2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, Historically suburban character of Los Angeles and zoning controversies
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, Historically suburban character of Los Angeles and zoning controversies
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, Historically suburban character of Los Angeles and zoning controversies
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, Historically suburban character of Los Angeles and zoning controversies
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. City council increasingly dealt with this by spot zoning, usually granting exceptions to height, density, or even land use restrictions.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, Historically suburban character of Los Angeles and zoning controversies
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, Historically suburban character of Los Angeles and zoning controversies
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, Historically suburban character of Los Angeles and zoning controversies
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, 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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, 2015 developments
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, 2015 developments
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."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, 2016 campaign to place initiative on ballot
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, 2016 campaign to place initiative on ballot
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, 2016 campaign to place initiative on ballot
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, 2016 campaign to place initiative on ballot
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. 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).


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, 2016 campaign to place initiative on ballot
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, 2016 campaign to place initiative on ballot
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, 2016 campaign to place initiative on ballot
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, 2016 campaign to place initiative on ballot
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:


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Background, 2016 campaign to place initiative on ballot
... an epic struggle between urbanites and suburbanites, folks who want to see L.A. get more dense, more walkable and more bikeable versus folks who want to preserve L.A. as the car and single-family-home-dominated patchwork of neighborhoods that it mostly was—and sort of still is today ... [ It] is a real debate, between two drastically contrasting visions of Los Angeles. And it is one that is a long time coming.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate
The price of buying or renting a home is becoming the defining challenge of the city ...


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate
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 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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Nature and cause of housing shortage
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Nature and cause of housing shortage
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." 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."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Nature and cause of housing shortage
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. It was also noted that overall vacancy rates were at historic lows, based on census data from the last decade, compared to 2010.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Nature and cause of housing shortage
The CPLA countered by citing 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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Nature and cause of housing shortage, Possible effect on evictions of rent-controlled tenants
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Nature and cause of housing shortage, Possible effect on evictions of rent-controlled tenants
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 2011–2015 had been for projects that would have been affected by the proposed moratorium, the paper found.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Nature and cause of housing shortage, Possible effect on evictions of rent-controlled tenants
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Nature and cause of housing shortage, Possible effect on evictions of rent-controlled tenants
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Alleged corrupt influence on planning process
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Alleged corrupt influence on planning process
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Alleged corrupt influence on planning process
Opponents pointed out that for all the CPLA's complaints about corruption, the measure had no provisions addressed to limiting campaign contributions from developers. 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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Possible effects of moratorium
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Possible effects of moratorium
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 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. 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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Possible effects of moratorium
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."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Possible effects of moratorium
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Role of transit-oriented development
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Role of transit-oriented development
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. 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 people who work from their homes.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Role of transit-oriented development
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."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Role of transit-oriented development
"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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Vision of Los Angeles's future: Blade Runner vs. Her
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?"


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Vision of Los Angeles's future: Blade Runner vs. Her
Stewart rejected any idea that the city should move in a higher-density direction. She characterized urban planners who advocated that as "stuck in a different world" and their ideal of urban living as "everyone needs to move close together and cram their children into places where there is nowhere to play. The theory that people enjoy living around the noise and congestion is wrong, and we need to respond to how people really live."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Vision of Los Angeles's future: Blade Runner vs. Her
Platkin told Curwen that the real struggle, in his opinion, was not over the density of development but the role of the public in shaping it. Nonetheless, he used a cinematic reference point invoked by other proponents of Measure S. "If you have a city whose land-use policies are determined by the roller coaster of real estate speculation, you will have a city that looks like Blade Runner", referring to the seminal 1982 science fiction film set in a 2019 Los Angeles of endless skyscrapers. 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."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Vision of Los Angeles's future: Blade Runner vs. Her
Curwen, however, contrasted that vision, frequently described as dystopian, with the 2030 Los Angeles envisioned in Spike Jonze's 2014 Best Picture-nominated Her, a vision also evoked by Curbed after Measure S's defeat. It, too, is a city of dense high-rises, realized on screen by digitally merging less recognizable elements of the thus-developed Shanghai cityscape. But its residents seem content with living that way, a lifestyle that depends far more on public transportation than it does today. "The future imagined by one generation is not necessarily the future wanted by another," he wrote. "the debate over density is challenging popular presumptions of the single-family home. Like the car, it has become a symbol of urban unsustainability."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Vision of Los Angeles's future: Blade Runner vs. Her
Curwen talked to two experts who had contrasting views. Joel Kotkin, a Valley Village resident and professor at Chapman University known for his beliefs that recent proclamations of urban comeback are illusory since Americans prefer a suburban lifestyle, told him that while he did not envision downtown becoming much bigger a part of the city than it was in Indianapolis or Dallas, current development trends threatened to overwhelm the suburban aspects of Los Angeles that had made it so attractive for most of the 20th century.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Vision of Los Angeles's future: Blade Runner vs. Her
But Zev Yaroslavsky, who as a councilman in the mid-1980s had led the fight for Proposition U, which preserved the city's low-density character, did not see Los Angeles as having to choose. "The suburbs aren't going anywhere," he told Curwen. "I look at the changes ahead of us as additive. You now have a more urban dimension to the city of L.A."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Role of AHF in sponsoring initiative
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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Role of AHF in sponsoring initiative
Its previous sponsorship of the successful 2012 Measure B, requiring all actors in pornographic films produced in Los Angeles County, to wear condoms during sex scenes, and Proposition 60, the unsuccessful effort to extend that prohibition to the state level after adult-film production companies left the county to avoid complying with Measure B, alienated some members of the city's LGBT community and was seen as overreach, but one still compatible with its mission.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Role of AHF in sponsoring initiative
"Why the AIDS Healthcare Foundation is spending its time and money fighting battles over land-use and transportation policy is of course [an] ... excellent question", wrote Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne. The paper also devoted an editorial to it. "How is this social justice? How is this helping AIDS patients?" the newspaper asked. It suggested the foundation's real motivation was to block the Palladium Towers development that its head, Michael Weinstein, had complained ruined the view of the Hollywood Hills from his office.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Role of AHF in sponsoring initiative
The Times noted that as of a week before the election the AHF had spent $4.6 million on the initiative, accounting for almost all the CPLA's financial support. Dana Cuff, an urban design professor at UCLA's Luskin School, told LGBT magazine The Advocate that at best, AHF's use of the money for the initiative was "not understandable". Later she said it was "actually a misuse of their funds". A former AHF volunteer turned critic told the Times it a "blatant abuse of the[ir] resources".


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Role of AHF in sponsoring initiative
During the campaign, the Los Angeles LGBT Center held a news conference not only opposing Measure S but criticizing AHF for having sponsored it. City Controller Ron Galperin said the foundation was "squandering millions of dollars" on the initiative and urged it to focus on its core mission of treating AIDS patients. Lorri Jean, director of the LGBT Center, showed the reporters demolition work that was ongoing for an affordable housing project of nearly 300 units across the street from the center's offices. 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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Role of AHF in sponsoring initiative
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. He told The Advocate that the AHF, despite its involvement in advocacy and initiatives, was still spending 96% of its billion-dollar budget on care. "We're not diverting money from patient care, but we feel that we have a responsibility to the community in which we're headquartered."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Debate, Role of AHF in sponsoring initiative
Former LA Weekly managing editor Jill Stewart, hired by the AHF as Measure S's campaign manager, was also criticized for her role since she herself lives not in the city but the affluent suburb of Calabasas, on the southwest corner of the Valley. "It's not my place to critique the merits of the place you choose to live," tech executive Stephen Corwin wrote in an open letter to Stewart in Medium, "but there's a painful irony in what you're trying to accomplish from there. How do you morally justify trying to preserve the integrity of a city you don't consider to be worthy of living in?"


