The voters of Los Angeles have taken a stand — and the world should pay heed.
“Measure S,” the ballot initiative defeated in Tuesday’s election, was not just a local issue. True, it would only have halted high-rise construction in one city. But like Brexit, like the election of Donald Trump, its effect would have been global.
These three campaigns, for all their differences, shared one common denominator: a fundamental fear of change.
They all had some reasonable motivations. For Brexit, it was a sluggish European Union that seemed to be holding back the British economy. For Trump, it was deindustrialization and a generation of lost jobs that aren’t coming back. For Measure S, it was an outdated planning code and conflicts of interest between developers and City Council.
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