Quote:
Originally Posted by LA21st
Cause it's not the same and la just has more of it. It's not really debatable. What other big city has to compete with a Anaheim in it's metro? Then you have long beach, Newport and Laguna, Pasadena, Glendale, Irvine area on top of the usual santa Monica , Beverly hills, wrst Hollywood etc etc...
I'm from Chicago and return once a year. It's not the same.
I don't even think there's a Glendale comparison in Chicago suburbs. It's a unique area and just like Chicago is great being centralized, la is great in the opposite way
.
And there's only a few places as big as Irvine in the country. They're not everywhere.
Tysons is one, Reston/Herndon for DC (but not bigger).
Maybe 5, 10 tops.
And those places don't have a huge University either.
|
LA has more suburban office clusters than most places because the region is huge and bigger than all other metros in the country outside of NYC. Orange County is pretty unique in that it's a fully suburban county (outside of some urbanish areas of Santa Ana) with a population of 3 million, and sandwiched between LA and San Diego counties. Plus they have one of the biggest tourist attractions in the world- Disneyland. There's a reason they have their own pro sports teams. It's basically its own thing, and while it does serve as a 'bedroom county' of sorts for LA, it's definitely also got its own economy and culture. People in the OC have access to great restaurants, theater and arts, universities, sports...they don't really have to come up to LA all that much unless they want to.
But I disagree that suburban competition is more intense in the LA area than other parts of the country. Remember, the city of LA is itself massive, encompassing over 500 square miles. Many areas that would be counted as suburbs in other places (most of the Valley, for example) are inside the city limits. Are Pasadena, Glendale, Santa Monica, etc. that much different than Silver Spring, Bethesda, Tysons Corner? Besides being larger (because, again, LA is larger than basically everywhere in the US), I don't see too much difference. San Francisco is like a tenth of the size of LA, and they have to deal with Oakland, San Jose, all the cities in the Peninsula and down in Silicon Valley as competition. New York has places like Jersey City, White Planes, Samford...tons more large-ish cities surrounding it. The Phoenix area has suburbs like Mesa, which is pushing 500,000 people, Tempe, Scottsdale, etc. I just don't see LA's situation as being all that different, just on a larger scale.