The Destructive "Low Density L.A." Myth
 

This untruth needs to be debunked, since it impacts important things like transportation funding. A city of almost 4 million people and region of 15 million cannot help but have many areas of high density, especially in the center. Los Angeles, especially in the core, has among the highest population densities outside Manhattan. The core area around downtown (especially just to the west) has densities comparable to San Francisco in a similar-sized area. Certain districts (Koreatown, MacArthur Park, etc.) have over 40,000 people/sq. mile. These are crowded places. Some of the density is hidden. You may see a single family house, but don't see perhaps 10 people living there, or an apartment building filled with many people sharing units. But walk the neighborhoods, and you'll see the human density.

Many suburbs and outlying cities have high densities as well, above 10,000/sq. mile. Long Beach, a city of almost 500,000, exceeds 10,000 people per square mile; Santa Ana has almost 400,000 people stuffed into about 20 square miles (20,000 per square mile). The Los Angeles region, because of costly housing, house and apartment sharing, high land costs and population growth, has some of the highest suburban densities in the nation.

It is true Los Angeles (like London, Paris and Berlin) is spread out, a consequence of the original Pacific Electric rail system and subsequent freeways, but high densities are found throughout much of the area. However, the highest densities often occur in nodes (e.g. Hollywood, Westwood, Venice, etc.) or in linear corridors (e.g. Wilshire corridor) making for efficient rail transit routes. L.A. is well on the way to an efficient heavy and light rail grid gnitting the dense nodes and corridors. Hopefully Orange County will join the light rail grid in the future (now just served by infrequent Metrolink and AMTRAK diesel trains).

I don't think anyone who really knows about cities thinks that LA is one of those cities like Phoenix which goes straight to suburbs once you exit the CBD.

Nonetheless, LA has a weird urban typology, only shared with Miami, insofar as it's quite dense in terms of population, but has historically been really bad in terms of mixed use and traditional urban form. The typical typology in a dense neighborhood is side streets which are filled with apartments with no ground floor retail, and a main street with road at least four lanes wide, with commercial structures some mixture of old single-story streetcar storefronts, strip malls, and a smattering of commercial highrises.

LA is getting better by this metric, but it needs tons of residential infill buildings with first-floor retail along its commercial corridors. In terms of ideal urban design, they should be at least as tall as the street is wide, so in many cases the typical 4-story apartment blocks built today won't cut it in terms of built form.

LA is fairly low density. It's quite high density for its specific typology (American Sunbelt) but overall, it's accurate to say it's a low density city.

Are there any megacities on earth (say 10 million+ population) with lower weighted density than LA? Probably not.

And it isn't really density, per se, that drives things like transit and urbanity. It's more how the density is arranged. Northern European cities usually don't have particularly high density, yet are quite urban and transit-oriented. London, Hamburg, Berlin, etc. aren't dense cities.

And if you compare SF and LA, yes they have comparable geographies with similar density, but they are VERY different at street level, which means dissimilar urbanity and transit orientation. SF's core is largely dense due to structural density; LA's core is largely dense due to overcrowding from poorer migrants.

I think Crawford's right.

LA has some very dense nodes, but they're mostly separated by medium density neighborhoods. What I think is our saving grace is how dense our single family neighborhoods are relative to the rest of the country. They're built in a way that, should they ever be rezoned, lends itself nicely to being developed into dense walkable communities.The end result is a mostly uniform medium density region.

As for comparisons to other American cities, LA is fairly unique. It's more like Asian cities like Tokyo and Seoul in the way it's urban centers are linked. Most American cities are centered around a single high density jobs center downtown, but downtown LA isn't even the region's largest concentration of jobs, Century City is. LA's urban center is really the the entire Wilshire corridor on the West side.

https://letsgola.files.wordpress.com.../lancaster.jpg

Even LA's exurbs are dense by national standards:

https://letsgola.wordpress.com/2013/...ean-by-suburb/

Care to provide a source?

I should say Century City is the largest of the West side job centers and has the most desirable office space.

Check out the discussion of this post: https://letsgola.wordpress.com/2014/...entric-region/

Showing an areal view of Lancaster is like showing an areal of Fairfield, Vacaville or Morgan Hill and saying that typifies San Francisco. Apples and oranges.

Thats why I said exurban. Even on the fringes of the region housing development is comparatively dense.

Density is density--so what if its because of "poor migrants"? There are neighborhoods of S.F. filled with "poor migrants" as well. Mission, Chinatown etc.

Oh, I misunderstood your point. I just see the vacant lots in the pic.

Yes, "density is density", but that's not what we're talking about.

