An 87-unit, four-story condominium project planned for El Camino Real won city Planning Commission approval Thursday night.<\/p>\n
Commissioners voted 3-1, with Commissioner Michael Quinn opposed and Commissioner Steve Dalton recusing himself due to a conflict of interest, to issue the project the design review permit it needs to proceed. The development plans don\u2019t need to go before the City Council for approval.<\/p>\n
Commissioners praised the proposed location \u2014 a nearly 2-acre site just north of El Camino Real\u2019s intersection with Garden View Road between a plant nursery and an office building.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not a bad place to put a large development,\u201d Commissioner Bridget Kimball said.<\/p>\n
Commissioner Brent Whittaker said the condominiums would provide \u201ca little bit of diversity\u201d to an area that\u2019s now a \u201clong stretch\u201d of commercial businesses.<\/p>\n
While the majority of the commissioners voted to approve the project permit, commissioners raised concerns about the added traffic congestion the project might bring to busy El Camino Real. They also had questions about the developer\u2019s plans to sell the units, rather than rent them.<\/p>\n
Kimball said she worried that the new condo owners might turn them into second homes or vacation rentals, and thus not help increase area housing options. She proposed adding a condition onto the project\u2019s approval to prevent that.<\/p>\n
Quinn said that the added traffic on El Camino Real, the design of the project\u2019s entrance area, and the amount of on-site parking led him to vote against the proposed development.<\/p>\n
Project developer Nolen Communities is proposing to have a mix of units within the four-story, Camino Condo project. Plans call for six studio units, 42 one-bedroom units and 39 two-bedroom units. There will be 108 on-site parking spots as well as a pool, fitness areas and a resident lounge.<\/p>\n
Nine units will be set aside for very low income families. The current San Diego County area median income is $130,900, and the \u201cvery low\u201d rate is set at 50% of that, or about $70,000 for a family of two people.<\/p>\n
This is the second time in three years that the commissioners have approved development plans for the site. The new plans are virtually identical to what was proposed back in 2024, city principal planner Denise Russell told the commissioners Wednesday night.<\/p>\n
The previous plans were dropped because the developer \u201cwas unable to obtain funding\u201d for rentable apartments, so now it is pursuing the for-sale condos instead, a city staff report states.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"An 87-unit, four-story condominium project planned for El Camino Real won city Planning Commission approval Thursday night. Commissioners…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":439666,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[7,4601,23,3054,74,84,76,75,1696],"class_list":["post-439665","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-diego","tag-california","tag-encinitas","tag-local-news","tag-north-county","tag-san-diego","tag-san-diego-county","tag-san-diego-headlines","tag-san-diego-news","tag-top-stories-sdut"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439665","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439665"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439665\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439665"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439665"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439665"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}