| Measure S – 2017 | |
| Neighborhood Integrity Initiative | |
| Yes: | 121101 |
| No: | 288012 |
| Total: | 409113 |
| Electorate: | 2030173 |
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 of those who voted on it voting against it.[1]
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.[2] 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.[3] 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.[4] [5]
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.[6] 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.[7]
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,[8] was seen as a turning point in the city's history.[9]
Measure S is the most recent contest in a long-running struggle over the character of Los Angeles as a city.[10]
"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."[11]
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.[12]
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,[13] in accordance with older plans for a city of 10 million,[14] 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.[15] 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.[16] 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.[17]
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.[18]
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[19] 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.[20]
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[21] 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.[22]
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."[23]
By March, the AHF had recruited journalist Jill Stewart to leave her post as managing editor of LA Weekly and serve as campaign manager for what was named the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. It formed the Coalition to Preserve Los Angeles (CPLA) to support it. While the original plan had been to have it on the ballot in that November's general election, in the middle of the month, the CPLA announced in a news conference on the steps of City Hall that they were instead planning to have it on the March 2017 ballot, at the same time as the city's next elections for mayor and city council.[24]
Weinstein said that the change in timetable reflected an "overcrowded" fall ballot, with that year's presidential election, races for Congress and the state legislature, as well as 20 other initiatives and propositions before voters. "The Neighborhood Integrity Initiative is a city issue, better suited for a city election, which we will have in March 2017." With city officials on the ballot as well, it was suggested that the initiative would force candidates for those seats to take positions on the issues it raised. Opponents suggested the change was meant to ensure an older, whiter and smaller electorate than that which votes in presidential election years, one likely to be more responsive to the arguments for Measure S, would consider it.
In May 2016 a poll found that 7% more potential voters were opposed to the measure than in support of it. However, 19% remained uncommitted.[25] This was potentially enough to swing the vote in supporters favor, especially since turnout in Los Angeles's March elections is historically around 10% of the city's electorate (in March 2016, only 8.6% of voters participated).[26]
The initiative would need over 61,000 signatures by early September to qualify for the ballot. By that time the CPLA had collected 104,000. Before city council voted on whether to adopt the measure or put it on the ballot, the two options given under the city charter, the CPLA met with Eric Garcetti, now mayor, to ask if he or council were prepared to institute measures on their own to control development. He offered only to provide more public notice of otherwise closed meetings between city officials, developers and lobbyists, a reform the CPLA considered inadequate, so the initiative was placed on the March ballot.[27]
Opponents organized as well. Before the initiative was placed on the ballot, the Coalition to Protect L.A. Neighborhoods & Jobs (CPLANJ) was formed to work against it. In addition to business groups the group's members included Laborers' Union Local 300 and nonprofit organizations that advocated for affordable housing and the interests of the poor. "People who do not agree on other issues are coming together to put a stop to this," said a spokesman. Most of the $800,000 the coalition had raised in the first half of 2015 came from four developers—Crescent Heights, whose Palladium project Weinstein had launched the initiative in response to, was the largest single donor through its wholly owned limited liability corporation for that project; other major donors of note included Lowe Enterprises and developer and local philanthropist Eli Broad.[28]
The debate around the initiative was seen not just as one about its provisions, or even the city's zoning, but of contrasting visions of the city. LA Weekly described it as:
The initiative proposed the following actions:[29] [30]
Both supporters and opponents agreed that Los Angeles had been undergoing a severe housing crisis since the end of the Great Recession. While the city's population had grown, surpassing four million late in 2016 by official estimates, and its economy had added, and would continue to add, a commensurate number of jobs, a study by Harvard University's Joint Center for Housing Studies concluded that the city had 382,000 units less than what it needed to accommodate very low-income renters.[31] And while rents in Los Angeles were lower than those in New York City and San Francisco, they were less affordable, since about half of Angelenos rented compared to only a third of all Americans and those Angelenos made less money than most other American renters. As a result, a 2014 study by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs[32] had found that Los Angeles had the least affordable rental housing in the country, with the average tenant spending almost half their income on rent.[33] The problem was further exacerbated, the UCLA study had found, by a significant portion of Los Angeles renters being of considerable means themselves compared to other markets, preferring to rent in the wake of the collapse of the late 2000s real estate bubble for the stability and flexibility it gave them, driving up rents in the process.