We're talking about urbanity and transit oriented, really. Just because you stuff some neighborhood full of poor migrants doesn't mean you'll get urbanity or transit orientation. Much of the San Fernando Valley is stuffed with poor(er) Latinos yet there's hardly anything urban or transit-oriented in the SFV. Same goes for much of the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County.

Places like Santa Ana, Costa Mesa, Westminster, Garden Grove, Anaheim, etc. are all quite dense but have little urbanity or transit orientation, and for good reason. They're mostly just typical Sunbelt suburbs but now stuffed with much larger household sizes. It's the same Carl's Jr + tract homes squeezed in everywhere landscape as elsewhere in the Sunbelt.
Yes, there are some poor SF neighborhoods, but not really comparable.

Neither Mission nor Chinatown get many immigrants these days, nor do they have large household sizes. They're structurally urban places, and structurally transit-oriented places, which is very different from somewhere like Koreatown or Westlake in LA. Their built form, especially at street level, reflects the pre-auto era, while the built form in central parts of LA generally reflects the auto era.

LA isn't dealing with a myth as much as it's dealing with an outdated perception. Besides, the layout of the area versus other places is what leads to those perceptions. LA is not a place you can walk from important point to important point. You can't really do that anywhere now days but it is certainly more realistic in Manhattan, Boston and San Francisco.

It's the most desirable location for companies in the financial sector, or at least that's how I read it. Otherwise, there really isn't evidence you can point to that would back up this claim. Certainly not in terms of project developments and perceived momentum.

DTLA's office market is very hot at the moment; it's just not being realized in the form of glassy skyscrapers. There's approximately 3 million square feet of high-quality, Class A creative office space (Broadway Trade Center, ROW DTLA, etc.) currently under construction. That represents a 10% increase in inventory, which I think more than qualifies as a "boom."

Also, not to launch a personal attack on you, but characterizing LA's typology as "polycentric" before proceeding to draw comparisons with Asian and Latin American cities only demonstrates a rather rudimentary understanding of the subject matter. Perhaps LA's polycentricity is only to the degree that it doesn't have a relatively dominant node?

What is inaccurate about that statement? LA is pretty clearly a polycentric city analagous to places like Mexico City, Sao Paulo and the like.

The "favored districts" with the highest home prices, highest office rents, best retail offerings, fanciest hotels, tourist attractions, iconic places, etc. are generally newer urban nodes well outside of downtown.

If some rich guy is staying for a week in LA, he's almost certainly staying in Bev Hills, on the Sunset Strip, or elsewhere on the Westside. He isn't likely to be downtown unless he has specific business downtown.

In a macro sense, sure. But that's where all similarities end. Going any further only complicates matters and doesn't really "clarify" any misconceptions. I cringe every time someone likens LA to Tokyo, as if to suggest that it's even possible for LA to follow Tokyo's model.

What do I think? I think the closest thing to a viable template for LA (if there is one) is some evolved, scaled up, and distorted version of Toronto -- a mostly post-war city with pre-war bones that can reasonably accommodate both cars and pedestrians; one that emphasizes walkable arterials.

But the honest answer is that there really isn't a comparable model to be found anywhere.

That's the status quo. You're projecting the status quo into the future, as if things can't or won't change. Retail options aren't fixed in place, fancy hotels can spring up elsewhere, etc. There are really only two things about the Westside that can't be duplicated elsewhere -- the cooler weather and the proximity to the ocean.

Is Toronto ringed by freeways, congested with traffic and close to an ocean? That's ocean, not lake. I'm more or less fine with the Tokyo comparison but I'd lean more toward Rio than Sao Paulo when it comes to Brazilian cities. Rio minus the favelas of course, or at least LA doesn't literally have them.

And this whole romanticization of the Westside* represents an 80s/90s zeitgeist that is quite frankly no longer en vogue. I'm not saying that the Westside doesn't hold massive appeal anymore, nor am I denying its importance to the local economy. But I do believe that it's no longer (and can no longer be) the main driver behind LA's appeal. Why? Because it's overwhelmingly suburban and quite resistant to major change. What you see now is pretty much what you're always going to get.

*Minus Santa Monica

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ighway_401.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...ighway_401.png

Toronto is highly centralized, with a dominant core that holds all the wealthy/desirable residential, commercial, tourist and shopping zones. It seems to be the anti-LA in terms of layout, IMO. Pretty much everything that matters is right around downtown.

It's also a city that barely has any freeways. There are like two or three major freeways.

To me, LA is kinda the U.S. Tokyo. I think that's a reasonable comparison. Polycentric, strung together by iconic, best-in-class mobility (trains for Tokyo, freeways for LA) and endless activity nodes across a vast basin or plain.