Journal

Fanita Ranch: where Santee's 3,000-home question actually stands

Written by Sofia Azizi, CA DRE# 02108624 · Updated 2026-07-30

Approved three times, stopped in court three times — most recently by two rulings on the same June 2026 day. What the courts actually decided about Santee’s largest-ever housing proposal, what they didn’t, and what the site’s status is right now. Revised as the record moves.

What is Fanita Ranch, and how big is it really?

Fanita Ranch is a proposal by HomeFed for about 2,638 acres of open space on Santee’s northern edge: roughly 2,949 homes in three villages under the plan with a school site — 3,008 without one — against a general-plan baseline the courts put at about 1,395 units for the same land. That gap between what the plan allows and what is proposed is the entire fight.

Scale explains the heat. Santee counts 22,614 housing units in the state Department of Finance’s 2026 estimates, so the proposal amounts to roughly an eighth of the existing city in one project — on hillsides the city’s plan designates for much less, with about 63 percent of the site kept as habitat preserve under the city’s description. Supply at that scale would move a small city’s market whichever way the record resolves — the reason the Santee guide calls it the variable rather than a fact.

How many times has Fanita Ranch been approved and struck down?

The Santee City Council has approved Fanita Ranch three times — September 23, 2020, September 14, 2022, and June 11, 2025 — and a court has blocked the project after each approval, most recently in two rulings issued the same day, June 4, 2026.

Each round leaned on a different legal path. The 2020 approval amended the general plan directly — then a citizen referendum qualified against the amendment and a court found the environmental review inadequate. The 2022 approval skipped the plan amendment, relying instead on a city “Essential Housing Program” certification adopted by urgency ordinance. The 2025 approval added 445 age-restricted units and invoked density-bonus provisions. Understanding that sequence is what makes the court record legible — each ruling answers the specific workaround in front of it.

What did the courts actually decide about Fanita Ranch?

Three separate holdings stopped Fanita Ranch, on three different grounds: a 2022 ruling found the environmental report’s wildfire-evacuation analysis inadequate; an October 2024 judgment set aside the second approval for conflicting with Santee’s general plan; and on June 4, 2026, the Court of Appeal affirmed that set-aside while the trial court separately ruled against the third approval’s density-bonus path.

The details resist slogans from either side. The 2022 ruling turned on evacuation disclosure — including a claimed escape route on a street that dead-ends — but the 2024 judgment expressly spared the report’s wildfire chapter while faulting the general-plan analysis. And the 2026 appellate opinion, while affirming that the approvals must be set aside, actually reversed the one elections-law finding — no court has ordered a public vote. What the opinion did say, pointedly, is that approving the project without a plan amendment “bypassed the will of the voters as expressed in Measure N.”

Does Measure N mean Santee voters get to decide Fanita Ranch?

Measure N — passed by Santee voters 51.5 to 48.5 percent in November 2020 — requires voter approval for development that increases residential density beyond what the general plan allows, which is why every post-2020 version of Fanita Ranch has tried to reach approval without amending the general plan.

The mechanics matter: a general-plan amendment is the act that triggers a Measure N vote, so the project’s recent history is a search for a lawful route around that trigger — the Essential Housing certification in 2022, density-bonus and senior-housing provisions in 2025 — and the courts have now rejected the first and, at the trial level, the second. The practical consequence: either a future version conforms to the existing plan’s capacity, or it amends the plan and faces the electorate, or a higher court changes the analysis. Those are the branches to watch.

Can Fanita Ranch start construction now?

Fanita Ranch in Santee is not entitled and not clear to grade as of late July 2026: the affirmed writ orders all project approvals set aside and suspends any activity that would change the physical environment until the defects are corrected, no public vote is scheduled, and no construction timeline exists.

HomeFed’s stated position after the June 2026 rulings, to East County Magazine, was that it is “looking at all our options”; no petition to the state Supreme Court had been reported as of this writing. For Santee owners and buyers the honest framing is unchanged: a 3,000-home variable with no date attached, worth tracking through the city’s project page and the court dockets rather than through advocacy from either direction. This page updates as the record does.

The chronology above is from the Court of Appeal’s June 4, 2026 opinion in case D085121, the superior-court judgment and writ the City of Santee posted with its project file, the city’s hearing records and CEQA notices, and California Department of Finance housing estimates, as of July 2026 — with party statements attributed to the parties. Litigation status changes; this page is revised as the record moves.

Published 2026-07-30