About 7 percent, and maybe as much as 10 percent, of rentals in Davis are currently vacant, says Davis real estate broker and manager Kit Boschken on this week’s Davisville. That's highly unusual for Davis, especially in August. The rate was under 1 percent a few years ago.

Why is the rate this high now? Kit lists several reasons on today’s program, where she’s joined by her husband Steve and their son James Boschken — they are a family of real estate professionals in Davis — to discuss Davis’ current real estate market. We also talk about home sales — prices and inventory are up from last year — the local impact of interest rates, the effect of the Trump administration’s cuts in research on demand for rentals and commercial space, the increase in student housing this decade, and even the allure of living in midtown Sacramento for Davis upper-division students who only need to be on the UC Davis campus a couple of days per week.

Kit Boschken believes rents will come down in Davis next year. She said she doesn’t know how much. “I think it’ll be a slow progression downward to a point. I don’t think we’re going to go from $1,000 a bedroom to $700 a bedroom. It’s not going to be that big of a drop,” she said. “But owners are going to have to be more realistic on what they want for rent, and are going to have to put some money into the properties.”

This interview was recorded in January 2013

Few journalists have had as much impact in Davis as Joel Davis, who died in April at 62.

In 2005 he wrote his book Justice Waits about the kidnapping and murders of two UC Davis students, John Riggins and Sabrina Gonsalves, in December 1980. His book helped sustain interest in solving the crime, ending in the conviction of Richard Hirschfield for first-degree murder in December 2012 — 32 years after the tragedy.

In January 2013, Joel appeared on Davisville to talk about the book, the effect the murders had on Davis and on him, and finishing his work even as he was diagnosed with early-onset Parkinson’s Disease. We replay that interview today.

Joel grew up in Davis. He cared about getting this story right. “I knew this would be an unusual case,” he wrote in the preface to his book. “I just didn’t realize how unusual.”

Photo is an excerpt from the Justice Waits book jacket

Vince Guaraldi’s music continues to have a wonderful afterlife, thanks to the successful recent releases of the Peanuts soundtracks that Guaraldi recorded before he died at 47 in 1976. Today we update the story with Derrick Bang, who wrote the book about the San Francisco jazz pianist and writes liner notes for the Peanuts soundtrack producers Jason and Sean Mendelson. Bang believes there’s likely more unreleased music to come even after the soundtracks series ends. Today on Davisville he also names an often-overlooked Guaraldi song that he says evokes a stroll in the rain as winningly as the composer’s Christmas song “Skating” evokes kids skating on a pond. We hear part of the song, “Rain, Rain Go Away,” which is nothing like the children’s nursery rhyme.

Bang underscores his belief in Guaraldi’s music and talent. “I want to do the best I can to make sure that his music lives into the 22nd century,” he says on today’s program. “I want him to become one of our Tchaikovskys.”

Illustration taken from the cover of The Charlie Brown Suite and Other Favorites CD (2003), which uses a drawing of Vince Guaraldi by Charles Schulz.

The ordinary jobs that come to the Davis Book Menders include wear-and-tear repairs, like fixing torn pages or tattered covers, but some damage is unusual — like the books that displayed tire treads or evidence of use as a trivet. Whatever the problem, the menders can fix it, says Karen McCluskey, a member of the group … with some exceptions, such as the book they bagged and discarded because it seemed like a biohazard.

The menders gather each Tuesday to work around a long table (see photo) inside the main Davis library, and on the first Tuesday of each month they host a book-repair cafe for anyone who wants to come in for help fixing their own books.

Publisher’s Weekly says U.S. sales of printed books totaled 782.7 million in 2024, up 4.4 million from 2023. Today on Davisville we talk with McCluskey about the work and the satisfaction of mending thousands of books each year.

The San Francisco Mime Troupe wants to entertain and challenge audiences with live satire, but Michael Gene Sullivan, the writer, director and an actor for this year’s show — Disruption: A Musical Farce — says he aims for more than two-dimensional hilarity.

“I’m very much against the pie-throwing satire of ‘here’s my enemy, I set him up, create a straw man, make fun of him, set fire to him,’ ” he says on this week’s Davisville. “When I was describing the [regular working-class cop] character [in the play] to someone, they were like, ‘I don’t want this guy to be a hero.’ I said, ‘he’s not a hero, but he’s not a villain, either.’ He’s totally understandable.…” (Sullivan plays the part in the play; the photo shows him in costume)

The nonprofit can't currently afford its former big summer tours, but has kept Davis on its annual circuit. This year they’ll perform July 10 in the Brunelle theater in Davis. Tickets are free but they ask viewers to donate $20 apiece.