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions
Besides the CPLA and CPLANJ, many local organizations devoted to the relevant issues took positions on Measure S. Some prominent individuals, mostly local elected officials and celebrities, did as well. However, many of those who did said it was hard to take sides since the measure polarized voters. "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. "It's been hard to have a factual argument. It's just a bizarre tangle of rhetoric and emotion."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions
"I completely understand the sentiment behind it," said Mitchell Schwartz, the most visible of the candidates running against Garcetti, who opposed Measure S. However, when asked by LA Weekly, he said he was unsure about it. Similarly, councilman Paul Koretz, one of the few incumbents facing a serious challenger, Jesse Creed, felt "it might light a real fire under the mayor and council's collective sense of urgency to update the community plans" but demurred when asked to take a position on the initiative, expressing concern that it could not withstand a legal challenge. Creed, who had made an issue of Koretz's support for a project by developer Rick Caruso which had also been the subject of a Times article about its possible connection to Caruso's political generosity, told the newspaper he had not yet decided where to stand on it.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions, Support
Well represented among Measure S's official endorsers were many of the homeowners' associations, and some of the neighborhood councils, which had exerted such control over city planning in the late 20th century. The groups that served Bel Air, Elysian Valley, Encino, Hollywood Hills West, Westlake South and Westwood backed the measure. Officials from some other prominent homeowners' associations, such as Richard Close of Sherman Oaks and Jeff Lynn of Van Nuys, lent their names.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions, Support
Close, a land-use lawyer, called Measure S "the Proposition 13 of this generation ... We need to stop pay-to-play development". At the time he was leading opposition to a proposed redevelopment of a closed Sunkist plant in Sherman Oaks, which he said epitomized what the new initiative was intended to stop. Noting that propositions 13 and U, both of which he had played a leading role in, built crucial early support in the San Fernando Valley, he said, that area's support would be essential to Measure S's passage. "Political action starts in the Valley. It aims to change this city." Close believed Measure S would pass overwhelmingly, since voters were even angrier about the underlying issues than they had been during the campaign for Proposition U.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions, Support
Some local environmental organizations supported Measure S. Among them were the Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley chapters of the Audubon Society and the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Associations. The Ballona Wetlands Institute also supported the initiative. Its executive director personally endorsed it, as did a number of local environmental lawyers.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions, Support
Richard Riordan, who as the city's mayor during the 1990s had pushed for the creation of the neighborhood councils which critics blamed for further limiting the city's growth, was the most prominent of the former elected officials to endorse Measure S. "Do we want to continue allowing rule-breaking developers to do as they please? I don't think so", he wrote in a Times op-ed. "Los Angeles is better than this." 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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions, Support
As often is the case with political issues in Los Angeles, some well-known actors joined their names to the cause. The CPLA in August 2016 announced that Kirsten Dunst, Joaquin Phoenix, Chris Pine and Chloe Sevigny were supporters. Leonardo DiCaprio and Garrett Hedlund were also mentioned, but the coalition later removed their names after their publicists said they had not, in fact, formally announced their support.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions, Opposition
The Los Angeles political and business establishment uniformly opposed Measure S. At City Hall, Mayor Eric Garcetti and City Controller Ron Galperin were joined by 10 of the city's 14 incumbent councilmembers in urging voters to reject the measure. Four county supervisors—Janice Hahn, Sheila Kuehl, Mark Ridley-Thomas and Hilda Solis—also expressed opposition. Governor Jerry Brown led state officials, including state senator Ricardo Lara and several of the assemblymembers from Los Angeles, in coming out against Measure S. They were also joined by U.S. Representatives Tony Cárdenas and Brad Sherman.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions, Opposition
To dramatize why they were opposed, Garcetti and other officials, along with representatives of opposed groups, held a rally at the 100-unit Casa Heiwa affordable housing development in Little Tokyo, a project that had required a zoning change and General Plan amendment when built in 1996. Thus, they argued, it would have been prevented by Measure S.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions, Opposition
Both the county's Democratic and Republican parties formally opposed Measure S. Democratic organizations representing the San Fernando Valley and Westside also joined them. The county Green Party also came against Measure S, calling it "a blunt instrument that would prevent desperately needed affordable housing from being built in the near term, while guaranteeing nothing about the future ecological orientation and affordability of new development."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions, Opposition
Business groups, including many local Chambers of Commerce, landlords and realtors' groups, campaigned against the initiative. A broad coalition of labor unions, including the county building trades council and individual construction union locals, along with public employees such as the city's police and fire unions, were also opposed. The American Civil Liberties Union also expressed its opposition.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions, Opposition
Environmental activist groups, chief among them the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Los Angeles League of Conservation Voters, expressed opposition as well. Many organizations that advocated for the homeless and affordable housing joined them. Father Greg Boyle, founder of job-training nonprofit Homeboy Industries, who had supported Measure S while supporters were still gathering signatures for it, withdrew his support several days later, saying he had only given it after two friends recommended he do so and, after reading the measure, was convinced it would not ease the city's housing crisis.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions, Opposition
None of the city's homeowners' associations opposed Measure S, but neighborhood councils in Central Hollywood, Olympic Park, Palms, Panorama City and Richard Close's home neighborhood of Sherman Oaks did. "It's a tale of two Valleys," said Councilwoman Nury Martinez, challenging Close's narrative. 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. "It literally took 20 years to get developers interested in these areas," she said. "Measure S punishes communities like this one."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions, Opposition
The Los Angeles Times strongly opposed Measure S, even before it had qualified for the ballot. In April 2016 it ran an op-ed by Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer for The Atlantic and city resident. Likening the proposed moratorium to the Mexican border fence proposed by Donald Trump, then seeking the Republican presidential nomination, he said the initiative would "wall off this city from newcomers on behalf of homeowners who don't want more traffic on 'their' streets."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Positions, Opposition
A month before the election, the paper ran an editorial urging Angelenos to vote no on S, calling it "a childish middle finger to City Hall." The city's other daily newspaper, the Los Angeles Daily News, also recommended voters reject it, saying that the legitimate issues it raised did not require a moratorium to solve.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign
As soon as council placed the initiative on the ballot, supporters and opponents staked out their positions. Stewart said that it would allow 95% of development proposed at that time to proceed "while the greediest 5 percent of developers are put on a timeout while we force the City Council to come up with a real plan for Los Angeles".


