It is perhaps inevitable that there should be so much anxiety over the wave of development that has been washing over Los Angeles as the economy has recovered.

More buildings in dense areas such as downtown and Hollywood mean more people, which means more traffic, which is, we can all attest, the last thing Los Angeles needs.

Unless it isn’t.

Economist Christopher Thornberg pointed out in these pages several weeks ago that he views traffic as a sign of economic vitality. Remember when downtown was a wasteland? Is traffic there now easy? No. But it is undoubtedly a positive reflection of the dynamic growth that has taken place there in recent years.

The same is true in Hollywood, home of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which has been bankrolling the anti-development Measure S, known as the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. The name implies a desire to maintain the status quo, a concept that applied to different circumstances two decades ago, frankly, would have been anathema to the same organization.

That, in truth, is what this measure – and a similarly intentioned measure defeated in Santa Monica last year – is about. It is an ill-informed and, hopefully, ill-fated effort to maintain a Los Angeles that has already ceased to exist at the expense of what we are becoming. The weight of that – in particular ever-higher housing costs – will not fall on the people who can afford to live in the hills and other leafy neighborhoods. It will land on the folks who rely on organizations such as the foundation itself. That seems remarkably unfair and shortsighted.

If there is an issue in which this NIMBY-ism is understandable, it is in the long-running effort of the city of Santa Monica to replace its airport with parks and other civic spaces.

The objections to the airport are also based on quality-of-life concerns, but they are substantively different than those raised by Measure S supporters. The alternative being offered to the airport is not stagnation, but positive additions to the community.

The past, is, as L.P. Hartley suggested, a foreign country. They do things differently there. This is Los Angeles, and we should be looking to the future.