San Elijo Hills' town square has been under construction, on and off, since before most of its current homeowners moved in. The retail buildings around the fountain opened in 2018. The building across the street, with the vet clinic and the dance studio, opened in 2022. A third phase is now sitting in front of the City of San Marcos, and it will not add a single new place to eat, get a coffee, or pick up dog food. It will add housing. Whatever fills the last open parcel next to the plaza, the commercial side of this town square is about as built out as it is going to get.
That matters this particular week, because Saturday morning the plaza turns into a staging area. The 2026 Double Peak Challenge, the community's annual 10K, 5K and kids' trail trot, starts at San Elijo Hills Park on September 26, with runners fanning out across the same trail network that makes up more than half the neighborhood's acreage. If you've lived here long enough to have a standing coffee order at the fountain, you already know the plaza looks finished. It is not, quite. It is between phases, and the phase still coming is not the one most people are picturing.
A Town Center Built in Three Chapters
San Elijo Hills was platted as a 1,921-acre master-planned community when the first residents moved in back in 2000, with a 70-acre town center envisioned from the start as a mix of shops, schools, a park and what the original plan called urban-style residences, all wrapped around a classic town square. It took nearly two decades for that plan to become a place you could actually walk to.
Here's the rough shape of how it happened:
| Year | What Went In at the Town Center |
|---|---|
| 2000 | First residents move into San Elijo Hills |
| 2018 | Town Center Phase 1 opens on 5.4 acres: four commercial buildings, roughly a dozen retail shops and restaurants, plus 12 three-story townhomes attached to the center |
| 2022 | Parkview (Phase 2) opens across from the central park and fountain: a 7,850-square-foot building housing a veterinary clinic, a chiropractic office and a dance studio |
| 2026 | A proposal is filed with the city for Lot 3 of the town center's parcel map: 31 apartments in a five-story building with a rooftop deck and a ground-floor recreation area |
Same developer behind all three chapters, working the same original footprint. Ambient Communities built Phase 1, built Parkview, and is now the name attached to the Lot 3 filing. That is not a new builder discovering an opening. It is the same plan, reaching its last page.
What's Actually Open Around the Fountain Right Now
If you have not walked the plaza lately, the retail side reads as full. The Phase 1 buildings at 1620 San Elijo Road carry an Albertsons, a Starbucks, a CycleBar, and a run of smaller tenants that includes SETS Kitchen, Sourdough & Co. and Shane's Pizza & Pints. Across the street in Parkview, San Elijo Hills Veterinary Clinic, 100% Chiropractic and GC Dance Studio round out the health-and-fitness side of the mix. As of a March 2026 CBRE leasing listing for the Phase 1 buildings, there was exactly one suite left in the entire 23,333-square-foot center: 1,033 square feet next to Starbucks.
One open storefront in a shopping center that has been filling in for eight years is not really an opening. It is a rounding error. That is the practical reason the next phase went to housing instead of another restaurant lease. There was nowhere left in the commercial footprint to put one.
The Lot That's Left
The filing itself is specific. According to the City of San Marcos planning department, the project on the table is 31 apartments inside a five-story building, with a roof deck and a passive recreation area at ground level, sited on Lot 3 of the parcel map that also holds the existing town center. It is smaller than a lot of the multifamily projects moving through North County right now, and that scale is the point. This isn't a developer stretching for a bigger footprint. It's the closing move on a 5.4-acre commercial parcel that was mapped out, in engineering documents from the original build, to hold exactly this many buildings and no more.
For residents who've watched the plaza fill in slowly over two decades, that context is worth having before the project shows up on a city agenda and reads like unexpected density. It isn't unexpected. It's the parcel the plan always had room for, arriving four years after the last one.
The Race Turns the Rest of the Plan Into a Course
The commercial side of San Elijo Hills tops out at that 5.4-acre footprint. The open space side does not work anywhere near as tightly. More than half of the community's original 1,921 acres, 1,115 of them, were set aside permanently as open space, laced with 18 miles of hiking and biking trail and anchored by the 200-acre Double Peak Park at the top of the community.
That's the ground the Double Peak Challenge actually uses. The race runs a 10K timed course, a 5K untimed run or walk, and a kids' trail trot, starting Saturday, September 26 at San Elijo Hills Park, with the schedule and course details posted on the race's own site. Proceeds benefit two local nonprofits, Friends of San Marcos and the Boys and Girls Club of San Marcos, which is part of why the race pulls neighbors who would not otherwise call themselves runners. It is one of the few weekends a year when the town center and the trail system function as a single event rather than two separate amenities you happen to live near.
Set the two halves of the master plan next to each other and the split makes more sense. The developer capped the commercial acreage on purpose and put the difference into trail miles and park acreage instead. One side of that ledger filled in with shops over eight years. The other side fills in every September with a starting line.
Why a Housing-Only Lot Isn't a Loss for the Plaza
It's easy to hear "31 units, five stories" and assume the town square is losing ground to density it didn't ask for. The math built into the original plan argues the opposite. San Elijo Hills never intended its commercial core to grow past a fixed footprint, and it never intended all the remaining land in the town center to become more retail. The blueprint called for shops, a park, two schools and urban-style residences from day one, in that mix, on that scale. Lot 3 is the residences catching up to the rest of the sentence.
None of this changes what the plaza feels like on a Tuesday morning coffee run or a Saturday spent watching kids cross the finish line at the trail trot. What it changes is the assumption that the last empty lot in your town center is up for grabs. It isn't. It was accounted for in 2000, and it's finally showing up on a city planning agenda a quarter century later.
If you're weighing what any of this means for your own address inside San Elijo Hills, whether it's the way a five-story building on the last lot might change sightlines from a nearby street, or simply understanding how a built-out town center tends to hold its value compared to one still filling in, Christine La Bounty tracks these details across San Diego's planned communities block by block. A conversation costs nothing and comes with no pressure to list. It just means you'll know what's actually happening before it shows up as a headline.
