Encinitas joins ‘Neighborhood Voices' effort to overrule state development rule

The Encinitas City Council recently voted 4-1 to support the Our Neighborhood Voicse initiative, a statewide effort to restore local control over land use and housing developments through a California constitutional amendment on the 2026 ballot.

Bruce Ehlers, the mayor of Encinitas, characterized the initiative as "a fight to maintain our standard of living and quality of life." He told NBC 7 that the state is continually and increasingly usurping his city's ability to control its own land use and zoning.

"The state keeps edicting new laws that reduce our ability to protect our own city from overdevelopment," Ehlers said.

The mayor told NBC 7 that, while he understands the need to provide more affordable housing, state housing rules are not necessarily the way to achieve that goal

"If you think that density is a surrogate for affordability, then Hong Kong, San Franciso, New York and L.A. would be the cheapest places to live in the world, and they are not,” Ehlers said.

The initiative comes as three new high-density housing projects are being built in Encinitas, nearly 1,000 residential units, with each project including affordable housing units.

Ehlers said the vote in support of the Our Neighborhood Voices initiative is a proactive mov,e because in the years ahead, the city will have to "up-zone" again, leading to more state edicts for more housing. The mayor also said his city has allies across California that are facing similar housing issues. In fact, Oceanside and San Marcos have joined Encinitas in endorsing the Our Neighborhood Voices initiative.

"The timing is right now," Ehlers said. "You have to pass an initiative statewide, it takes quite a bit of effort to get it off the ground and win."

The resolution did not pass unanimously. Joy Lyndes, the deputy mayor of Encinitas, was the lone dissenting vote on the city council.

"I don’t support Our Neighborhood Voices initiative because it’s like using a sledgehammer to push a tack in,” Lyndes tells NBC 7.

"I also have housing concerns, but Our Neighborhood Voices is not the right tool at the state level to go in right direction for housing reform," Lyndes said.

Lyndes, who's been working with SANDAG on regional housing needs, believes regional cooperation is key to addressing the issue.

"We have the opportunity to aggregate together all of the cities in the county to ask for reforms in the county and to ask the state to bring forward solutions that work better for us so we can have the level of local decision-making that our constituents want us to have but still achieves the objectives of affordable housing," Lyndes said. "I think there are a lot of ways of doing that. We can do it in a different way than the state is currently doing that."

Lyndes is fearful that if Encinitas keeps positioning itself as a hard "no" on housing, the state will actually increase housing mandates on the city.

“I’m afraid what this does — because we don’t have diplomacy to come to the table — is that it will not solve the problem that we intend to solve and it could make it worse,” Lyndes said.