has evolved in the intervening years, with eating and drinking taking over from merchandising retail as the primary ground floor activity. Other issues include increased interest in mixed-use and housing infill projects; heightened advocacy for expanding multimodal transportation access to the downtown; conflicts regarding parking availability and management; and concerns raised due to ownership changes and subsequent business turnover affecting a significant portion of the downtown’s retail store frontage.
To help inform the plan update process, BAE prepared a market assessment that identified the potential for downtown to capture additional demand for downtown retail, office, residential, lodging, and entertainment uses over the next 20 to 25 years. In addition to standard data sources, BAE’s analysis drew upon an extensive set of interviews with downtown property owners, developers, merchants, and real estate professionals; incorporated location-based data from mobile devices to better understand where people present in Downtown Davis come from at different times of day, on different days of the week; and utilized confidential historical establishment-level data obtained from the CA Employment Development Department to better understand how Davis’ underlying economy is changing over time and affecting downtown real estate demand.
BAE has also prepared pro-forma financial feasibility analysis for several different downtown development prototypes, to provide planners and stakeholders with a better understanding of how economics can drive downtown developer decisions, and how increasing allowable density and making other regulatory changes may be able to help stimulate desired changes.