Civita Movers
New mid-rise living on an old quarry floor, which means elevators, parking structures and a booked freight window.
By the Discount Movers Team · Updated August 2026 · CAL-T #201759 issued by the BHGS · US DOT #4372335 · BBB A+ Rated
The Direct Answer
What Does A Move
In Civita Cost?
Discount Movers charges $119 an hour cash for two movers and a truck in Civita, on our own published ladder that runs to $269 an hour cash for five movers. The three hour minimum is $357, there is a flat $75 fuel fee, and there is no deposit, ever.
What moves the number here is the elevator reservation is the move: mid-rise buildings here run moves through reserved elevators, and the reservation is the fixed point everything else is planned around. The full rate card is one page, and the instant estimate returns a crew size and an hourly rate in about 30 seconds.
Housing Stock & Access
Civita Homes
& Access
Book the elevator first and the rest of a Civita move falls into place. The village is new construction on the floor and slopes of a former quarry: mid-rise condos and apartments over parking structures, connected by internal streets that did not exist fifteen years ago. Access is modern and managed, which means the move runs on reservations rather than on curb luck, and the buildings that surround the hillside park each handle those reservations their own way.
The elevator reservation is the move
Mid-rise buildings here run moves through reserved elevators, and the reservation is the fixed point everything else is planned around. We arrange the window with your building before the day and build the schedule backward from it, because a crew standing in a lobby waiting for an elevator that was never booked is the most expensive way to spend an hourly rate.
Parking structures with real clearances
Civita parks in structures, not on driveways, and structures have height limits a 26 foot truck will not clear. The truck stands at the building loading area or the nearest legal curb while the crew works the structure and elevator path. We confirm the loading position with your building rather than assuming, because two Civita buildings can handle it two different ways.
Built on a quarry, so nothing is flat for long
The village steps up the old quarry slopes, and buildings on the upper terraces sit noticeably above Friars Road. Grades inside Civita are engineered and manageable, but the approach can matter for where the truck stages and how long the path from truck to elevator runs. A photograph of your building entrance when you book settles it in a minute.
Mission Valley traffic on every side
Friars Road, Qualcomm Way and the 8 and 163 interchanges surround the village, and all of them congest at commute hours and around big events in the valley. The inside of Civita loads quickly once positioned, so timing the approach is where the savings live. We plan starts around the valley traffic rather than pretending it is not there.
New buildings protect their finishes
New construction means pristine lobbies, corridors and elevator cabs, and managers here reasonably expect them protected. We pad the elevator, protect door frames and floor paths, and treat the common areas as carefully as the furniture, which is standard for us and also usually a condition of the building letting the move happen at all.
Every Civita address is different. Send us a photo of the street and the entrance and we will tell you what the access means for your crew size, your carry and your estimate.
📞 (858) 490-0155Where We Work
Civita
Areas We Cover
From Grant Family Quarry to Quarry Falls to Civita
The ground under Civita was a sand and gravel quarry held by the Grant family for decades. Vulcan Materials was the last operator. Mining ran on the site for about seventy years, and reclamation into buildable pads was under way from 2004. The site was then graded and engineered into buildable pads before a single foundation went in. Civita today is a joint venture of Sudberry Properties and the Grant Family Trust. It was originally entitled under the name Quarry Falls and approved by the City in 2008, covering 230 acres and roughly 4,780 homes alongside commercial space and public parks. The first homes went on sale in 2011 and the first residents moved in in 2013.
For a moving crew, that history is not trivia. It is the reason the job looks the way it does. There is no inherited street grid in Civita and no housing stock older than the last fifteen years. Nothing here has a 1950s stair rail that will not take a sofa turn, or a driveway laid out before delivery trucks got wide. What replaced all of that is a managed environment: buildings with written move policies, corridors with finishes someone is accountable for, and an elevator that belongs to a schedule rather than to whoever presses the button first. The tradeoff is real. You give up curb luck and you get predictability, provided somebody does the booking.
Getting a 26-Foot Truck to Civita Boulevard
Friars Road is the spine that feeds Civita Boulevard, and there is no getting around that. Our approach is SR-163 south to the Friars Road exit, then east on Friars to Civita Boulevard. That leg keeps a loaded truck on a road built for valley volume right up to the point where it turns into the community, and it puts us at the Civita Boulevard entrance without a string of surface lights first.
Coming off I-8 instead means climbing north on Mission Center Road or Qualcomm Way to reach Friars, which runs the truck through the valley's busiest surface intersections and finishes with a turn onto Friars in traffic. We will take that leg when the origin address or a customer's schedule makes it the sensible one, but it is not our default, and on a day with a building elevator window to hit it is not where we want to be spending an hourly rate. If your origin is somewhere that makes the I-8 side unavoidable, tell us when you book so the start time accounts for it rather than absorbing it.
There Is No Road North Out of Civita
Sharp Memorial and Rady Children's sit on the mesa top north of Civita. On a map they look close enough to walk to. By road they are not, because the Franklin Ridge Road connector that was drawn to link Civita up over the ridge was never built. There is no direct road up the slope.
