Quote:
Originally Posted by sopas ej
Perhaps the ultimate irony is that Los Angeles, so long demeaned by some planners as the ultimate in “sprawl” is, in fact, the least sprawling major urban area in the United States in relation to its land area.
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What a low-level take. LA is absolutely NOT the least sprawling major urban area, it just has built out almost all of the available flat land in the region at higher densities than occur in the eastern 2/3 of the country due to land and water constraints. LA sprawls from almost Santa Barbara to Palm Desert. To say it's the least sprawling metro is a joke. I guess you could claim LA has the most uniformly dense suburbia in the country.
We've been through this a million times on this forum. Suburbia is built out at higher densities in the Western US mostly due to water constraints. In places like Vegas you have pretty tightly packed suburban sprawl
directly adjacent to uninhabited desert. That pattern would never exist in the east, because there's no need for it to. Density diminishes as you get further from core cities in those environments, and often bleeds into small towns that existed independently of the core city for many years. That makes these types of metros appear less dense on paper than western metros, but it doesn't mean that they sprawl more. Almost all of Vegas is sprawl, as there really isn't even a core city. Similar arguments with many CA places. Orange County is almost all sprawl, but it has pretty impressive density numbers. Same with the IE.