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign
Speaking against the measure, Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce chief executive officer Gary Toebben told the Los Angeles Business Journal that the measure "goes way too far", which would become opponents' main argument against it, to the point of becoming the URL of their website. "[ It] means moving hundreds of thousands of Angelenos one step closer to homelessness," he said, alluding to a recent increase in the city's homeless population over the last several years despite slow population growth and general economic prosperity.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign
The CPLA, attributing that increase to what it said were thousands of evictions of rent-stabilized tenants by developers looking to build the high-density luxury housing Measure S was meant to curtail, endorsed Measure HHH, a bond issue on the upcoming ballot that would raise $1.2 billion and commit it to buying property on which facilities for the homeless would be built.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Comparisons to Trump campaign and presidency
Both sides on Measure S were primarily composed of liberals and progressives, often in ethnic or social groups that identified politically with the Democratic Party, which overwhelmingly dominates politics in Los Angeles. As such, supporters and opponents of the initiative compared the other side to recently elected Republican president Donald Trump in their rhetoric, often suggesting that "billionaires" supported the other side. The CPLA observed that the city's top developers had contributed to Trump's campaign, although none of them had supported the CPLANJ financially, whereas Crescent Heights, the lead contributor to that organization, had not given any money to Trump. In response, the CPLANJ reminded voters that prominent S supporter Richard Riordan, the city's last Republican mayor, had also endorsed Trump (although only after his nomination—Riordan had previously called Trump "crazy").


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Comparisons to Trump campaign and presidency
Richard Close, the influential SOHA head and a strong supporter of Measure S, believed Trump's victory augured for the success of the initiative, although he, too, had not voted for the president. "It tells me that the public is frustrated, mad, and believes that any change is better than the status quo. That"s the perfect ingredient for ... the enactment of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative in March," he told Los Angeles magazine at the beginning of 2017.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Comparisons to Trump campaign and presidency
Several opponents of Measure S not only compared supporters' rhetoric to Trump, but followed Conor Friedersdorf's lead in likening the initiative itself to the policies Trump had promised when campaigning. The Times itself called proponents' arguments "positively Trumpian" in an editorial, an argument similar to one made in an open letter to Yes on S campaign manager Jill Stewart by tech executive Stephen Corwin.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Comparisons to Trump campaign and presidency
In a follow-up post, Corwin reacted to one of the pro-S mailers by comparing Measure S to Brexit, the 2016 referendum in which British voters decided their country should leave the European Union, and Stewart herself to Brexit advocate Nigel Farage, since, he argued, she made similar promises on behalf of the measure that, like Farage, she and supporters would have to renege on after it passed. 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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Billboards
The CPLA tried to reach voters primarily through outdoor advertising, a strategy that the AHF had used to pass Measure B, requiring the use of condoms during penetrative sex scenes in adult films made in Los Angeles County, in 2012, and again for the previous fall's unsuccessful Proposition 60, which would have extended Measure B statewide, and Proposition 61 attempting to limit the price the state paid for prescription drugs.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Billboards
Many of the billboards AHF had used for those campaigns as well as public service announcements warning gay men against the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases were, during the last months of 2017, converted to "Yes on S" messages. Ultimately 120 billboards, many in the city's affluent Westside, promoted Measure S, an amount opponents said was far in excess of any other recent political campaign.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Billboards
The owners of the iconic "Welcome to Silver Lake" sign at Sunset Junction also repainted it with a pro-Measure S message. They had been fighting a proposed nearby development, which would not have needed a zoning change and thus would not have been put on hold by the moratorium. Some opponents of the initiative who lived in the area resented the appropriation of a local landmark, but most felt it was the owners' right to do as they pleased with the sign. A member of the local neighborhood council, however, complained that the owners spelled Silver Lake as one word in contravention of a requirement that the space be used.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Conflicts with Measure JJJ
In November city voters considered Measure JJJ, addressing some of the same issues as Measure S. It required that 20% of developments requiring zoning variances be set aside for affordable housing, that local labor be used on them, and incentivized developers for building near the city's subway lines. The city's business community, particularly developers, were as opposed to it as they were to Measure S.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Conflicts with Measure JJJ
However, so was the CPLA. In a news release strongly opposing JJJ, it claimed that initiative had been "cooked up" by the interests opposing Measure S in an effort to split its support and keep it from the ballot. Measure S proponents said that they considered JJJ likely to fall short of its goals, pointing to what they considered broadly worded loopholes in JJJ. "Ultimately there's a way out, every single time, for developers," Stewart told the Times.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Conflicts with Measure JJJ
The Los Angeles Tenants' Union (LATU), a group representing renters and their rights throughout the city, publicly opposed Measure JJJ and supported Measure S. "We've been overrun, and nobody has had the strength or the ability to get political control over this bad land use and extreme overdevelopment," said one LATU member in a CPLA news release announcing the endorsement. Both groups argued that JJJ would encourage the demolition of older, more affordable housing in favor of luxury condominiums. "People's dreams are dashed to make way for City Hall's horribly conceived urban cleansing," said Stewart. She praised the LATU for its refusal to take money from the city or developers, in contrast to other housing rights groups she did not name.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Conflicts with Measure JJJ
Local building trades union leaders who had been among the primary backers of Measure JJJ expressed concern that Measure S, if passed, would largely negate it through its moratorium. Lawyers also said that despite standard "poison pill" language in both initiatives giving precedence to any other initiative receiving more votes should there be a conflict between any aspect of either initiative, that question was not likely be resolved without litigation should both of them pass. Measure JJJ ultimately passed with the support of 64% of the voters.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Voter guide lawsuit
In late December a citizen backed by the CPLA brought suit against the CPLANJ over a statement it submitted for inclusion in the guidebook sent out to voters. It routinely includes short arguments for and against the ballot measure, often prepared by advocacy groups. 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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Voter guide lawsuit
Shortly after the new year, the suit was settled when CPLANJ agreed to drop the claim that the study was independent and scale back some of its other claims based on a two-year time period. Both sides claimed victory. The CPLANJ said that by agreeing to the new wording the CPLA was agreeing to the claims that it would cost the city 24,000 jobs, while Stewart claimed that CPLANJ was tacitly admitting its arguments could not hold up in court.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Deceptive mailers
In October 2016 CPLA formally retracted a claim that actor Leonardo DiCaprio supported Measure S, after environmentalists criticized him for a stance in favor of lower-density housing at odds with his general support for environmental causes. Stewart, who took responsibility for the mistake, said she had spoken with the actor's publicists two months earlier and "I thought we had received final word" at that time. One of those publicists said DiCaprio took no position on Measure S.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Deceptive mailers
The real estate website Curbed Los Angeles, which had broken the story, learned from DiCaprio that all he had done for CPLA was to sign a petition to save an unidentified historic building. Curbed attempted to learn whether he had actually signed the petition to get the initiative on the ballot, but was told by the city clerk's office that those signatures are not public record. 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), or that DiCaprio had signed on to support the measure without fully understanding what it entailed.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Deceptive mailers
In February, the CPLA sent out a mailer to voters that had on one side a picture of a smiling Garcetti, his signature and the quote "I Agree". The other showed a letter written by him on city letterhead, with "I agree" following many pro-Measure S talking points. It was headed "Mayor Garcetti finds a lot to like about Measure S".


