Long time Piggington browser, recentish Leucadian. I’ll bite and say that some of the more pretentious or more conservative-skewing crowd (based anecdotally on convos with friends, their parents who also own in the area, and people I know who have passed on either 1Channel Island or Saxony Condos for explicitly this reason) are unhappy about the houseless persons parking lot on Saxony where people living out of their cars can park on the Leichtag property overnight. Frankly, it would not bother me and I think it’s sort of naive to expect all this land to either be undeveloped forever or only developed for houses well-off people can afford without concessions to the worse-off. Maybe that’s me being a hippie.
We too are now living in a smaller newish (~Y2k) Leucadia area and we indeed love “funky town” though I would say about half our friends would rather have more *house* space in Encinitas Ranch/The Ranch/La Costa Oaks for the +/- highish 1mms or low 2mms. There are people who couldn’t care less about being walking v. driving distance to the beach and majority non-chain restaurants and I couldn’t blame them for not wanting to pay the premium for less house. Even heard an acquaintance get drunk at a get-together a few years ago and confess that they could never do Leucadia because they wanted a strong HOA. We also have no amenities (golf, pool, tennis) so if that is your jam better go east.
Also candidly if we had school-age kids it would be stupid to not want to pick a La Costa Valley, The Ranch, Arroyo Vista, Santa Trails area where they can walk to school K-6 or even K-12 versus having to drive to Capri or Paul Ecke and now even middle school (head hurts trying to remember OakCrest or Diegueno–feel like you flip a coin LOL) since there is no longer a bus.
As always it’s different strokes for different folks. Having done the La Costa area thing when kids were younger it has an undeniable appeal to have the children walking distance to K-12 and at least at the time ECC and OPE (and maybe the one by Sonata) and Diegueno were the best schools hands down. Now that our family is aged up the appeal is much less so but we are very beachy folk and not golfers or horse fans in the slightest.