Supporters argued that the problem was not a housing shortage so much as an oversupply of housing for the higher end of the market, housing that often remained vacant for lack of interest or, the CPLA suggested, because they were used as investment properties. It cited a 2015 report from the city's housing department to Garcetti, warning that a large majority of Los Angeles's new housing over the preceding decade was for households earning $105,000 a year or more, far more than needed for that end of the market, yet despite that there was still a 12% vacancy rate. This, the coalition claimed, was due to the spot zoning developers were too easily able to obtain since, it said, "zoning is now meaningless in L.A."[34] AHF founder Michael Weinstein defended his organization's financial support for the measure by noting that the foundation's biggest responsibility after taking care of patients was finding them places to live. "L.A. is in the grip of a social justice crisis over whom our city really serves," he wrote in a Times op-ed. "As we work to house patients in L.A., City Hall focuses on approving $3,500 apartments that sit empty."
In response to supporters' claims that the real cause of the housing shortage was an abundance of luxury housing, opponents said that regardless of the market segment it was intended for, any new housing would eventually drive down the price of all housing.[35] It was also noted[36] that overall vacancy rates were at historic lows, based on census data from the last decade, compared to 2010.[37] The CPLA countered by citing[38] a report by the chief economist for the popular real-estate website Zillow that this purported "trickle-down" effect was not, in fact, occurring, not in Los Angeles or any other American city it studied. In fact, it claimed, median rents for the lowest third of houses and apartments were rising at much greater rates than the overall rental market, particularly in California.[39]
Proponents claimed that 22,000 tenants had been evicted from rent controlled housing since 2000 in order to build luxury housing, and that without Measure S that amount would increase. Since California's Ellis Act, under which landlords can evict tenants if they are no longer offering the units for rent, was state law beyond the scope of city ballot initiatives, Measure S could not address them directly. Supporters claimed instead that its provisions would drive down the number of evictions by making it harder to build the kind of housing for which tenants were evicted.[40]
However, the Times found that many of the developments for which rent-controlled tenants had been evicted had not needed the spot zoning the measure intended to stop in order to be built; one such project had been one from which an Echo Park woman featured in one of the pro-S campaign advertisements was evicted. Fewer than 10% of all the evictions of rent-controlled tenants between 2011 and 2015 had been for projects that would have been affected by the proposed moratorium, the paper found. Miki Jackson, a spokeswoman for the supporters said that they were concerned about the "enormous ripple effect" spot zoned projects have, since they lead to gentrification and more Ellis Act evictions. She acknowledged, however, that the 22,000 evictions were the total Ellis Act evictions since 2000, not just those triggered by spot zoning.
Opponents argued that preventing spot zoning temporarily would actually increase Ellis Act evictions during that time. Most spot zoned projects were proposed for sites on which no housing had previously existed, they noted. If developers could not build on those, they would turn instead to remodeling and rebuilding housing in older neighborhoods, with more rent controlled tenants subject to Ellis Act eviction. "[It] will leave in place the options that removed the most housing," said Josh Kamensky, a spokesman for the CPLANJ.
As proof that the city government had been corrupted to the point of needing the drastic steps the initiative would take, supporters began touting a lengthy October 2016 Los Angeles Times article. It described Sea Breeze, a Torrance-area apartment project, that was approved for construction despite its proximity to several industrial sites that could adversely affect the quality of life for residents. The newspaper found that large campaign contributions to mayor Eric Garcetti and key city council members including Janice Hahn, later elected to the U.S. House, came from individuals of modest means who worked for companies connected to the project's developer, although those contributors did not recall writing checks for amounts they admitted were equal to what they earned in weeks or even months (many of which also appeared to be written by the same person regardless of whose account they were drawn on). In some cases the purported contributors were not even registered to vote. The city's planning commission had twice unanimously rejected Sea Breeze, only to be overruled by city council. To facilitate one of those votes, Garcetti had invoked a rarely used mayoral power to temporarily reduce the number of votes necessary for passage.[41]
Opponents pointed out that for all the CPLA's complaints about corruption, the measure had no provisions addressed to limiting campaign contributions from developers.[42] In January 2017, several city council members introduced legislation that would, in fact, have banned campaign contributions from developers with projects seeking city approval, although whether it would have passed, much less survived a court challenge, was questionable. While Measure S supporters approved of the effort, many thought it made their points about how necessary the initiative was. "It's an admission of guilt", said Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association (SOHA) president Richard Close, a supporter.[43]
The practical effect of the moratorium was another point of disagreement between the two sides. Supporters repeatedly stated that only 5% of development in the city would be halted by it, and that it would only last two years. Opponents responded that both claims were misleading. The 5% figure was based, they said, on an apparent analysis of all permits; however, they implied, most of the construction that would be allowed was improvements to existing buildings or very small-scale housing, and the 5% of blocked projects included most of the larger multi-unit proposals seeking approval. And due to the initiative's requirement that the city update its entire zoning, a process which could take longer than two years, opponents estimated it could be as long as ten years before developers felt comfortable building again.