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Deceptive mailers
The mailer implied that Garcetti supported Measure S, which in fact he strongly opposed. He called it a "dirty trick". A CPLA spokesperson said in response that "[t]his was just a friendly reminder on what these City Hall insiders promised and what they've yet to deliver to the voters of Los Angeles."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Deceptive mailers
A week before the vote, an editorial in the Los Angeles Times criticized the CPLA for its misrepresentative mailers. It also noted that many of the mailers had included quotations from other Times editorials in support of the measure. However, the editorial noted, as with the Garcetti mailer those mailers had not stated that the newspaper had consistently opposed the measure.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Deceptive mailers
The claims of support by opponents was not the only aspect of the CPLA mailers that led to accusations of deception. 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.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Eviction-notice mailer
In late February the CPLA sent out another controversial mailer. This one appeared to be an eviction notice, using the same format as real ones, although there was small print identifying it as a paid political advertisement and the line with the purported case number was filled in with "This could be you or a loved one!" Tenants' organizations received calls from worried members who thought they were real, leading the head of one such group to call the CPLA "outrageous and irresponsible". The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, whose name was on the mailer, wrote to CPLA demanding they cease and desist from using their name, or at least follow up and tell recipients the mailer was not an actual eviction notice.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Campaign, Eviction-notice mailer
"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. A leader of one tenant group, the Eviction Defense Network, agreed, calling the tactic "forceful". Stewart further speculated that the sheriff might have been acting at the behest of opponents of Measure S, since they had used the same political consulting firm. Later the CPLA refused to retract the mailer, calling it protected political speech, and expressing doubt that anyone could seriously have assumed it was an actual eviction notice.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote
Since the mayoral race, as well as most of the council contests, was not seriously contested, Measure S was the most closely followed vote on the night of March 7, due to the amount spent by both sides on advertising and messaging.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote
Early returns after the polls closed showed a huge advantage for "No" votes. With less than 5% of the precincts reporting, almost 60% of voters had registered their opposition. "We don't like the looks of the early returns", Stewart told the Times. She nevertheless held out hope that something "amazing" could turn things around.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote
Shortly after midnight, with more than half the vote in, the opposition margin had increased further. Losing by a 2–1 ratio, the CPLA conceded defeat. When all votes had been counted, more than 70% of Angelenos had rejected Measure S. LA Weekly noted that was a wider margin of defeat than Measure N, an initiative to restrict the city's ability to tax and regulate cannabis sales, whose supporters had never campaigned for it and indeed abandoned it weeks before the election. Turnout was 20% of the electorate, low but still almost twice as high as in the mayoral election.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote
The votes against Measure S came from all over the city. A post-election analysis by the Times, with an accompanying showed only isolated areas of support, with no neighborhood supporting the initiative outright. Many of these precincts were small, some with fewer than 10 votes cast, leading the newspaper not to publish totals or margins for privacy reasons. These areas were small portions of downtown, Echo Park, Fairfax, Koreatown, Valley Glen and the large southern area of Westchester mostly given over to Los Angeles International Airport.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote
For precincts where there had been enough to display results, in those scattered areas where Measure S won its margin of victory was narrow, around 51–52%, often a difference of less than ten actual votes. Other than a few blocks of Silver Lake, and part of Watts, most of these areas were in the Valley: portions of Chatsworth, Granada Hills, North Hills, Northridge, Shadow Hills and Sun Valley. Measure S did best in the southwestern corner of Boyle Heights, with 55% of the vote, and collected 8 out of 12 total votes in part of San Pedro.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote
In the majority of Los Angeles, where votes against Measure S prevailed, the margin was much higher. Many of these areas were on the Westside, where the billboards promoting the initiative had been most concentrated. Some precincts there recorded margins far above the city average against S, in the 70–80% range; in one between National Boulevard and the Santa Monica Freeway at the south boundary of Castle Heights, the margin of defeat was 87%. Opposition was strongest in Westwood: 89% of the precinct that includes the UCLA campus voted no, and 92% of an off-campus area to the northwest voted against Measure S.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote, Reaction
Opponents expressed relief. "Defeating Measure S has spared our city from a future that would've meant fewer jobs, fewer funds for critical public services, fewer new homes for those who desperately need them, and even less affordable rents," according to Rusty Hicks of the county Federation of Labor. "[P]eople understood the devastating impact [it] would have on our community if it passed," said Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce president Gary Toebben.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote, Reaction
Weinstein, whose AHF had sponsored the measure, remained upbeat. "This campaign will go down in the record books as one of the most successful campaigns that did not actually win the vote," he said. Despite losing the vote, he observed, City Council had begun taking some actions supporters wanted. "We are going to hold City Hall's feet to the fire on these issues ... Los Angeles will be a better place to live as a result of the Yes on S campaign." Ileana Wachtel, a CPLA spokeswoman, attributed the initiative's loss to the city establishment's opposition. "It's tough to fight the status quo and it's tough to fight really wealthy developers."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote, Reaction
"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."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote, Reaction
Developers, however, said the fact that the initiative had gotten on the ballot in the first place showed them that there was a strong enough belief that they had captured the city's planning process, and as a result they were not planning any large projects until the city had made progress updating its zoning as the measure's proponents had intended.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote, Reaction
"Many expected [Measure S] to lose," LA Weekly wrote, "but few imagined it would lose by so much." SOHA president Richard Close, who had two months earlier expressed confidence that it would triumph, admitted the wide margin of defeat came as a surprise to him. "I think the takeaway is that the homeowners in Los Angeles no longer have the political clout they once had."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote, Reaction
Opponents readily agreed. "Voters didn't reject pay-to-play," said Stuart Waldman, president of the Valley  Industry & Commerce Association, another business group that had worked against the initiative. "[They] rejected NIMBYism", referring to the common acronym for "not in my backyard", used pejoratively for opponents of development such as the supporters of Measure S. "They are sick of angry, wealthy homeowners who don't want people moving into their neighborhood, driving into their neighborhood, or parking in their neighborhood", which he said described the members of Close's organization.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote, Analysis
Searching for an explanation of Measure S's spectacular failure, LA Weekly first noted that unlike the similar growth-slowing Proposition U in 1986, which had been sponsored by councilmen Zev Yaroslavsky and Marvin Braude after their colleagues refused to block large-scale development in their districts, no sitting elected official had supported Measure S. And its major proponent, AHF head Weinstein, was a polarizing figure. "He's not somebody that could get tens of thousands of people to charge after him," explained Raphael Sonenshein, a public-affairs professor at California State University, Los Angeles.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote, Analysis
Sonenshein also wondered if the election of Trump and the associated populism underlying it had actually worked against Measure S, rather than in its favor as Close believed it would. 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. "It's kind of hard to have a rebellion in those conditions," Sonenshein said. "There's already a rebellion going on."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Vote, Analysis
Martin Cooper, a public relations executive and historian of the Valley who had supported Measure S, said it failed because opponents got their message across about what the city stood to lose more effectively than supporters were able to explain how it would work. "The reasons it lost were two reasons the opposition explained well: money and jobs", he told the Daily News. "It was not a coincidence that Mayor Garcetti's victory party was held at a union hall."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Aftermath
More than the fact of Measure S's defeat, the scale of it convinced many observers that it marked a significant turning point in the history of the city. "[ It] represents a significant break with 50 years of resistance to growth in Los Angeles," Waldie told LA Weekly, which itself called the vote "a confirmation that the city wants to become more urbanized, more dense, less reliant on the automobile, more inclusive and, perhaps, a more unified city."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Aftermath
Times architecture critic Christopher noted that Measure S was opposed by roughly the same percentage of voters who had supported Measure M the previous fall, which led him to call the vote "a very strong mandate for a new and more urban L.A.", which he called the Third L.A., emerging as the Second L.A. championed by supporters of the failed initiative continued to break down amid the new realities of the 21st century.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Aftermath
"Los Angeles is starting to feel like a great world city," David C. Martin, architect of the Wilshire Grand Center, now the city's tallest building, had said before the vote. William Fulton, author of The Reluctant Metropolis, an acclaimed history of the city, said the title of his book no longer applied. "Los Angeles really has undergone an unbelievable shift," he said, "between older homeowners, who don't see why growth is good for them, and younger folks, who can't afford $800,000 for a starter home."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Aftermath
While Curbed pointed out that voters may have rejected Measure S for a variety of reasons, it did indeed constitute a mandate for the city's future when taken together with Measure M. However, it said that mandate was more focused on access to mass transit and walkability than density. "Measure S was the last, gasping attempt at trying to convince us that LA will never give up its cars," the site wrote.


