La is a wasted opportunity

[u/villehhulkkonen]

Imagine if Los Angeles was built like Barcelona. Dense 15 million people metropolis with great public transportation and walkability.

They wasted this perfect climate and perfect place for city by building a endless suburban sprawl.

[u/Cebo494]

Despite the highly suburban character of LA, it's actually the #1 most dense "Urban Area" in the US (as defined by the census bureau). It lacks a major urban core, but the suburbs themselves are significantly and consistently more dense. Lot sizes are fairly small throughout LA so they still fit a lot more housing across the region than anywhere else.

Obviously, downtown LA doesn't come close to something like Manhattan (nothing in the US does). But on a regional level, LA wipes the floor with NYC on density; once you get past the boroughs, NYC suburbs are full of big houses on big lots and pull the average density down a lot.

[u/Virtual_Perception18 → u/Cebo494]

I think this is because LA started doing “suburbs” a bit before every other city started doing them. Most of the houses you see in LA were built anywhere from the 1920s-1950s, with the vast majority of them being built right after WWII from the mid 40s-50s, when everyone was moving here from all over the country. Most of the “suburbs” that surround the city proper do not have curvy roads and large lots but have grid layouts and small lots unlike other major cities’ suburbs. Essentially we were the prototype for suburban/car centric cities in the country.

Most cities started ramping up suburban development around the 1950s-1970s and they seemed to “perfect it” way more than we did. Cities in the Southeast built way bigger houses with more windy streets which made their suburbs even more “suburbsy” than ours.

[u/theOG22 → u/Cebo494]

Yeah but suburbs are not the city. New Yorks boroughs are huge and dense. If you want space you move out of the city, that’s the point.

[u/deskcord → u/theOG22]

Except the "suburbs" in LA are often interspersed in between mini city centers. Larchmont and Hancock park are right between DTLA, Hollywood, and Koreatown. Pasadena is half-suburb, half town/city. Glendale is the same. The Valley is a giant suburb home to Studio City and Burbank. The San Gabriel Valley is an enormous suburb that's also the best Chinatown in the US. Much of Palms is a suburb but it's right next to Beverly Hills, Century City, and Santa Monica.

And on and on and on.

[u/deskcord → u/[deleted]]

This is a downright hysterical thing to have just typed out.

[u/deskcord → u/[deleted]]

Again, this is just laughable, especially when you mention fucking Dallas.

Los Angeles has 14% of its land used for parks, the exact same as NYC, over a substantially larger piece of land. Dallas is 8%. Denver is 6%.

Do you just...say shit?

[u/GeoLaser → u/deskcord]

LA is a sea of concrete and does not have much unused land or kid friendly parks. I have lived there and there isn't much land that is free to roam besides official hiking trails, the beach and sparse parks.

Denver has a kid friendly park with grass to have a picnic on everywhere. I drive down random neighborhoods and find parks all the time. That does not happen in LA at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denver#Parks_and_recreation

https://coloradoencyclopedia.org/article/city-beautiful-movement-denver

[u/deskcord → u/GeoLaser]

Lol so you just actually have no idea what you're talking about. The response to actual facts and data about the total park utilization of each city gets a "wikipedia denver parks" link.

[u/GeoLaser → u/deskcord]

Seems like you do not either as you havent linked anything

[u/No-Sky1906 → u/[deleted]]

Griffith Park is the largest urban park in the country.

[u/clevideo21 → u/[deleted]]

Just had a kids bday party at Griffith Park with a bunch of kids running around.

[u/SvenDia → u/theOG22]

LA isn’t really a city though. It’s a few dozen suburbs surrounding a small downtown. And then it has a number of independent small cities/towns inside its borders, along with mountain ranges. I get why people don’t like it, but it’s not at all generic

[u/SadLilBun → u/SvenDia]

What?

This is extremely incorrect. We don’t have a singular epicenter, but we are not “a few dozen suburbs surrounding a small downtown.”

I live in the city and work just outside of downtown. It is 100% not a suburb. Not even close. We have neighborhoods, but that does not mean suburb. Suburbs surround the city, not downtown itself.

[u/Clipgang1629 → u/SadLilBun]

A more accurate description would be LA is a mega city made up of many different cities. Some neighborhoods in LA have higher population than mid sized cities.

Nothing about LA city feels very suburban. Especially compared to other sprawling places that truly do feel like a suburban city like Phoenix. Some areas of LA are more suburban than others but most of the city proper does not give a remotely suburban feeling.

People just repeat shit they read without knowing the city outside of their trips to Disney or whatever it may be

[u/Will_Come_For_Food → u/Clipgang1629]

I don’t know how a person could possibly call this opinion unless they’ve never visited a real city check out London, Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, São Paulo Vienna, Amsterdam, or any other real city like Singapore then go back to LA. The entire thing is one giant suburb single-family dwelling as far as the I can see.

[u/Clipgang1629 → u/Will_Come_For_Food]

Yeah I mean okay bro, I’ve been to most of those cities, all the European ones listed and BA. They’re world class. But they’re also ancient compared to LA and many are just ancient in general. They’re in different countries, with different history, sociology, and politics. It’s not really a fair comparison.

