Asked by a statewide local-control group whether he supports local control of land use, Encinitas District 4 candidate Brad Lefkowits answered, “Yes, of course.” A good answer, and the last unqualified sentence in his reply.
If you read the rest, he wants our local policies put “in sync with requirements that are currently being handed down from Sacramento.” He wants “as much control over our own future as the law allows.” He wants flexibility “so long as we are making good faith efforts,” a standard the state, not Encinitas, gets to judge.
Asked whether single-family neighborhoods should be protected, he says yes, then adds in the next breath: “The reality is more complicated.”
These are skillfully written answers. Every yes comes with an exit, and every exit leads to Sacramento.
That matters, because the problem is the state laws. Over the past decade, the state has stripped cities of the power to decide how much housing they need and where it goes. Local control “as the law allows” is, by design, almost none. A candidate who defines it that way isn’t promising to restore local control. He is promising to administer its absence, politely.
Test his other promises against what that law has built. Lefkowits pledges “homes that young families and our local workforce can afford.” Consider Solaris, the new apartment complex on Quail Gardens Drive. City records describe it as “multi-family rental units.”
Of its 140 units, 76 are one-bedrooms, and just six are three-bedroom units. The cheapest market-rate one-bedroom asks about $3,400 a month, which takes a household income of about $136,000 to afford. The cheapest three-bedroom takes about $214,000.
Twenty-one units are set aside as “affordable.” The building’s own advertisement defines a single person earning $97,950 as “low income.” The 21 are the justification. The other 119 are the product. Not one of the 140 was built to be owned. Statewide, an independent count from the state’s own reports found fewer than one in 380 homes completed from 2021 through 2025 was an affordable home a family could actually purchase.
That is the formula he promises to follow: four market-rate units for every “affordable” one, with the majority being apartments for rent. The rezoning alone raises the land’s value before anything is built. The rent comes later. We keep the traffic, the strained infrastructure and the inadequate evacuation routes, and the young families he promised homes; they get a lease instead.
This summer Lefkowits told a local group that Encinitas “has to comply with state law” and that he won’t support “spending taxpayer money fighting state housing laws without a realistic path to success.” He left that sentence out of his answers to the local-control group.
Consider what his test means on Clark Avenue, where 199 apartments were approved in 2022 on a site served by Union Street, about 19 feet wide, well under the state and local fire access minimums.
Because state law treats the project as “by-right,” the city’s usual review was cut short. Last November the city asked a judge whether that approval can override its duty to get fire engines in and families out. Under Lefkowits’s test, that question never gets asked.
Notice, too, what his answers leave out. Remember “the reality is more complicated”? Here is the complication he never names: SB 9, the state law that already lets most single-family lots be split and built out to four units, approved without a public hearing. A candidate who promises to protect those neighborhoods, and in the same breath promises to comply with state law, is protecting them only as far as Sacramento allows. Protecting them would mean challenging that law, and challenging it is the one thing his answers never offer.
His answer on SB 79, the new state law that upzones land near transit, follows the same pattern. He says he would have voted no. But his first point is that the law doesn’t apply to Encinitas, because our bus and train service is too infrequent to qualify.
His main objection is that it discourages the city from adding transit. The law’s assault on local control comes last, introduced with “additionally.” That isn’t a stand against the law; it’s relief that it hasn’t reached us yet.
Look for what he has not said. In his written answers, he never says our state housing allocation is too high. He never says he would challenge SB 9. He never says he would ask a judge. Each would mean challenging a state law, not administering it.
No matter how skillfully written Lefkowits’s words are written, local control ends where Sacramento’s permission ends. If his answers begin with “as the law allows,” he has told us which side of that line he stands on.
Mike Lewis
Encinitas
