Like so many of us in Encinitas, I’m the guy who moved here for the luxury of working, playing, raising a family, playing with the kids, and now with grandkids — all the things an old guy does after living the dream with my head in the sand for nearly 50 years.
But odd things are happening in our town, so I’ve been asking a few questions. Here’s what I’ve learned.
The politicians in Sacramento have established “central planning” for our city and every city in California, specifically our neighborhoods, under the false pretext that their ideology will deliver more affordable housing. They have executed a land grab of unbelievable and ever-expanding proportion.
This is not theory or what they plan to do in the future; this has already happened. The investment you thought you were making, arguably the single largest and most important investment you’ve ever made, buying into a neighborhood where you wanted to raise your family and grow old, has ALREADY been hijacked, stolen from you by the people currently in power at the state capitol.
Your investment in your little slice of heaven is not what it was. Your investment is now a planned stack-and-pack, high-density, traffic-gridlocked metropolis. Encinitas’s future is not under your City Planning Department’s control, your City Council’s Control, or worse yet, not under any form of local control. Your city planning, like every other city in California today, is under the control of a misguided state.
What does state control mean? It means the community you thought you invested in is now in the hands of the ideologues and their high-density agenda. This is not an idea that works; it is an experiment that has proven not to work. Manhattan, New York, Chicago, LA, Santa Monica, Vancouver, and London have among the highest housing costs per square foot in the world.
And if you thought it couldn’t get worse, it does. The state caps the number of parking spaces a city can require of the builder for all this construction: one off-street space per house, and ZERO parking requirements for the ADUs and structures near “Transit Centers.”
How’s parking in town now? It’s going to get worse. Pending legislation (SB 79) allows high-rise towers within a 1/2 mile of transit stations and specific bus stops.
If your home is within that radius, your neighborhood is now a high-density Transit Center. Over the past five years, Sacramento politicians have been quietly passing hundreds of bills that together amount to a state land grab unlike any you have ever seen outside of Ukraine.
The irony is that your politicians are pitching this under the banner of “affordable housing.” These new laws have had the opposite impact, reducing affordability as builders rationalize their high land and building costs with higher square-foot rents and selling prices.
The state has gifted big money, encouraging investors to invest in a failed ideology, rather than encouraging cities and neighbors to invest in their own neighborhoods.
Like cutting down a 1000-year-old Redwood tree, once our neighborhoods are cut down, they’re gone and will never return. Now is the time to invest in protecting your neighborhood, because others are investing millions to destroy it.
This is not a red or blue issue. This is a California lifestyle voter issue that requires your attention. The ideologues in Sacramento need to go! Vote them out.
Please look into ourneighborhoodvoices.com.
Mike Lewis
Encinitas