My point about LA is it has this bad reputation for many Americans that it’s this suburban sprawling hell hole. In comparison to most every American city that’s just not the case.

Also the city is not one giant single family suburb. That’s ridiculous lol. There are places like that in LA but there are miles and miles and millions of people living in LA where it is nothing like that. KTown is the densest area on the west coast with over 100,000 people living there. There are lots of places with density in LA bro

[u/NecessaryPen7 → u/Clipgang1629]

Then throw in a lot of the more suburb single family homes are on topography that doesn't initially make a great spot to build large multi family buildings. Hollywood to Burbank, etc

[u/No-Sky1906 → u/SvenDia]

Good grief, this is so wrong.

Few dozen suburbs? What on earth are you talking about?

[u/SvenDia → u/No-Sky1906]

I didn’t use suburban in a pejorative sense. What I meant is that the central part of the city around downtown is similar in size and density to a city of around 500,000 instead of 4 million. I would say similar things about my hometown of Seattle, very dense around downtown and more suburban around the edges with several neighborhoods that feel like small cities or suburbs with a main commercial street and some mid sized buildings. Ballard, West Seattle, Magnolia and Queen Anne Hill are good examples of this.

[u/TallSurfer25 → u/theOG22]

Did you read anything @cebo494 said before you wrote this comment?

[u/keylime12 → u/Cebo494]

Lol I was downvoted to hell for saying this in r/LosAngeles

[u/Metammetta → u/Cebo494]

This is how the US Census Bureau defines it, but that includes Newark, NJ and Jersey City, NJ as part of NYC. That's a pretty technical definition that is meaningless to most people.

Like, don't we laugh at people who live near Newark and say they're from NYC? Really doesn't make sense.

[u/Cebo494 → u/Metammetta]

Urban Area and Metropolitan Statistical Area are two fairly similar definitions both used by the Census Bureau. Urban Area is the smaller of the two, and should be entirely contained within the Metro Area.

But Newark is 100% a valid satellite city of NYC. A huge portion of it's population commutes to the city or otherwise participates in NYC's economy. People who want to be in and around NYC might consider moving to Newark because of its proximity. And there isn't really a clear dividing line where the urban-fabric of one ends and the other begins; if you look at a map, it's just a sort of continuous gray built up megacity split up by a couple rivers.

It (and Jersey City) probably would've become boroughs if they weren't accross state lines. I mean, Newark is closer to Brooklyn than The Bronx is.

[u/Metammetta → u/Cebo494]

True, good points. That makes a lot of sense.

[u/deerskillet → u/Cebo494]

This is not a good thing imo.

[u/Cebo494 → u/deerskillet]

What about it?

[u/deerskillet → u/Cebo494]

Sprawl makes transportation exponentially more difficult. This makes pretty much everything else also more difficult

[u/JustPassinThrough119 → u/Cebo494]

A good example of the expression "there are lies, damned lies, and statistics" in the wild! NYC itself is much more densly populated than LA. The NYC MSA is more densly populated than the LA MSA. Just not in this other way of slicing and dicing the data. So what is a better way to live densly (if that's important to you), a dense core surrounded by little towns in countryside or endless suburbs?

[u/Cebo494 → u/JustPassinThrough119]

I'm pretty sure that LA is still #1 if you go by MSA density instead of Urban Area, they're pretty similar metrics. Wikipedia doesn't have a convenient page that lists MSA density like it does Urban Area, but some other websites show LA as #1. NY just has a lot more low density, high income neighborhoods with big yards in particular around NYC, especially in Nassau, Westchester, Rockland, and Northern New Jersy. LA, even in its wealthier neighborhoods, has relatively smaller homes that are packed much closer together on smaller lots.

And the short answer to your other question is that, all else being equal (transit access, economic opportunity, etc.), I would prefer the greater average density instead of having a dense core with sparse satellites. When you need to house 20 million people, density is pretty much the only variable that determines how much land it takes to house them, so higher density is desirable. It isn't sprawl if it's dense and especially not if it has a good variety of transportation options, which is LA's biggest weak spot, but they have made massive improvements over the last decade or two.

[u/JustPassinThrough119 → u/Cebo494]

I did a quick check and I think the NYC MSA comes in about 8% higher density than LA MSA, but i don't think that matters much to my main point which is that the density numbers are determined by where the lines are drawn. For example going just by city boundaries it's not even close. NYC is at 29,302 people per square mile compared to LA at 8,205. And it's not just Manhattan. Staten Island had a higher population density than LA at 8,618. From a practical standpoint I think it's the extreme density that provides the transportation options, allowing the ability to live without a car. I went down this rabbit hole because the claim that LA is more dense than NYC just struck me as wrong. I still don't think I'm wrong but the LA area is more dense than I realized.

