[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.

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.

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.

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.

The implementation of this vision was challenged[20] when Hollywood residents blocked an update to that community's Specific Plan that would have allowed for higher density and taller buildings,[16] 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.

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.

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.

[30]The initiative proposed the following actions:[31][32] The price of buying or renting a home is becoming the defining challenge of the city ...Both supporters and opponents agreed that Los Angeles had been undergoing a severe housing crisis since the end of the Great Recession.

As a result, a 2014 study by the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs[34] 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.

[39] The CPLA countered by citing[40] 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.

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.

[42] As proof that the city government had been corrupted to the point of needing the drastic steps the initiative would take, supporters began touting[36] a lengthy October 2016 Los Angeles Times article.

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).

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.

[44] 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.

"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.

"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.

[12] Another vocal Measure S proponent, Kenneth Alpern, mocked opponents as "[those] who believe that megadevelopment and a Blade Runner scenario of a sterile, overcrowded Los Angeles is WONDERFUL.

You now have a more urban dimension to the city of L.A."[12] Opponents questioned what an initiative focusing on municipal zoning had to do with the AHF's primary mission of offering treatment for AIDS patients through the pharmacies and clinics it operated.

The project, she said, required a zoning change from light industrial use and thus would have been impossible to build under the strictures of Measure S.[55] Weinstein defended the AHF's sponsorship of the initiative by reiterating that housing patients was the organization's largest priority after caring for them, and he felt the recent upsurge in luxury developments was making that harder by driving up rents.

"It has turned into a real civil war issue," said Joe Bray-Ali, a bicycle activist running against incumbent city councilman Gil Cedillo, who opposed the initiative.

"[62] Other onetime elected officials who supported the initiative included former congresswoman Diane Watson, former state senate majority leader Gloria Romero and former city councilman Dennis Zine.

She pointed to the redevelopment of a former Montgomery Ward and the expansion of a shopping mall near her home in Panorama City, both "desperately needed and desired", as the sort of development that the initiative would imperil, since they depended on parking variances.

[78] Abundant Housing LA likened the Yes on S arguments to the "alternative facts" claimed by Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway in response to unfavorable news coverage of the administration.

The suit argued that the adverse economic impacts of the measure claimed by a study paid for the CPLANJ yet represented by it in its documents as independent were based on a ten-year period instead of the two years the moratorium was intended to last.

The website said this raised the possibility that some of those signatures could have been obtained under a pretense (as tech executive Stephen Corwin claimed he had witnessed[78]), or that DiCaprio had signed on to support the measure without fully understanding what it entailed.

One mailer depicted a neighborhood of affordable housing that, the CPLA claimed, could have been built under Measure S. However, a Curbed reporter found that it was actually located in Torrance, outside Los Angeles's municipal boundaries.

[7] "We appreciate the county of Los Angeles giving the Yes on S campaign some last-minute critical media attention, on our key issue: that developers of luxury towers evict poor and working-class Angelenos every day," Stewart responded.

"[97] "I think it's great for the city," said the freshly re-elected Mayor Garcetti, as he was walking through Larchmont Village the next morning, when asked about the failure of Measure S. "We're not going to lose momentum on building housing, and I think that doesn't come at the expense of our neighborhoods.

[48] While he agreed that those feelings had been present in the wake of the presidential election, since Trump's inauguration the growing opposition to his presidency in the city and nationwide provided a more attractive outlet for that anger.