This year’s top graduating senior at the University of California, Davis is Avantika Gokulnatha. She just earned a degree in genetics and genomics, she’d like to help make aging more manageable for people, she values her art classes in the campus Craft Center, and she prizes research. “Research has always been what I define to be American,” she says, and on today’s Davisville she explains what she means, what brought her to Davis, and where she’s headed next.

This UC Davis photo by Gregory Urquiaga shows Avantika Gokulnatha with Jack McGruder of Fairfield as they talk about how to use an app on an iPhone

Davis needs hundreds of additional homes for people with very low incomes, says Bill Pride during today’s Davisville, and other Yolo County cities have similar needs. As executive director of a new nonprofit, Yolo Community Builders, Pride wants to respond to that demand by building more tiny housing units throughout the county, inspired by the innovative Paul’s Place in Davis, for people who would otherwise be homeless.

Today we talk with Pride and Maria Ogrydziak, an accomplished architect who will design the new units. Pride is a former executive director of Davis Community Meals and Housing, which built and runs Paul's Place, a four-story building in central Davis that combines permanent housing, transitional housing, and various services to help people escape homelessness. Ogrydziak designed Paul's Place.

Other nonprofits would own and offer support services at the locations that Yolo Community Builders plans to develop. YCB is developing these partnerships with nonprofits, and Pride hopes to announce the first projects by the end of the year.

(Image, taken from Yolo Community Builders website, shows two tiny homes side by side)

The large tariffs on U.S. imports ordered by President Trump in April have created huge uncertainty and anxiety, amplified by Trump’s frequent course changes and by tariffs imposed on the U.S. in retaliation. Small businesses can’t wait for uncertainty to clear, however. They have to make frequent decisions in real time. Today on Davisville a few businesses downtown tell us what they think of the tariffs, how they’re coping, and how their customers are responding.

The results are not conclusive -- only five businesses responded to a set of questions I sent to DDBA members prior to this program -- but  they are interesting. One respondent cheers the tariffs. The other four rate the impact to be severe and negative. Even so, you’ll also hear nuance.

Today's guests are Brett Lee, executive director of the Davis Downtown Business Association, and Kevin Wan, president of the association this year and co-owner of Sophia’s Thai Kitchen. They comment on the responses and add insights of their own.

(Photo shows a downtown Davis street scene on May 22, 2025)

The Davis school district might have to close up to three public schools over the next decade for reasons that include declining birth rates, high housing costs, and changing job patterns. Adding more homes for families in Davis could blunt that trend, but Davis voters generally resist population growth. So, people in Davis need to start talking about what they want to do, while there's still time to plan for the change. Matt Best, superintendent of the Davis public school district, discusses the choice this week on Davisville.

“We’ve got to plan for one of two scenarios. One, we see housing on the horizon and we’ve got a plan for a reboundary [of attendance areas] if those students arrive. The second path is, there is no new housing on the horizon, and we’ve got to plan to close two or three schools over the course of the next decade, and how are we going to solve that problem as a community?

“The way we’re looking at this challenge now is, the Board of Education is going to make a decision in the fall of ’26 about what the plan is, given the conditions that we have,” Best says. “Which means that by the ’27-’28 school year, we’re going to have to start to actuate some change if there’s no new development. … We can’t have any surprises. We need time as a community to talk about these challenges. We solve our problems best as a community when they’re out in the daylight.”

(The photo shows North Davis Elementary, one of eight elementary schools in the Davis Joint Unified School District.)

Last year’s idea for a new “civic information hub” in Yolo County has grown into Yolo Local, a budding project to create a new source for local information and news. This spring the project is surveying people throughout the county to get insights on the types of information people want to access about local civic life and events, but don’t necessarily know where to find as the old ways of distributing information and news continue to fragment.

Today on Davisville we hear an update about the project from Autumn Labbe-Renault, the executive director of Davis Media Access and the project’s main organizer. What Yolo Local will look like, and how it will operate, is not yet decided. That will come after the survey results are released, probably in September. Meanwhile, Autumn offers two examples of existing civic information sites she likes—Lookout in Santa Cruz and The Oaklandside, in Oakland—during today's review of what's driving this project, who's involved, and how it all might come together.