Santa Monica is both urban and suburban, just like the rest of LA. It's urban suburbia.

Sure, downtown Santa Monica is urban
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0173...7i16384!8i8192

But is this?
https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0372...7i16384!8i8192

Eh, you can do those kinds of samples for Chicago or DC too. Doesn't tell much. It's probably one the most urban "newer" suburbs in the whole country.

Most of Santa Monica is pretty dense, with walkable commercial strips througout.
Wilshire, Main, Santa Monica, Ocean Park, Colorado, Broadway, Montana, Pico etc. You're never more than a few blocks from retail/restaurants and there's solid transit. Even the numerous office buildings have street facing retail everywhere in the neighborhoods.

But Santa Monica is not what I would call a suburb though; even if it has suburban areas within it. It's as almost as old as LA itself and is one of the many nodes within the LA area that all grew into one another.

A neighborhood can simultaneously be fairly dense and have businesses to walk to while still being suburban in its basic form. IMO most of LA is just dense suburban style development. Most everywhere has generous side and front setbacks, curb cuts are very prevalent, the streets tend to be wide, and the commercial corridors are dominated by suburban style development. Land of the corner strip mall and what not.

But lots (for SFHs) are pretty small and packed close together, and literally almost every buildable parcel in the entire LA basin is built out. So you end up with a suburban-ish looking environment that is deceptively dense. It's walkable in the sense that you can walk to a variety of things, but it wasn't built with the pedestrian in mind. That's why it can be somewhat tough to determine suburban areas from the City of LA. The suburbs are dense, and the city, while dense, is largely suburban in its built form. It's a totally different paradigm than the rest of the country.

I'm from DC burbs, and I was amazed how much street retail there was in LA suburbs, especially places like Santa Monica. You don't really see that much in Fairfax County and the like.
Santa Monica just looked very different than what I was used too.

Paradise isn't even a suburb -- It's an unincorporated part of Clark County, home to McCarran Airport, UNLV and the Strip of course.

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Anybody mention Anaheim?
Population 359,000.
25 million visitors annually.

Same is true for Boston.

https://goo.gl/maps/AK6Gw44XmQajFwaX6

ha. yeah, if we are going to criticize a random weak point in a residential street in santa monica.

It's true for any city. Even NYC (queens/staten Island)

Santa Monica isn't just urban in downtown. That's a false statement. For a "suburb" it's walkable in several areas.

It's funny that people on this forum call north east/midweest suburbs walkable, even when many of them are small areas around a train station (much smaller than downtown santa monica) and the rest is usually single family homes too. They don't have a Wilshire, Montana, ocean park blvd etc in addition to that. They're pretty standard and generic.

You can't have it both ways.

Santa Monica isn't so much a "suburb" but rather a logical extension of the city, defined merely by municipal boundaries. . .

. . .

Like much of LA County. Plenty of LA neighborhoods are technically suburbs just like some LA suburbs are actually in the city limits (Houston has a similar issue).

I think it probably still fits the description of the thread. You guys are getting too hung up on a definition of a suburb.
Other LA metro places that are destinations:
Burbank
Pasadena
Malibu
Anaheim
Manhattan Beach (South Bay)
The OC beach cities; Newport Beach, Huntington Beach, Laguna Beach, San Juan Capistrano.
Places like Palm Springs, Big Bear, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Ojai would fit more into the day trip category.

The historic district in Alexandria is a definitely a nice visit for an afternoon.

The thread might as well be the best metro destinations.The term "suburb" seems to be just a physical characteristic of a place.

Frisco Texas would be an awesome place to live if you cared about a generic suburban lifestyle, Cowboys Training Facility, Stars practice center, FC Dallas stadium, tons of shopping destinatinos, great minor league ballpark, video game museum.

+ Glendale
& to a lesser extent, Woodland Hills

Pasadena for LA. Unlike SM, CC, BH, and WH, it isn’t absorbed by urban LA but rather enjoys a great deal of autonomy. Rose Bowl, Rose Parade, Norton Simon, Caltech, PCC (25,000 students), and Old Town make it significant on a regional, national, and even international level.

For a place that can’t be considered a free-standing city in its own right, I’d go with Malibu, the Beach Cities, and Laguna Beach in OC. Coachella Valley too, although I don’t know if you could call that a suburb of LA. Ditto the Hamptons and NYC.