Oh come on, LA has a massive shortage of green space. This ranking puts it at 74, while San Francisco is 3rd:
http://parkscore.tpl.org/rankings_ad...etfycsmsnubx40
We have some great parks, but the biggest ones are in the mountains, and are not all that accessible to many people. If you're in the flats and not near the coast, it's pretty hard to find decent parks and open space. It's a definite negative feature for the city, IMO, and I think it comes from the fact that we have such an abundance of tiny private green spaces. This point gets at a major difference between SF and LA. In LA, homeowners have little postage stamp patches of grass in the front and back yards. There are grass strips in the parkways along the streets all over the place, too. SF just doesn't have those things, but they have giant parks and smaller, neighborhood parks scattered around the city. In LA you see greenery and plants all around you in most neighborhoods, but very little of it is public or even big enough to be usable.