Opponents also disputed supporters' claims that Measure S would not affect any plans for affordable housing. Instead, they claimed, 90% of those projects would not be able to be built since they would require the sort of variances the initiative would forbid for projects on those scales. One cartographer identified city-owned parking lots on which 724 units could be built, but only if the General Plan, which currently allowed only industrial use on the property, were amended, something the measure would forbid even for projects of entirely affordable housing.[44] They also dismissed the exemption for such projects, saying that was "yet another example of 60 year old solutions to today's problems", in the CPLANJ's words.
Richard Platkin, a former city planner who strongly supported Measure S, wrote that these arguments were specious. "For nearly an entire year", he wrote in a January 2017 City Watch LA column, "I have repeatedly asked ... readers to identify any affordable housing projects that required a General Plan Amendment or even a zone change to begin construction. So far, I have only been told about one case in all of Los Angeles." He said the city's own reports confirmed this, and that the 2% of new housing that was meant for lower-income renters and buyers came about not because of any municipal action but through state laws allowing higher densities for affordable housing. Platkin further noted that the city owned 9,000 parcels on which such housing could be built, only a few of which had been so developed. "Now, suddenly, this long-ignored affordable housing option has been taken out of mothballs", he said, suggesting it was in direct response to the threat posed to developers' alleged control over City Hall by Measure S.[45]
Opponents criticized the provision forbidding the city from granting reductions of more than one-third the required parking spaces, since they said it went against the city's goals of encouraging transit-oriented development along subway lines and other major transportation corridors. The CPLA said these large parking variances did not accomplish that goal, "instead send[ing] drivers seeking parking spilling into overwhelmed neighborhoods." It claimed some residents of these developments were walking five blocks to and from their homes to parking spaces on a daily basis. However, the CPLA had also contributed $10,000 to a campaign against November's Measure M, a county-level initiative which increased the sales tax a half-percent to pay for light rail extensions. Stewart explained that they saw transit as a "development arm". The Real Deal, another real-estate website, suggested that indicated the coalition was as opposed to transit as it was to traffic congestion, which it frequently cited as an argument for Measure S, an argument that seemed contradictory.[46] In an earlier interview with The Planning Report, Stewart had expressed skepticism about the role of transit in reshaping Angelenos' lives. "People who can afford to own cars continue to drive their cars", she said. "No amount of discussion will get people to give up that freedom." If the city truly wanted to reduce congestion, she suggested, it should offer tax breaks to remote workers.[47]
Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne also noted that when Hollywood had updated its Community Plan in 2012 to allow for more transit-friendly development, three community groups, including Fix the city, a descendant of Not Yet New York, which had been a key force behind the similar Proposition U in 1986, successfully sued to block it. He said this pointed to "the basic hypocrisy that the authors of Measure S and other slow-growth advocates can't argue away ... Many say they're in favor of updating the community plans but fought to block one that didn't match their vision of low-rise, essentially suburban Los Angeles."
"Some clever-by-half advocates of sustainability imagine that every large and tall apartment building is automatically transit-oriented," Platkin responded to those arguments. Those that had been built near Los Angeles's subway stations, he said, were so far only transit-adjacent, since their residents still used their cars to get around (AHF head Weinstein similarly argued that "People who pay $3,800 [a month] for an apartment are not the ones who ride the subway.") Only when such development was built for lower-income tenants and residents who depended on transit to get to work, Platkin wrote, could it truly be described as transit-oriented. He allowed that Los Angeles's relationship with mass transit could indeed be reconfigured to be more like that of New York or San Francisco, but it would require improvements to the streets making them more amenable to bicyclists and pedestrians, not just high-density development near transit stops.
Underlying the Measure S debate were contrasting visions of the city and what direction it would take in the future. "Longtime residents of Los Angeles have in their collective imagination an image of what the city should look like and how they should live in it," D. J. Waldie, a Lakewood native and author of Holy Land, a well-regarded memoir of his youth in the planned suburb, told the Times Thomas Curwen. "[I]t's that image that is being interfered with as the city becomes more dense. What kind of city will they see in five, 10 or 15 years?"