A program that allows homeless people who are living in their vehicles to spend the night in the Encinitas Senior & Community Center parking lot will continue at least throughout 2025.
Encinitas City Council unanimously voted last week to a contract extension for the Safe Parking Lot program. They said they would even be willing to grant Jewish Family Service, which operates the program and other similar ones in San Diego County, a longer-term contract, but JFS officials said they only wanted to go through the end of the year because that’s how long they currently have money to fund it.
Housed within the lower portion of the community center’s parking lot, JFS’s program provides 25 parking spots where people who are temporarily living in their vehicles can park overnight. Program participants have to leave the lot each morning, and all of them must undergo an off-site, prescreening process before they can participate in the program.
The city’s efforts to end its homeless problems have been controversial of late. The newly elected majority on the City Council has been pushing for change, arguing that Encinitas needs to rethink its past mindset on adding social service programs and start emphasizing policing efforts in order to end criminal behavior by homeless people, including drug use, vandalism, littering and illegal camping. However, the council was united in its for keeping the overnight parking program.
The people who use it typically are “the transitional” homeless — people who have recently become homeless and would like to change that status — they’re not what’s termed “the chronically” homeless, Mayor Bruce Ehlers said. The parking lot s are willing to accept social service workers’ help to improve their situation, he added, as he explained why he was ive of continuing it.
Councilmember Jim O’Hara, who was elected in November, said he has been going through the city’s Homeless Action Plan creating a list of “successes” and “failures,” and the parking lot program is on his success list. There is only one issue currently with it, he said.
“I wish the usage was higher, (but) it is what it is,” he said.
In 2024, nightly occupancy rates averaged 19 vehicles, or about 76 percent of the spaces, JFS records indicate. The lot served a total of 36 individuals, with 16 “positive exits” where people ultimately were helped into permanent housing.
JFS opened its Encinitas Safe Parking Lot in early 2020. It was initially housed within the large, private Leichtag Foundation property and accessed via a gated entrance on Quail Gardens Drive.
In 2022, the lot relocated to the lower parking lot of the city’s community center. The decision to allow JFS to relocate to the community center parking lot was initially controversial, in part because the new location was near many youth-serving facilities, including preschools and Oakcrest Middle School. However, in the years since, there have been no reported problems with the facility, the city’s mayor and a representative for the county Sheriff’s department said.
Councilmember Joy Lyndes, who voted against the proposed move three years ago, said that she now regrets that decision. In the years since, she’s visited the site and talked to the program organizers, and “I just think it’s a marvelous program that has shown us some success,” she said.
