Measure S, originally known as the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, was considered by voters in the city of Los Angeles in the March 7, 2017, election. It would have imposed a two-year moratorium on development projects seeking variances from some aspects of the city's zoning code, made changes to the environmental impact statement requirements in the code, and required the city to update its comprehensive plan during the moratorium. The measure failed, with over two-thirds voting against it.
Proponents said it was necessary to curb high-density development that would have adversely affected the city's suburban character and favored gentrification at the expense of affordable housing. They also charged that city government had been corrupted, citing recent disclosures of campaign contributions to mayor Eric Garcetti and other officials from developers with large projects awaiting city approval that those contributors had attempted to conceal. Opponents, who included many advocacy groups for the homeless as well as the city's business community, building trades unions and developers, said that while the measure addressed some real problems, it went too far and would have not only prevented the construction of new affordable housing but made the city's overall quality of life worse by aggravating an existing housing shortage. They questioned whether the money spent by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation (AHF) to get the initiative on the ballot was really related to the foundation's mission, and suggested that it was really motivated by AHF director Michael Weinstein's desire to block a development that would have dominated the view from his office window.
Backers had originally intended for the initiative to be on the ballot in November 2016, but later decided to postpone it to March, when the city's mayor and some council members were up for re-election, a move opponents said was really meant to put the measure in front of an electorate believed more likely to support it. Since those races were not vigorously contested, Measure S received the greatest attention from the media and voters. Both sides accused the other of deception. Proponents filed a suit alleging that opponents overstated the claimed negative impact of the measure in material submitted for the city's voters' guide, while opponents highlighted false claims of support attributed to Garcetti and actor Leonardo DiCaprio. The sheriff's department also attempted to block a mailer in support of Measure S designed to look like an eviction notice after many recipients mistook it for a real one.
A fundamental question underlying Measure S was not just its provisions, but the direction the city itself would take. Supporters invoked its late 20th-century image as a highly suburbanized city of detached single-family homes whose occupants primarily used their cars to get around; opponents looked toward a future as a more densely developed city where residents of the densely populated areas relied as much on buses and Metro Rail. Its failure, coupled with voters' approval of a half-cent sales tax increase the previous fall to fund expansions to regional mass transit systems, was seen as a turning point in the city's history.
Background
Measure S is the most recent contest in a long-running struggle over the character of Los Angeles as a city.
Historically suburban character of Los Angeles and zoning controversies
"Los Angeles has been a place of multiple centers: religious and secular, indigenous and colonial, European and mestizo, and familiar and alien," public television station KCET said in a 2011 account of the city's development since the early 19th century. Unlike other American cities, which grew outward from a historical core and only later acquired suburbs, Los Angeles had started as a series of suburbs, with small communities such as Pasadena, Whittier and Long Beach starting up at some distance from Los Angeles in the late 19th century. Recounting how the efforts of developers like Henry E. Huntington and Harry Chandler and the water supply system developed by William Mulholland shaped the city, the Los Angeles Times later said "Builders, more than planners, facilitated the city's growth spurts, driven by one singular vision: Los Angeles would be a city of small houses on small lots."
This pattern of development continued as the city's population grew explosively in the early 20th century, fed by rail access and the promise of a relaxed, almost utopian lifestyle amid a warm, gentle climate and natural setting, along with an early adaptation to widespread automobile use. High-rise development remained largely confined to downtown, with newly settled areas retaining the small-scale suburban feel that had distinguished the city's earlier days, resulting in "an ethnically diverse and complex metropolis in which no single economic or cultural center dominates a region that is neither conventionally suburban in character nor fully urban."
The city first established a zoning code in 1921. By the end of the decade complaints that political corruption was leading to spot zoning, or single-property changes to use, for commercial establishments, undermining the purpose of the zoning code, were already abundant; they continued even as the real estate market slowed in the Great Depression. After the war, with federal housing subsidies driving construction, zoning was often changed when actual uses differed; most of the farms of the San Fernando Valley disappeared by the 1960s to make way for residential development. Neighborhood homeowners' associations gained political power through opposing spot zoning; by the end of the decade, public outrage over a developer's indictment for bribing officials to get a favorable zoning change led to amendments to the city charter forbidding spot zoning.