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Aftermath
Curbed nevertheless cautioned that the defeat of Measure S was "not a starter pistol to commence building the supertall LA of Her." Activists on both sides of the debate agreed. "Defeating Measure S doesn't solve anything," said Damien Newton, the founder of Streetsblog LA. "[We can't say] the status quo is fine." In a CityWatch LA essay two days after the election, Jill Stewart wrote that "while our reforms failed, Measure S won the argument."


2017 Los Angeles Measure S, Aftermath
She pointed to the thousands of Angelenos who voted for it, and said the campaign believed it was a much closer race before opponents began spending and Governor Brown came out against it. The real issue, she said, always had been the level of public participation in city government. "This is far more fundamental. It's about who decides how and where LA's infrastructure, housing, parks and services are planned and intertwined, as required, to best serve residents."


2017 Los Angeles Rams season
The 2017 season was the Los Angeles Rams' 80th in the National Football League (NFL), their 81st overall, their 51st in the Greater Los Angeles Area and their first under head coach Sean McVay. The Rams improved on their 4–12 record from the previous season. With a win over the Arizona Cardinals, the Rams ended a decade-long drought and clinched their first winning season since 2003 and first playoff appearance since 2004, when the club was based in St. Louis. The team played a game in London, England at Twickenham Stadium against the Arizona Cardinals in Week 7 as one of the NFL London Games.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season
For the second consecutive year, the Rams started out in first place in the NFC West with a 3–1 record. The Los Angeles Rams also scored 107 points in the first three games of the season, the second highest in franchise history and a league leader. Furthermore, the team went from being dead last in total offense the previous season with an NFL-low 224 points to becoming the highest scoring team in the league in 2017 with an average of 29.9 points per game and 478 total points scored - tops in both categories.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season
On Christmas Eve, the Rams defeated the Tennessee Titans 27–23 in a Super Bowl XXXIV rematch to clinch the NFC West for the first time since 2003 and their first playoff berth since 2004. This was also their first playoff appearance as the Los Angeles Rams since the 1989 season and their first division title as the Los Angeles Rams since the 1985 season. Their promising season came to an end as they were defeated by the No. 6 seed and defending NFC Champions, the Atlanta Falcons, 13–26 in the Wild Card Round. Coincidentally in the Rams' last playoff game in 2005, they were also beaten by the Falcons. For the season, the Rams introduced a new logo, with the horns and outline changing to white. This logo would remain for two more seasons.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Offseason, Coaching changes
On January 20: The Rams hired Sean McVay as the team's new head coach. Interim head coach John Fassel, who had replaced Jeff Fisher following Fisher's firing in Week 12 of 2016 and also interviewed for the head coach position, was retained as special teams coordinator along with running backs coach Skip Peete and assistant offensive line coach Andy Dickerson.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Offseason, Coaching changes
On January 21: The Rams hired Wade Phillips as the team's new defensive coordinator.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Offseason, Coaching changes
On January 22: The Rams hired Matt LaFleur as the new offensive coordinator.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Offseason, Uniform changes
The Rams underwent a moderate uniform change, removing New Century gold from their helmets and pants while leaving their jerseys unchanged. The Rams allowed their fans to decide on which pants stripes and facemask color they wanted the team to use via polls on their social media pages, with a single navy striped pants and white facemask winning. Additionally, the Rams wore navy pants with a single white stripe for some away games.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Preseason
The Rams' preliminary preseason schedule was announced on April 10.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Schedule
The Rams' regular season schedule was announced on April 20.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 1: vs. Indianapolis Colts
The Rams started their season with a blowout win over the Colts as Jared Goff got both his first victory and the first 300-yard passing game of his career, including a touchdown pass to rookie wide receiver Cooper Kupp. Cornerback Trumaine Johnson was named NFC Defensive Player of the Week after returning an interception 39 yards for the Rams' first touchdown of the season, while also recording two tackles including a forced fumble and a fumble recovery. Safety Lamarcus Joyner also returned an interception for a touchdown and added four tackles. Defensive end Michael Brockers had five tackles to lead the defense, which had four sacks and forced three turnovers as Sean McVay became the youngest head coach ever (31 years, 7 months, 2 weeks, 3 days) to win in his NFL debut.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 2: vs. Washington Redskins
Facing his former team, Sean McVay was dealt his first career defeat as the Rams fell behind 13-0. Todd Gurley had 132 yards in total offense and two scores, including the first receiving touchdown of his career on an 18-yard pass from Goff in which he hurdled Redskins cornerback Bashaud Breeland on his way to the end zone. Rookie tight end Gerald Everett turned in a strong performance with three receptions for 95 yards, while Alec Ogletree had 11 tackles including a sack on defense.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 3: at San Francisco 49ers
In their first NFC West matchup of the season, the Rams came out ahead of a high-scoring battle with the rival 49ers. As the game was on Thursday Night Football, the Rams wore their all-gold Color Rush uniforms for the first time since their final home game in St. Louis. With friends and family in attendance, Jared Goff (a Bay Area native) completed 22 of 28 passes for 288 yards and three touchdowns, two to Sammy Watkins. Both Watkins and Robert Woods surpassed 100 yards receiving on six receptions each.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 3: at San Francisco 49ers
Todd Gurley caught one touchdown and ran for two more (his first three-TD effort in the NFL) to go along with his 149 yards in total offense. Nickell Robey-Coleman had an interception, a fumble recovery and five tackles to lead the Rams defense. As this was an NFL Color Rush game, the Rams went with their all-yellow uniforms for the first time since their final home game in St. Louis in 2015, which offset the host 49ers' all-black scheme.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 4: at Dallas Cowboys
Greg Zuerlein hit a team-record seven field goals and Todd Gurley totaled 215 offensive yards (121 rushing, 94 receiving) along with a spectacular 53-yard touchdown on a screen pass as the Rams defeated the favored Cowboys on the road. Both earned NFC Player of the Week honors for Special Teams and Offense, respectively. Mark Barron's eight tackles and an interception led the Rams defense. Because the Cowboys wore their white uniforms at home, the Rams wore their Millennium Blue uniforms with blue pants, which clashed terribly with their blue and white helmets. The Rams' uniform choice was widely derided by pro football pundits and on social media.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 5: vs. Seattle Seahawks
The Rams staked out a 10-0 lead in the second quarter, but were undone by two interceptions and three lost fumbles in losing to the visiting Seahawks. Tavon Austin scored the Rams' only touchdown on a 27-yard run in the second quarter. Starting with just over a minute left in the fourth quarter, Jared Goff drove the Rams 55 yards to the Seattle 20-yard line and just missed connecting with Cooper Kupp in the end zone for a potential game-winner in the final seconds. On defense, rookie strong safety John Johnson got his first career interception and returned it 69 yards while Mark Barron had 15 tackles.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 6: at Jacksonville Jaguars
The Rams got off to a fast start in Jacksonville as Pharoh Cooper returned the opening kickoff 103 yards for a touchdown, which earned him NFC Special Teams Player of the Week honors. The teams traded scores four times in the first quarter, with Greg Zuerlein converting a 56-yard field goal and Gerald Everett scoring on a 4-yard shovel pass from Jared Goff. In the second quarter, Cory Littleton blocked a punt by which Malcolm Brown picked up at the 8-yard-line for a touchdown. Zuerlein added a second field goal in the fourth quarter for the final margin.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 6: at Jacksonville Jaguars
Nickell Robey-Coleman had an interception, and the Rams defense totaled five sacks of Jaguars quarterback Blake Bortles. Los Angeles, which had worn their blue-and-yellow throwback uniforms at home vs. Seattle the previous week, petitioned the NFL to allow them to wear the throwbacks on the road in Jacksonville, but their request was denied. With the host Jaguars wearing white, the Rams wore their Millennium Blue jerseys for the final time in franchise history, this time with white pants.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 7: vs. Arizona Cardinals
The Rams turned in a dominant performance over the NFC West rival Cardinals at London's Twickenham Stadium for their first-ever regular season victory outside the United States. Jared Goff threw for 235 yards and had a touchdown pass to Cooper Kupp (four receptions, 51 yards), with one interception. Goff also scored on a 9-yard run as the Rams built a 23-0 halftime lead. Todd Gurley had his fourth 100-yard rushing game of the season with 22 carries for 106 yards and a touchdown, plus four receptions for 48 yards.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 7: vs. Arizona Cardinals
The Rams defense shut down Cardinals running back Adrian Peterson (12 carries, 21 yards) for the game and allowed only 196 total yards to Arizona. Cardinals quarterback Carson Palmer was hit hard by Rams linebacker Alec Ogletree as he threw late in the second quarter and the pass was picked off by Lamarcus Joyner to set up a Todd Gurley touchdown run. Palmer suffered a broken left arm on the play and was knocked out for the year (Palmer retired following the season).


