Should there be any doubt that LA belongs among the big 6 urban US cities?

[jd3189]

Before living here in LA for residency, I remember years ago on another thread that the only major cities in the country that still retained much of their prewar built environment and seemed urban were NYC, SF, Chicago, Boston, Philly, and DC. LA was sometimes included in this group but was seen as still distinct from those “big 6”.

Now that I have spent some time driving, walking, and taking public transit around the city, I have to say that LA is pretty urban at its core and various other nodes, such as Hollywood, Mid-Wilshire, etc. It’s still very car centric with small strip malls and some larger ones anchored by grocery stores like Ralph’s and local supermarkets. However, it’s still is walkable though many of those nodes and many of its urban parts are prewar or at least interwar/ early postwar.

In many neighborhoods, there isn’t only single family homes. A lot of small garden apartments, dingbats, duplexes/triplexes as well as legit large apartment buildings among them. Even the SFHs are on small lots which gives both a sense of independence but also fosters some level of community, unlike the newer suburbs in Texas or Florida. Overall the built area reminded me of parts of Brooklyn ( outside of the brownstones) and Queens. It’s not as intense as Manhattan (although nowhere in this country is) but it wasn’t built with that in mind.

I guess what I’m trying to say for this thread is that despite its faults, LA is legitimately one of the most urban cities in the country and belongs with the other 6 prewar cities. It still has a lot to improve upon but it does belong up there along with NYC, Chicago, and SF.

[wanderer34]

LA is regarded as one of the Big 3 amongst American cities along with NY and Chicago. If I could extend it to three more showcase cities, it would have to be Miami, Houston, and DC, with Miami being the showcase city of the Southeast, Houston being the showcase city of TX, and DC being the nation's capital!

[LA21st]

The other city being debatable is Seattle for number 7.
Seattle has a better downtown and environs but didnt seem more urban or dense outside of it.

For downtown, yes. City, no on seattle. La is just too big and its really hard to compare. Only nyc and chicago beat it on scale.

But overall Seattle would be 8. Baltimore fits in somewhere.

[pj3000]

Yes, I think there should be doubt. You're trying to compare Los Angeles' level of urban development with that of cities that were established as major urban centers for MUCH longer than Los Angeles.

Los Angeles' prewar built environment is not all that impressive, in comparison. It's just a function of age/era of development.


LA's urban environment is certainly distinct from the cities you mention. But forget about comparison to the "big 6" cities that you mention. Los Angeles doesn't even have the built environment of smaller city like Pittsburgh:

[Crawford]

LA is obviously among the Big 2 U.S. metropolitan centers.

But in terms of traditional urbanity/transit orientation, I'd say no. Those six cities seem to better embody cohesive, functional prewar urbanity. LA kinda does its own thing, which is not quite traditional urbanity and not quite Sunbelt form.

[iheartthed]

No, it doesn't belong in that group unless you want to render the classification meaningless. L.A. is probably the perfect Sun Belt city, though.

[hipster duck]

I'm kind of making a metric out of thin air, but if you wanted a definition of what separates those big 6 cities from the rest, it would be:

- Can a million people or more live a reasonably middle class life in walkable neighborhoods that are all connected to one another by decent public transit? Could these million + people ditch their cars without experiencing a huge drop in quality of life?

I'm not sure DC makes it to the 1 million mark on this metric, but it's probably pretty close. The rest do, yes.

Just by sheer numbers, LA might have 1 million people living in areas that you can walk around - although for many, the walking experience is subpar. But are those places all stitched together by decent public transit? Like, would you travel from Abbot Kinney Blvd in Venice to downtown Pasadena by public transit given other choices the way that traveling from Downtown Berkeley to the Mission seems like a no-brainer with BART?

[38 Geary]

I don't think it's quite there yet as of right now.

In terms of transit, give it maybe 50 years when a few large transit projects are completed and we can assess the impact. The D Line Extension, Sepulveda Transit Corridor, K Line Northern Extension, and Vermont Transit Corridor are the four big ones that I think will be transformative to help elevate LA to the next tier.