[u/Cebo494 → u/JustPassinThrough119]

Cities are simply more than their boundaries. A huge amount of the people working in a city and contributing to its economy don't live within their borders. Plus, municipal borders are so arbitrary that it's not a very useful metric for many things in general. NYC's borders are basically set in stone around the 5 boroughs despite the massive region of satellite cities and suburbs that's built up around it. LA is massive by comparison because it's continuously annexed land as it grew. So regional stats tend to be more useful than municipal ones.

Also, LA definitely has enough density to support transit; you really don't need that many people before transit becomes cost effective, you just need the political will to make something worth using.

[u/JustPassinThrough119 → u/Cebo494]

I think I'm about rabbit holed out on this topic. I went far enough down the hole to pull up the map of the Census Bureau Urban Areas ( https://www.census.gov/geographies/reference-maps/2020/geo/2020-census-urban-areas.html ) and they look like gerrymandered political districts. I question how useful the Urban Area definition is for understanding general city density. I will claim, without any data to prove it, that the core solid block of the NYC urban area is more densely populated than the core LA urban area. Thank you for the Digression of the Day.

[u/NecessaryPen7 → u/Cebo494]

NYC is explicitly the boroughs, with some of Jersey thrown in.

[u/GoldenBull1994 → u/Cebo494]

I’m really sick of people saying LA lacks a major urban core. There is a major urban core that’s 3/4ths the size of Philadelphia, and it’s just as populous. It sits north of the 10 and south of the hollywood hills and stretches from downtown-to the beach. Right behind this photo is a core that peaks at densities as high as 44k/sq mile by neighborhoods and at over 100k at the tract level. You can find a population the size of SF in an area smaller than SF. The average density of the core as a whole is just under 20k/sq mile. This core was built long before suburbanization even started nationwide, before the 20s.

[u/da-bears86 → u/Cebo494]

The idea isn't to have density across the whole metro area. That's the sign of failure: the inability to incorporate proper density means it spills over to the rest of the county. Quantity =! quality in this regard. The New York metro area has range and variety of density -- you have NYC, and outside of NYC you have cities with better walkability than anywhere within the entire LA metro, including LA and Hoboken. Additionally, within an hour's drive to the southwest, west, and north, there is farmland, small mountain and valley towns, and just space. You have the option for as dense as you want or as sparse as you want. The density of NY allows for the preservation of the small communities and nature further out, rather than a sea of kinda dense SFH.

[u/userhwon → u/Cebo494]

Building up is a problem because earthquake protection makes upper stories a lot more expensive. So LA is probably not going to get more dense over time.

[u/Icy_Raspberry1630 → u/userhwon]

They should follow after tokyo, another earthquake prone are that is also more heavily populated. Which also has great public transport

[u/WorstNormalForm → u/Icy_Raspberry1630]

I guess people are coming from the Tokyo post lol

But yes Tokyo is a model for walkable urban density, but it's also not a feasible one...because you can't really undo suburban sprawl "in place" without fixing crime and public transport and cleanliness and the very idea of real-estate-as-an-investment first

The North American model of urban planning has diverged for so long that any piecemeal improvement is not going to fix car culture, NIMBYism or the politics behind it

[u/Icy_Raspberry1630 → u/WorstNormalForm]

I'm not sure what tokyo post yourw speaking of, this post just popped up on my feed and I'm just responding to your earthquake problem. Because it is possible to build higher in LA, both tokyo and SF are examples but yes I agree it won't happen for a long time due to the NIMBYism, which is unfortunate.

[u/WorstNormalForm → u/Icy_Raspberry1630]

Oh I was just joking about this post on the front page inspiring interest in livable urban design

[u/Cebo494 → u/userhwon]

The Tokyo metro area has a density roughly double that of the LA metro area despite an even greater threat of earthquakes. Part of that is due to a similar phenomena of small average lot sizes resulting in very dense neighborhoods of detatched homes, but they also have plenty of multi-story and larger apartments, especially towards the core of the city.

We have the technology to make buildings earthquake resistant. And in a place like LA that has a lot of housing demand and not a lot of undeveloped land, the added costs for earthquake resistance can be more than offset by the added value associated with increased density.

[u/mahdroo → u/Cebo494]

So here we are again with people randomly talking about L.A. online always discussing the logistics of what is possible technically, and never understanding the actual issue. Voters in LA are actively opposed to increasing density and fight it tooth and nail. Everyone wants to live the way we live now: small lot homeowners. If you put up a bunch of apartments, then those people living there outnumber the small lot homeowners, and can outvote them to increase density. BUT we don't have that here. Instead we have lots of small lot homeowners who want the density to be somewhere else far away. THAT is the issue. You have to either bypass the will of the people, or convince the people. So it doesn't matter what is possible technically. The real issue is that people do not want the outcomes that might solve our problems, and there is no solution to THAT problem.

[u/userhwon → u/Cebo494]

And it's super expensive to build and live in Tokyo. And they have no choice because Japan is full. They can't spill over the hills to Lancaster and Bakersfield or out towards the Imperial Valley (though they are building into the bay, and it will likely be filled in completely within a century). So it's cheaper to build out than up in LA.