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 7: vs. Arizona Cardinals
Mark Barron added another interception off Drew Stanton to set up the third of Greg Zuerlein's four field goals on the day. It was the Rams' first shutout victory since 2014, and their first-ever win in the NFL International Series. It was also one of two NFL London Games of the 2017 season to end in a shutout, the other being the New Orleans Saints' 20-0 victory over the Miami Dolphins in Wembley Stadium in Week 4.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 9: at New York Giants
Returning to action after their bye week, the Rams put on a dominating performance against the host Giants, who suffered their worst loss since 1964. Jared Goff was named NFC Offensive Player of the Week after throwing for 311 yards and four touchdowns, two to Robert Woods and one each to Tyler Higbee and Sammy Watkins. Todd Gurley scored a pair of rushing touchdowns and added a 44-yard catch-and-run that set up another.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 9: at New York Giants
The Rams defense forced three turnovers, including fumble recoveries by Aaron Donald and Connor Barwin and an interception by Trumaine Johnson, all of which led to Rams scores. Their special teams also contributed to the win, with three field goals by Greg Zuerlein and a blocked punt by Cory Littleton also setting up a touchdown by the offense.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 10: vs. Houston Texans
Taking a 9-7 lead on three field goals by Greg Zuerlein during a quiet first half, the Rams exploded for three touchdowns during the third quarter of the Texans' first-ever visit to Los Angeles. Jared Goff passed for a career-high 355 yards and three touchdowns. Two went to Robert Woods, one of which went for 94 yards (the third-longest touchdown pass in Rams history), with the other going to Sammy Watkins.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 10: vs. Houston Texans
Meanwhile, the Rams defense forced four Texans turnovers, two of which were strip sack recoveries from Connor Barwin and Samson Ebukam while the other two were interceptions by linebacker Mark Barron and strong safety Blake Countess. Zuerlein closed out the Rams' fourth-straight win with his fourth field goal. The 7-2 start was the best for the Rams since 2001. They now have at least one home victory against all 31 other franchises.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 11: at Minnesota Vikings
The Rams took the opening kickoff and drove 75 yards in nine plays, capping the drive with a 6-yard touchdown run by Todd Gurley. After the Vikings tied the game in the second quarter on a Latavius Murray touchdown run, Los Angeles came close to regaining the lead when Jared Goff connected with Cooper Kupp near the goal line. But Vikings safety Anthony Harris stripped the ball from Kupp and recovered it, and the Rams never threatened to score again. Vikings quarterback Case Keenum bedeviled his former Ram teammates, passing for 280 yards and a touchdown as Minnesota scored 17 unanswered points in the fourth quarter. Alec Ogletree had 12 tackles in what would be the only loss on the road for the Rams during the regular season.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 12: vs. New Orleans Saints
Jared Goff passed for 354 yards and touchdowns to wide receivers Sammy Watkins and Josh Reynolds as the Rams grabbed an early lead and kept it throughout in holding off the eventual NFC South Division champions. Rookie wide receiver Cooper Kupp had a season-high eight receptions for 116 yards, and Greg Zuerlein added four field goals. On defense, both Aaron Donald and Robert Quinn had five tackles and a sack for the game. With the win over the New Orleans Saints, the Rams improved to 8-3, their first non-losing season since 2006.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 13: at Arizona Cardinals
The Rams jumped out to a 16-0 first quarter lead and never looked back against the host Cardinals. Tight end Gerald Everett and wide receiver Sammy Watkins both scored on touchdown passes from Jared Goff, and kicker Greg Zuerlein converted four field goals. The defense combined for a season-high seven sacks of Cardinals quarterback Blaine Gabbert, with Aaron Donald, Robert Quinn and Ethan Westbrooks totaling two sacks each. Cornerback Trumaine Johnson had a team-high seven tackles and Alec Ogletree picked off a Gabbert pass and returned it 41 yards for a touchdown. With the win over Arizona, the Rams improved to 9-3 and achieved their first winning season since 2003.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 14: vs. Philadelphia Eagles
The showdown between two of the NFC's top teams did not disappoint, as the first two picks in the 2016 NFL Draft faced off for the first time in a high-scoring game that featured four lead changes. Eagles quarterback Carson Wentz threw three touchdown passes in the second quarter as Philadelphia came back to stake out a 24-14 halftime lead. The Rams rallied in the third period as Jared Goff found Sammy Watkins for his second touchdown pass of the game and Blake Countess recovered a blocked punt for a score that put the Rams on top 28-24.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 14: vs. Philadelphia Eagles
Wentz drove the Eagles to the goal line and suffered what would be a season-ending torn ACL injury, but Wentz did not leave the field before throwing his fourth TD pass of the game to Alshon Jeffery to give Philadelphia a 31-28 lead. Early in the fourth quarter, Todd Gurley (13 carries, 96 yards) scored his second touchdown of the game to give the Rams a 35-31 advantage. But former Rams QB Nick Foles stepped in for the injured Wentz and engineered two scoring drives that ended in field goals for the Eagles, who took a 37-35 lead.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 14: vs. Philadelphia Eagles
With just seven seconds remaining, the Rams' last-ditch play went disastrously, as Tavon Austin fumbled a lateral from Pharoh Cooper which Eagles defensive end Brandon Graham ran in for a touchdown as time expired. With the loss, the Rams fell to 9-4 while the Eagles clinched the NFC East for the first time since 2013. This is also the first matchup between the Goff vs Wentz rivalry.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 15: at Seattle Seahawks
The Rams thoroughly dominated the Seahawks, rolling to a 40-point lead by the third quarter in their biggest-ever win in Seattle. Running back Todd Gurley ran 21 times for 152 yards and three touchdowns, while also catching three passes for 28 yards and another score and was named NFC Offensive Player of the Week. The Rams defense menaced Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson all day long with seven sacks, three coming from Aaron Donald and two more credited to Robert Quinn).