In the late 1970s, following the enactment of Proposition 13, which capped property tax assessments until the property changed owners, Los Angeles residents began advocating for slow growth and neighborhood preservation. A new General Plan for the city lowered density limits from a floor area ratio of 10:1, a level comparable to the New York City borough of Manhattan, in accordance with older plans for a city of 10 million, to 4.5:1, with most high-rise development confined to certain areas within the city. However, the city government, dominated by pro-growth interests, resisted implementing the necessary zoning changes. Despite the state legislature passing a 1978 law ordering the city to bring its zoning into compliance with the new General Plan by 1982, two years after that deadline barely one-quarter of the necessary changes had been made.
With the city's zoning code still largely reflecting older higher-density aspirations, projects were approved that residents assumed were not supposed to be built in the places they were. "Although property values continued to soar," wrote historian Mike Davis in City of Quartz, his 1990 social history of the city, "neighborhoods were Manhattanized beyond recognition." Skyscrapers were built in North Hollywood and Universal City, while Ventura Boulevard in Encino became home to the high-rise American offices of many Japanese banks. In 1986, the signatures of 100,000 voters put Proposition U, essentially cutting density limits everywhere in the city in half, and dividing it into 35 distinct neighborhoods, on the ballot. It passed later that year with 70% of the vote. Afterwards, it was later estimated that the city's zoning could allow for at most a population of 4.3 million.
Implementation of the General Plan was soon sidetracked; after the 1992 riots, city governments prioritized public safety over all their other responsibilities. Over the next decades, however, preferences in buildings and the city's needs changed, but the General Plan did not, despite a schedule that called for it to be updated every ten years. The city council increasingly dealt with this by spot zoning, usually granting exceptions to height, density, or even land use restrictions.
The provisions of Proposition U, originally intended to slow commercial development, eventually began to restrict residential construction as well. The city's housing stock grew at less than half the rate of other American metropolitan areas between 1980 and 2010. In 2005 city council eliminated the decennial requirement for updating the General Plan in favor of a "New Community Plan", but budgetary limitations brought on by the Great Recession shortly afterwards meant that by 2015, only two of the city's ten regional plans had been updated.
In the late 2000s, mayor Antonio Villaraigosa called for a future Los Angeles of "elegant density", focusing on transit-oriented development. The implementation of this vision was challenged when Hollywood residents blocked an update to that community's Specific Plan that would have allowed for higher density and taller buildings, arguing that tourists came to the area to see the Walk of Fame, not skyscrapers, and that a recent decline in the neighborhood's population was at odds with predictions of future growth. City officials insisted that census projections that almost 50,000 more people would be living in Hollywood by 2030 justified the plan. Eric Garcetti, the city councilman for the area, said that the proposed plan accommodated growth instead of creating it.
By 2015, the city's population was approaching 4 million, nearly the limit allowed by the post-Proposition U zoning. With 80% of the city's residential land zoned for single-family homes, compared to only a quarter of New York or San Francisco, both more densely populated than Los Angeles, the homeowners' associations in more affluent communities used that political power to file lawsuits under the California Environmental Quality Act against the approval of larger new developments in their neighborhoods. A later study found that many of the projects so challenged were urban infill, multi-family residential developments of the kind considered to reduce urban sprawl.
2015 developments
In 2015, Miami-based Crescent Heights was seeking permission from the city to build the Palladium Residences, 731 luxury condominium units in two 30-story towers on the lot of the recently restored Hollywood Palladium theater. Michael Weinstein, head of the AHF, the world's largest private organization devoted to treating AIDS, had frequently opposed the project at community meetings. He complained the buildings were too high and would impair the view of the Hollywood Hills from his office on the 21st floor of the Sunset Media Center on Sunset Boulevard. After a private meeting with Crescent's local representative in July of that year failed to resolve the issues, Weinstein threatened not only to file a suit against the city to block the project but sponsor, through the AHF, an initiative to change the city's zoning code in ways that would prevent the construction of projects like his.
Later that year, Weinstein asked the board of the AHF, which had approved the organization's sponsorship of previous initiatives like Measure B and Proposition 60, requiring the use of condoms during sex scenes by actors in pornographic films, to support an initiative aimed at reforming the zoning code to prevent further large developments from skirting the intent of the city's zoning. "There was general consensus", said chair Cynthia Davis. "We agreed with what he shared with us."
2016 campaign to place initiative on ballot