Sara Libby’s May 17 San Francisco Chronicle column on Encinitas is a case study in journalistic malpractice. Her depiction of our community as a “rich beach town” waging an “anti-housing insurgency” is not only wrong — it’s offensive.
Encinitas is not some gilded fortress of wealth. It’s a diverse and eclectic coastal town, home to surfers, seniors, artists, small businesses, mobile home parks, modest apartments, and yes, single-family neighborhoods.
Property values have risen over the decades, as they have across coastal California, but most long-term residents are not speculators or elitists. They’re families who love their community and want housing solutions that respect local context and infrastructure.
To reduce civic engagement and support for local control to a “temper tantrum” is a cheap rhetorical trick that ignores the real concerns behind it: the state’s increasingly authoritarian approach to housing policy. State mandates are stripping cities of planning authority while delivering little in the way of genuine affordability. That’s not NIMBYism. That’s rational skepticism.
Worse, Libby cherry-picks inflammatory comments and paints them as representative of an entire city. That’s lazy at best, dishonest at worst. The suggestion that Encinitas residents oppose housing and helping the homeless is an unfair conflation — one that ignores the many efforts in the city to support transitional housing, services, and long-term planning rooted in compassion and accountability.
California’s housing affordability crisis is real. But solving it requires more than soundbites and scapegoating. Demonizing cities like Encinitas may score ideological points, but it won’t build a single affordable home.
Mike Lewis
Encinitas
2 comments
This one woman’s OPINION is meaningless and it was right to call it out. This is the problem with today’s media, and why the divide is so great. People believe the “news” they read, when it is mostly nothing more than one-sided propaganda, an Opinion piece, from fools like this, even CBS news, 60-minutes, MSNBC, and the likes.
Californians up and down the state are against one party-rule, top down state mandates/dictates, and this includes “state housing law”, and what it is doing to our communities. In 2026, hopefully voters finally wake up and replace the folks making these policies in Sacramento, that rob cities of local planning control – and far more.
Absolutely.
State Control over local housing only benefits wealthy developers and the politicians they own.
Looking at you, Catherine Blakespear, Toni Atkins, Scott Weiner, Gavin Newsom and the rest of The Developer Party.