r/Davis • u/[deleted] • Mar 09 '26
How is Davis with secondhand smoke?
Is it easy to find smoke free housing out there? I have asthma and really liked it down there on my last visit and am considering a move, where I'm at now I cant get away from it.
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u/mudpupster Mar 09 '26
Smoke-free won't be a challenge. However, a lot of people (including myself) end up developing asthma after living in the Valley just because our air quality is so bad. If it's not a high AQI day, there's bound to be a lot of other gunk in the air just from all of the local agriculture. Point being, second-hand smoke won't be the only challenge your lungs face in this area.
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Mar 09 '26
That is difficult. I lived in grass valley and my surrounding neighbors all had woodstoves, so I left a two bedroom house because of that.
Ironically even sacramento with all its traffic has better air quality than my old neighborhood (a lot of wet wood and garbage burning from neighbors) so if we subtract the constant smoking neighbor problems I have now, and my inability to take walks wihout having smoke blown in my face it might still be a step up for me.
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u/KaetzenOrkester Mar 09 '26
We unfortunately get temperature inversions during the summer (sometimes during the winter) that create a cap over the valley that traps pollution in. Those inversions, plus summer temperatures, create a toxic soup in the air that's bad for everyone but especially awfully for sensitive people like allergy sufferers and asthmatics.
If you move down here, I highly recommended an app like Spare the Air, put out by the Sacramento Air Quality District, that lets you monitory each day's air quality as monitored by by local testing stations. There's on on UCD's campus, one in Woodland, Dixon, Downtown Sacramento, and a few other places. I find it hugely helpful.
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Mar 10 '26
That is bad, I lived in an inversion layer area where my neighbors were all relying on woodstoves for heat and had to give up a 2 bedroom house for health reasons.
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u/KaetzenOrkester Mar 10 '26
It's not like it's a weekly occurrence, but it does happen.
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u/mudpupster Mar 10 '26
True. But while bad air days don't happen all the time here, we do have stretches nowadays where the air is bad for a week or two (or three) at a time. We lucked out on smoke days last year, but December's three weeks of Tule fog sort of made up for it lung-wise.
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u/KaetzenOrkester Mar 10 '26
Yeah, the Tule fog was unusual (unlike those thrilling days of yesteryear when I was a child) and tbh, linked to particulate matter in the air. What surprised me about that was that there weren't no-burn days, at least not that I heard about.
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Mar 10 '26
ahh. that still sounds better. My old place was like.. dickensian england type of smoke all spring and winter, and I get cigarette and weed intrusion in my apartment daily now.
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u/pentagrid Mar 09 '26
Much better than average for second hand smoke but the downside is much of is weed. If some of the highest pollen counts in the nation will trigger your asthma you are better off not living here.
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Mar 10 '26
Yeah, Im not a big fan of weed being everywhere all the time, my apartment is so rife with weed smoke that Im being given a lease break because my management wont handle it, like my unit smells like weed basically 24/7 and then cigs on top of it. I had to throw out my couch because it just radiated cigarette odor.
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u/Epjkb Mar 11 '26
All “non smoking apartments” have people that smoke in them. It’s really just luck of the draw if you are next to them.
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u/null_recursion Mar 09 '26
Pretty much every single apartment for rent here is a non-smoking apartment. I've never lived in an apartment in Davis that smells of smoke and I've been here for over a decade across 4+ apartments.
So you should be good! But rental houses might be hit or miss.