Quote:
Originally Posted by Obadno
LA has a bit of a downtown now but as late as 2000 ish people complained that Downtown LA sucked.
Even now LA and Dallas have small looking downtown areas compared to the regions they anchor.
On top of that, Dallas and LA were large cities when Phoenix was still a town. As for continued growth Downtown Phoenix has plenty; but its basically growth for the first time as most of the empty lots weren't even urban to begin with but old pre-war single family homes the area of the "original" "downtown" is completely filled in.
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Yeah, what you're saying here is true. It's just that LA and Dallas (and other sunbelt cities) did in fact develop more significant downtowns than Phoenix did... a minor reason being that they developed earlier than Phoenix did, before auto sprawl displaced a lot of major development outside the core.
While LA and Dallas do have smaller downtown areas (though they still are pretty big) relative to the overall vast size of their multi-nodal metro areas, their downtowns are still orders of magnitude larger than Phoenix's downtown in relation... because they developed earlier and because they were and are more prominent cities. So it's very difficult to claim that Phoenix is in the same boat with LA and Dallas and others when it comes to why their downtowns didn't develop -- because they actually did, while Phoenix's did not. Phoenix seems to be kind of an outlier in this case.