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 15: at Seattle Seahawks
Kicker Greg Zuerlein kicked two field goals and four PATs to add to his league-leading total of 158 points, but aggravated a back injury so severely that he was placed on injured reserve soon after the game. The Rams improved to 10-4 as head coach Sean McVay became the youngest coach to win 10 regular season games since 1937.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 16: at Tennessee Titans
In this Super Bowl XXXIV rematch, the Rams clinched their first NFC Western Division title since 2003 in a wild shootout with the Titans in Nashville. Running back Todd Gurley repeated as NFC Offensive Player of the Week after finishing with 22 carries for 118 yards and 10 catches for 158 yards and 2 TDs, including an 80-yard catch-and-run in the second quarter.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 16: at Tennessee Titans
Trailing by three in the fourth quarter, Jared Goff engineered the first comeback win of his professional career, completing 22 of 38 passes for 301 yards and four touchdowns, the last going to Cooper Kupp on a 14-yard scoring strike with 11:51 remaining. The Rams defense made the lead stick, holding the host Titans scoreless on their final three drives. The victory also guaranteed the Rams their first playoff berth since 2004.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 17: vs. San Francisco 49ers
With no chance to improve his team's standing, Rams head coach Sean McVay opted to rest most of his starting lineup for the season finale. The 49ers got their fifth straight win to close the season as Jimmy Garoppolo passed for 292 yards and two touchdowns while Carlos Hyde ran for two more scores for San Francisco. Rams replacement kicker Sam Ficken kicked a pair of field goals in the first half and backup running back Lance Dunbar scored on an 8-yard run in the fourth quarter.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Regular season, Game summaries, Week 17: vs. San Francisco 49ers
Sean Mannion made his first pro start for the Rams at quarterback, going 20-of-34 for 169 yards. On defense, cornerback Kevin Peterson led the Rams in tackles (eight), pass deflections (five), and interceptions (two) as the Rams finished with an 11-5 record. The Rams wore their classic blue-and-yellow throwback uniforms for the second time in the season.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Postseason, NFC Wild Card Playoffs: vs. (6) Atlanta Falcons
The Los Angeles Rams hosted their first playoff game in the Greater Los Angeles Area since 1985, and their first playoff game at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum since the 1978 NFC Championship Game. But the defending conference champion Falcons started off strong, capitalizing on two special teams miscues by the Rams to build a 13-0 lead on two Matt Bryant field goals and a 3-yard run by Devonta Freeman. Los Angeles rallied as Jared Goff connected with Cooper Kupp on a 14-yard touchdown pass and Sam Ficken hit a 35-yard field goal just before halftime.


2017 Los Angeles Rams season, Postseason, NFC Wild Card Playoffs: vs. (6) Atlanta Falcons
Todd Gurley was effective with 101 yards on just 14 carries, but the Falcons were able to control the clock, dominating time of possession 37:35 to 22:25. The teams traded field goals in the second half, but Atlanta pulled away late as quarterback Matt Ryan iced the game with an 8-yard touchdown pass to wide receiver Julio Jones for the final 26-13 margin. Rams wide receiver Robert Woods had nine receptions for 142 yards in the loss, the Rams franchise's first playoff appearance since 2004 where, coincidentally, their loss also came to the Falcons.


2017 Los Angeles Sparks season
The 2017 WNBA season is the 21st season for the Los Angeles Sparks of the Women's National Basketball Association. The Sparks are the defending WNBA champions. The season tipped off on May 13. The Sparks finished 26–8 with the number 2 seed in the league and advanced all the way to the Finals for the second season in a row, setting up a rematch with the Minnesota Lynx, but would lose this time in 5 games, failing to win back-to-back championships.


2017 Los Angeles mayoral election
The 2017 Los Angeles mayoral election was held on March 7, 2017, to elect the mayor of Los Angeles. Due to a change in the city's election calendar to align mayoral elections with statewide elections, the winner stood to serve a term of five years and six months instead of the usual four years.


2017 Los Angeles mayoral election
Municipal elections in California are officially non-partisan. Incumbent Eric Garcetti won a record 81.4% share of the vote in the primary, eliminating the need for a run-off. Voting turnout was relatively low at 20.1%.


2017 Los Cabos Open
The 2017 Los Cabos Open (also known as the Abierto Mexicano de Tenis Mifel presentado por Cinemex for sponsorship reasons) was an ATP tennis tournament played on outdoor hard courts. It was the 2nd edition of the Los Cabos Open, and part of the ATP World Tour 250 series of the 2017 ATP World Tour. It took place in Los Cabos, Mexico from July 31 through August 6, 2017.


2017 Los Cabos Open, Singles main draw entrants, Other entrants
The following players received wildcards into the singles main draw:


2017 Los Cabos Open, Doubles main draw entrants, Other entrants
The following pairs received wildcards into the doubles main draw:


2017 Los Cabos Open – Doubles
Purav Raja and Divij Sharan were the defending champions, but lost in the semifinals to Juan Sebastián Cabal and Treat Huey.


2017 Los Cabos Open – Doubles
Cabal and Huey went on to win the title, defeating Sergio Galdós and Roberto Maytín in the final, 6–2, 6–3.


2017 Los Cabos Open – Singles
Ivo Karlović was the defending champion, but lost in the first round to Quentin Halys.


2017 Los Cabos Open – Singles
Sam Querrey won the title, defeating Thanasi Kokkinakis in the final, 6–3, 3–6, 6–2.


2017 Los Cabos Open – Singles, Seeds
The top four seeds receive a bye into the second round.


2017 Lotte Giants season
The 2017 Lotte Giants season features the Lotte Giants quest to win their first KBO League title since 1992.


2017 Lotto–Soudal season
The 2017 season for the Lotto–Soudal cycling team began in January at the Tour Down Under. As a UCI WorldTeam, they were automatically invited and obligated to send a squad to every event in the UCI World Tour.


2017 Loughborough Lightning (women's cricket) season
The 2017 season was Loughborough Lightning's second season, in which they competed in the Women's Cricket Super League, a Twenty20 competition. The side finished fourth in the group stage, winning two of their five matches.


2017 Loughborough Lightning (women's cricket) season
The side was coached by Salliann Briggs and captained by Georgia Elwiss. They played one of their home matches at the Haslegrave Ground, and the other at the County Ground, Derby.


