Op-ed | I Don’t Want Davis to Change. That’s Why I’m Voting Yes on Measure V.

By Nathan James Harper. April 6, 2026

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When I was a kid, a new affordable housing complex went up behind my house in South Davis. My neighbors fought it. There was much opposition. The fear was real: that something precious about our street, our Davis, was about to be taken away.

Then it was built. Years passed. I grew up sharing classrooms and lunch tables and bike paths with the children who lived there. Twenty years later, I love it. I love my neighbors. I love having grown up in a place diverse enough to show me the world before I ever left it.

That is the Davis I am fighting for. And it is exactly why I am voting Yes on Measure V this June.

I want to be honest with you. I am not a developer. I am not a politician, yet. I am a Davis kid who moved away and came home. Montgomery Elementary, Harper Junior High, Davis Senior High. Six years in Knoxville competing in the pole vault at the University of Tennessee, homesick in a way I did not fully understand until I came back. I now help run a mental health facility just outside town. I live here on purpose.

And I am scared.

Not of Village Farms. I am scared of what Davis looks like in ten years if we keep saying no.

I watch young families leave for Woodland and Vacaville because they cannot afford to stay. These are not strangers. They are people who love this city, who want to raise their kids here, who are priced out of that choice. And every time a family leaves, a child leaves with them. A seat in a classroom empties. A spot on a little league roster goes unfilled.

Patwin Elementary and Birch Lane are facing potential closure. If you grew up here, you know what that means. Those schools are not buildings. They are where Davis happens. Where kids from different backgrounds share the same hallways, the same teachers, the same idea of what a community can be. Losing them would not just be sad. It would change what this city is.

I understand the people who oppose this project. I have read their arguments carefully, and I respect many of them. The fears about contamination, about whether affordable housing will truly get built, about traffic on Pole Line Road. These are not silly concerns. Some of them deserve better answers than they have gotten.

But I will say this about traffic: when I came home from Tennessee, I was genuinely angry about the extra cars I found. I felt like Davis had been taken from me. Then I caught myself. I was frustrated about waiting one more cycle at a stoplight, in a city where I can bike to almost anything I need. That is an embarrassingly privileged thing to be upset about. And here is the part we rarely say out loud: much of those cars belong to Davis families who moved to Woodland because we would not build housing for them here. They are still commuting in. We did not reduce traffic by refusing to grow. We just made it someone else’s problem.

My father told me Davis was designed to be diverse on purpose. Not to cluster people by income. Not to protect what exists at the expense of what could be. To build something that actually reflects the values we say we have.

I cannot promise Village Farms will save our schools or solve our problems. No honest person can. What I can tell you is that I have read the EIR, I have read the opposition, and I believe this is the most Davis-aligned project this community has had the chance to vote on in a generation.

The Davis I love was built by people willing to share it.

Please vote Yes on Measure V on June 2nd.