State Laws Are Fueling New Home Construction in Encinitas

In 2024, the number of new homes permitted in Encinitas skyrocketed. That is exactly what state lawmakers have been wanting to happen. And it is exactly what the majority of Encinitas voters have been fighting desperately to stop.

Mayor Bruce Ehlers has been leading the fight against housing density in Encinitas for years. He said many residents are not pleased with the construction they see.

“They hate it,” Ehlers previously told me.

Ehlers would know. He was elected mayor in 2024 along with a slate of other anti-development candidates, whose singular campaign promise was to fight state housing dictates harder than previous elected officials.

But for now at least, Encinitas is a case study in how state housing laws are working as intended: They are forcing housing-resistant cities to build new homes, whether they like it or not.

Encinitas’s current building boom can all be traced back to a court decision in 2018, according to both anti-development activists like Ehlers and people who disagree with him.

At the time, Encinitas was in a major legal battle with two very different organizations. One, the Building Industry Association of San Diego, had historically been more of a conservative force in local politics. The other, San Diego Tenants United, was about as far to the left as any important local group could be.

Both sued Encinitas for not passing a state-required housing plan, which would “upzone” certain areas in order to allow for denser housing.

Cities are required to pass such plans every few years, but lawyers for BIA argued that Encinitas was out of compliance because it hadn’t passed a new housing plan since the 1990s.

Some previous Encinitas City Councils might have passed a housing plan, but there was a major impediment standing in their way. It was called Proposition A and it was designed by none other than Ehlers.

Measure A is a local law in Encinitas that requires all major upzoning to go through a vote of the people.

“Proposition A has been the only thing standing between us and previous councils running amok,” Ehlers told me. “Prop. A protects us from the ebb and flow of council majorities. It puts the people in charge of increased zoning and height limits.”

In 2016 and 2018, the Encinitas City Council brought ballot measures to the people to increase zoning. Voters shot both of them down.

That was the state of affairs when Superior Court Judge Ronald Frazier ruled on the lawsuit in December 2018. Frazier ordered that the requirements of Proposition A be frozen temporarily. He gave the City Council 120 days to pass a new housing plan, during which time the council would not need the approval of voters.

In March 2019, the Council passed a new plan — which looked much the same as the housing measure voters blocked in 2018 — to the fury of many Encinitas residents.

“The majority of voters shot this down and all you’ve done is bobble headed this back into existence,” former mayor Sheila Cameron told the Council.

The plan upzoned more than a dozen properties to increase density and height limits — and those properties are where developers are building hundreds of apartment units today.

Two major building sites that were upzoned are located along Encinitas Boulevard. At Quail Gardens Drive multiple apartment buildings are in the works which will create hundreds of new units. At another site at the intersection of Rancho Santa Fe Road hundreds more apartments are being built.

Not everyone hates the new projects.

Marco Gonzalez is an attorney who lives in Encinitas. Early in his career he represented community groups, who opposed development. But today, he’s changed his stance. He represents developers who want to build in Encinitas, because, he said, he sees dense, infill building as the primary way to get cars off the road and solve climate change.

“If you’ve spent time in other communities where three- and four-story apartments are integrated into the community, you know that nothing we’re proposing or building in Encinitas is all that remarkable,” Gonzalez said. “Long ago when Proposition A passed, [anti-development activists] decided anything over two stories would be labelled a monstrosity.”

Due to the new construction, Encinitas is now closer to meeting its state-mandated housing goals than any other city in the county.

Overall, Encinitas is required to produce 1,554 new homes by 2029. It has already permitted more than 1,265 since the current housing cycle began in 2021.

As with every city, most of those homes have been for people with above moderate income. More than 275, however, are reserved for people with “moderate,” “low” or “very low” income, compared to the area median.

Ehlers claims that this shows the state’s housing policies aren’t working. Building all these homes isn’t actually helping the affordability crisis, he says.

He likes to ask a rhetorical question: “How many million-dollar condos do I have to build to solve the affordability crisis?”

Gonzalez disagrees completely. Million-dollar condos, of the type being built in Encinitas, are nearly half the cost of the average home there, which was $1.8 million in July, according to Redfin.

But, moreover, those 275-plus affordable units wouldn’t be built at all, if it weren’t for the state’s housing laws.

“The city spent 30 years trying to dodge its obligation to build multi-family housing,” Gonzalez said. “I’m not surprised people are upset we’re finally building [it.]”

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