2017 Loughborough Lightning (women's cricket) season, Squad
Loughborough Lightning's 15-player squad is listed below. Age given is at the start of Loughborough Lightning's first match of the season (12 August 2017).


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy
The 2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy (officially, the Trophy was given to the winner of the 2017 Louis Vuitton America's Cup Challenger Playoffs) was a sailing competition held to determine the challenger in the 2017 America's Cup.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy
The tournament was an expansion of the previous Louis Vuitton Cup format, with the defender competing in the first round robin stage.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy
The races ran from 5 to 12 June 2017 in Bermuda and were preceded by the 2015–16 America's Cup World Series. It was won by Emirates Team New Zealand who defeated Artemis Racing in the final. The races were conducted using AC50 yachts, a new class of 50 feet (15 m) hydrofoiling wingsail catamarans, larger than the AC45F yachts used in the world series and smaller than the AC72 yachts used in 2013. Emirates Team New Zealand went on to compete with defending champions Oracle Team USA in the 2017 America's Cup match.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Challenger of Record
On 1 October 2013, Australia's Hamilton Island Yacht Club was confirmed as the "Challenger of Record" for the 35th America's Cup. Only moments after the win by USA team Oracle, Hamilton Island Yacht Club (HIYC), located on the edge of the Great Barrier Reef in Queensland, Australia issued its challenge for the 35th America’s Cup. The HIYC challenge was accepted by the Golden Gate Yacht Club, which remained the Defender and Trustee of the world’s oldest international sporting trophy. Australian billionaire Bob Oatley was said to be financially backing the Hamilton Island Yacht Club as the Challenger of Record for the 35th America's Cup.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Challenger of Record
On 19 July 2014, Russell Coutts, Director of the America's Cup Event Authority (ACEA), announced that Hamilton Island Yacht Club had withdrawn Team Australia from the 35th America's Cup. Team Australia claimed that the new protocols as set forth by defending champion Oracle Team USA were too hard to prepare for when no dates or venue have been confirmed for the event.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Challenger of Record
A replacement for Hamilton Island Yacht Club as Challenger of Record was not named.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Entry period
On 7 August 2014, the Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron on behalf of their crew, Emirates Team New Zealand, became the first team to announce an official America’s Cup entry. 8 August was the actual deadline for challengers and the defenders had previously mentioned that four teams had entered or planned to by the deadline: Luna Rossa (ITA), Artemis Racing (SWE), Team France (FRA) and Ben Ainslie Racing (GBR).


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Entry period
Ben Ainslie, ORACLE TEAM USA's tactician at the 2013 America's Cup, expressed serious interest in challenging his former employers with his own team based out of the United Kingdom.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Entry period
In an interview on RadioLIVE on 8 June the New Zealand Prime Minister John Key referred to the new America's Cup rules as "Mickey Mouse" and said the government would not help fund a challenge. In a follow-up interview with Grant Dalton the same day, Dalton said that the team's knowledge of the catamaran was far more advanced than at the same stage with the AC72. He announced that Team NZ had secured the services of the designer who fitted the servo to the Team Oracle USA AC72 in the last America's Cup.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Entry period
On 25 June 2014 Team New Zealand confirmed their intention to challenge in a media statement as they had gained sufficient private financial backing from private sources such as Sir Stephen Tindall without government assistance. Speaking on RadioLIVE, government minister Steven Joyce said he did not rule out a New Zealand government contribution after the election as the government's previous investments of $37 million NZ had yielded dividends of about $87 million NZ in the previous challenge.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Entry period
Team New Zealand confirmed its team would build a challenger program for the next Americas Cup. Yachting commentators said Team New Zealand had an incredibly strong design, technical and support team. The sailing crew is drawn from a mix of previous Americas cup sailors and some of the kiwi gold medal winners at the last Olympic games.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Competitors, Defender, Golden Gate Yacht Club - Oracle Team USA
A defender competed in the Louis Vuitton Cup for the first time in the series' history, with Oracle Team USA retaining helmsman James Spithill and the core of his crew from the previous defense.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Competitors, Challengers, Hamilton Island Yacht Club (Challenger of Record) - Team Australia (withdrawn)
Hamilton Island Yacht Club challenged for the 35th America's Cup up just minutes after GGYC's win in the 34th America's Cup in September 2013. However, in July 2014, the team pulled out of the Cup due to the high financial risk.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Competitors, Challengers, Circolo della Vela Sicilia - Luna Rossa Challenge (withdrawn)
In June 2014, Luna Rossa confirmed they would again be challenging for the Cup, and would retain most of their team, including helmsman Chris Draper, skipper Max Sirena, and tactician Francesco Bruni. However, after the Challenger Committee, along with Oracle Team USA, chose to reduce the size of the boats from the AC62 class to the AC50, Luna Rossa withdrew in protest.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Competitors, Challengers, Kungliga Svenska Segelsällskapet - Artemis Racing
Artemis mostly kept its crew intact from their previous challenge. After a win and a second-place finish in the last two World Series events, the team came into the Qualifiers with what appeared to be the fastest of the AC50 boats.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Competitors, Challengers, Royal New Zealand Yacht Squadron - Emirates Team New Zealand
After initial trouble with financial backing, Team New Zealand announced their intention to challenge in late June 2014. The team chose to replace longtime helmsman Dean Barker with 2013 Youth America's Cup winner and Olympic silver medalist Peter Burling. The team's AC50 boat includes a number of unique innovations, including replacing the grinders used by most teams with pedals.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Competitors, Challengers, Yacht Club de France - Groupama Team France
In 2014, Franck Cammas' Groupama Sailing Team announced a challenge for the cup. The team had previously won the 2011–12 Volvo Ocean Race as well as the 2013 and 2015 editions of the Little America's Cup.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Competitors, Challengers, Royal Yacht Squadron - Land Rover BAR
After winning the 34th America's Cup as tactician for Oracle Team USA, British Sailor and four-time Olympic gold medalist Sir Ben Ainslie announced his own team, Ben Ainslie Racing (BAR), would be challenging for 35th Cup. In June 2015, the team partnered with Land Rover changed their name to Land Rover BAR.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Competitors, Challengers, Royal Yacht Squadron - Land Rover BAR
Land Rover BAR won the AC45 World Series, and thus started the round robins with a two-point advantage.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Competitors, Challengers, Kansai Yacht Club - SoftBank Team Japan
SoftBank Team Japan was the last team to file a challenge, in late April 2015. The challenge was spearheaded by America's Cup veteran Kazuhiko Sofuku. Former Team New Zealand helmsman Dean Barker joined the team as skipper and CEO in May, and British Olympic medalist and former Luna Rossa helmsman Chris Draper joined in June as tactician and Sailing Director. Due to the team's late entry, Oracle Team USA provided a design package for the team in order to kick-start their challenge.


2017 Louis Vuitton Challenger's Trophy, Results, Qualifier round robins
The five challengers and the defender, Oracle Team USA, competed in two round robins between 26 May and 3 June 2017. Points were awarded for every win. The lowest ranking competitor was eliminated and the highest ranking competitor will be awarded a point at the start of the America's Cup match if it reaches that stage of the competition. In the event of a tie for lowest or highest ranking, "the Louis Vuitton America’s Cup World Series standings" was to be "used as the tie breaker". The highest ranking challenger was able to pick its opponent in the semi-finals. The scores were: