Quote:
Originally Posted by mhays
Seattle's a tweener between that group and the urban six.
Its peak density is much higher. It's transit and walking commute shares are much higher. It's far more on an immigrant center. It has tourist districts (as does only SD).
Activity is in nodes that comprise 20% of the city. Some of these are linear, and others are dotted around town.
But it's true that all of these cities are growing in similar formats.
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The forum's 2020 census thread yielded interesting statistics on metropolitan population density. The cities that you and Segun were discussing vary quite a bit in terms of overall density.
Percentage and number of persons in each MSA who lived in census tracts with population densities of 10,000+:
(Los Angeles: 50.0%, 6,611,283)
San Diego: 24.7%, 816,530
Seattle: 12.5%, 505,840
Denver: 10.6%, 315,809
Portland: 7.1%, 179,612
Minneapolis: 6.5%, 241,894
Seattle is not notably dense, but it is growing rapidly and in the right way--prioritizing transit-, pedestrian-, and bike-friendly new development and transit extensions in times of very high population growth.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Wigs
I think people forget how quickly LA boomed
LA (city) was already over 1.5 Million before America entered WW2
LA County was 2.8 Million at the time
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Right, and most of the cityscape laid out to contain those people before 1940 was either traditionally urban (e.g., downtown) or quasi-urban (e.g., streetcar suburbs). While pre-war Los Angeles was already in the process of suburbanization and switching from public transit to private vehicles, the entire region was still nonetheless well-served by a massive streetcar network. The pre-war streetcar-oriented layout formed the template upon which most of the city and much of the county were eventually built. Of course, there are now vast tracts of true autopian sprawl, but the transit-friendly layout of the pre-war city is what distinguishes Los Angeles from other polycentric sunbelt cities. That, and the population densities--which is probably related.