The actual drive is back out to Friars Road and around, either via Mission Village Drive or by getting on the freeway. This catches people constantly, and it matters more than it sounds like it should. It matters if you are moving a parent out of Civita into something near the hospitals. It matters if you are sequencing a move around medical appointments and assumed the hospital was a five-minute errand. And it matters if you are moving down into Civita from Serra Mesa and pictured the two as neighbors. They share a hillside. They do not share a road, and any move that treats them as adjacent will run long.
Civita Park, the Amphitheater and the Curb on Move Day
Civita Park on Civita Boulevard is the community's main public park, with an amphitheater, a dog park, playgrounds and public parking lots. The final phase of it was completed in 2020. It is a large part of why people choose Civita, and it is also why the curb outside it is not always there when you want it.
Those public lots are for park visitors. They are not staging for a moving truck, and on a day when something is running at the amphitheater the lots and the nearby stretch of Civita Boulevard fill in. When you book, tell us your building, which side of Civita Boulevard it faces, and anything you know to be scheduled at the park that day. We would rather position the truck once, in the spot your building's management actually wants it, than circle a loaded 26-footer looking for somewhere legal to stand while the elevator window burns.
The Recreation Center Is Not a Way In
The Civita Recreation Center is a private clubhouse for Civita homeowners with keycard access. It is not a public building and it is not a route into any residence. We raise it because it gets offered as a meeting point more often than you would expect, usually by someone who is used to giving visitors an easy landmark.
Landmarks are useful for finding Civita. They are not useful for loading it. What we need is the building address, the entrance your building's management wants moves run through, and the name and phone number of whoever holds the elevator key or the loading area code. If your building requires a resident to badge the crew through a door, that resident has to be standing there when the truck arrives, not still in traffic. A crew that cannot get through a door is a crew on the clock doing nothing.
Afternoon Heat on a Podium Deck
Civita sits on the valley wall inland of the coast and burns off the marine layer earlier than coastal San Diego does. The practical result is that a summer afternoon on an exposed podium deck, or inside a parking structure, runs warmer here than a coastal move on the same day. It is an inference from where the community sits rather than a reading off a thermometer, but our crews have felt it enough times to plan around it.
So we plan water and shade breaks into a Civita summer job, and where the building's elevator window gives us any choice we push the heavy end of the load toward the earlier part of the day. If your building will only release an afternoon window in July or August, say so when you book. We would rather send the crew prepared for an afternoon on a hot deck than treat it as a morning job that happens to start late.
When the Window Is Short, Buy Movers Rather Than Hours
A building window with a hard end time changes the arithmetic of crew size. On an ordinary job you pick a crew that fits the volume. Inside a fixed window you pick a crew that fits the clock, because the window does not stretch and the next one your building offers may be days out.
The ladder is $119 an hour cash for two movers, $169 for three, $219 for four and $269 for five, with each mover past five adding $50 an hour. The three-hour minimums are $357, $507, $657 and $807 in that order, and the fuel fee is a flat $75. A five-mover crew costs more per hour and frequently costs less in total on a windowed job, because it clears the window in one pass instead of ending with a third of your belongings sitting in a lobby and no elevator to move them with. If the volume needs a second truck, that is $150 plus a second $75 fuel charge, and it is far better known when you book than discovered at the elevator. There is no deposit at any crew size.
Moving From One Civita Building to Another
Civita is large enough, and turns over often enough, that moves inside the community are common. People go from a one-bedroom to a two-bedroom, from an apartment to a for-sale condo, from a lower building to one that faces the park. It feels like it ought to be the simplest move in San Diego. It is two moves.
You need a reserved window at the origin building and a reserved window at the destination building, and unless the same management company runs both, they will not line up on their own. Buildings here release windows on different schedules and hold different requirements for insurance paperwork. When both windows do land on the same day the driving stays inside the community's own streets and the job comes down entirely to whether the two schedules cooperate. Secure both reservations first, then call us with the date, and we will size the crew against the tighter of the two windows rather than the larger of the two apartments.
The Elementary School on Civita Boulevard
There is a neighborhood elementary school on Civita Boulevard, part of San Diego Unified. It is a genuine draw for families choosing the community, and on a weekday it is also a traffic pattern that sits directly on the street our trucks use.
Drop-off and pickup put cars and pedestrians on that stretch of Civita Boulevard at predictable points in the day, and a 26-foot truck trying to position at a building entrance in the middle of that helps nobody. Where your building's elevator reservation leaves us any latitude, we schedule the Civita arrival outside those periods. Where it does not, we say so when you book and plan a slower, more careful approach into the building rather than acting surprised on the day.
Loading a Long Distance Move Out of a Civita Mid-Rise
A long distance move out of Civita works the way it works everywhere we go, with one Civita complication. The price is one flat rate, agreed in writing before we load. There is no deposit and no figure that shifts once the crew is standing at your door.
The complication is that your load day is set by your building, not by us. Transit runs at 550 miles a day starting the day after we load, so the elevator window your building releases is the thing that fixes your delivery window, not the other way around. Anything within 200 miles, which includes Los Angeles, is delivered the same day we load. So the sequence is: get the reservation from your building, bring us the date, and we write the rate against it. We do not handle international shipments, container or POD transport, or vehicle transport, so if any of those are part of your plan, arrange them separately and tell us what is leaving with us and what is not.
What Our Crews Plan For Here
FAQ