As far as housing, there seems to be a lot of housing going up but they're usually podium towers and have a loooot of parking included. LA seems to be doing a decent job of concentrating the housing developments around transit stops, but they still contain more parking than units the majority of the time. This may also be a classic chicken/egg scenario where Angelenos are forced to drive given insufficient alternative transportation, or also just the huge availability of parking and auto oriented development making it easier and more convenient to drive. The above transit projects should hopefully help with that.

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

I'm kind of making a metric out of thin air, but if you wanted a definition of what separates those big 6 cities from the rest, it would be:

- Can a million people or more live a reasonably middle class life in walkable neighborhoods that are all connected to one another by decent public transit? Could these million + people ditch their cars without experiencing a huge drop in quality of life?

I'm not sure DC makes it to the 1 million mark on this metric, but it's probably pretty close. The rest do, yes.

Just by sheer numbers, LA might have 1 million people living in areas that you can walk around - although for many, the walking experience is subpar. But are those places all stitched together by decent public transit? Like, would you travel from Abbot Kinney Blvd in Venice to downtown Pasadena by public transit given other choices the way that traveling from Downtown Berkeley to the Mission seems like a no-brainer with BART?

I mostly agree with this. I think 1 million is a stretch for all of these cities except NY and Chicago, but if you set it at half a million then yes. But the bigger point is that you have almost no one in L.A. going car free by choice, but a substantial percentage of people do that in the other cities.

[Docere]

L.A. is the first of the sunbelt cities to get big, so a rather unique typology.

[Xing]

If LA continued down the same road it had prior to the 90’s, I’d have doubts. It didnt. It aggressively began to take the criticisms it received, and it began addressing the issues head on. The transit system expanded like wildfire. Downtown is improving. It’s taking cars off the road, with the transit, & HOv lanes.It now has a world class art scene. It has character. It’s dense. It just seems to be trying too hard to improve, for me to simply ignore the changes. Yes, it has a lot more improvements to make, particularly with downtown LA, but I think it’s showing that it takes its position seriously.

You still see people from cities like ATL and Houston getting way too sensitive & defensive with criticism. That’s not how criticism works. Ask LA. You take criticism, and you address it. You fix it. The more you whine about it, the more you pro-long change.

[eschaton]

LA has a pretty unique typology for the U.S. Put simply, it's dense (both structurally and in terms of population) but the walking infrastructure is subpar, and the massively polycentric nature of the region makes it really hard to cobble together a functional transit system.

To give a concrete example, this area has a 97% score on Walkscore. 97%! No one would look at it and say that it's highly walkable. But it's dense with commercial amenities, and has a high population density. Just good luck trying to cross the street on foot - or have a pleasant stroll along the sidewalk.

Adding to this too, there's the issue that Los Angeles has a pretty uniformly low-income city center. Outside parts of DTLA proper, Echo Park is the only close-in neighborhood which is both desirable and semi-walkable. The pedestrian-friendly wealthy areas tend to be distributed more on the western fringes of the city, and aren't really cohesive. You can live near one, and take advantage on foot, but you likely will have to drive and park to walk to the others.

[Quixote]

Originally Posted by Crawford

LA kinda does its own thing, which is not quite traditional urbanity and not quite Sunbelt form.

/thread

[Quixote]

It should be noted though that sans NYC, the other five cities have household car ownership rates of about 65% or higher.

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by eschaton

LA has a pretty unique typology for the U.S. Put simply, it's dense (both structurally and in terms of population) but the walking infrastructure is subpar, and the massively polycentric nature of the region makes it really hard to cobble together a functional transit system.

To give a concrete example, this area has a 97% score on Walkscore. 97%! No one would look at it and say that it's highly walkable. But it's dense with commercial amenities, and has a high population density. Just good luck trying to cross the street on foot - or have a pleasant stroll along the sidewalk.

Adding to this too, there's the issue that Los Angeles has a pretty uniformly low-income city center. Outside parts of DTLA proper, Echo Park is the only close-in neighborhood which is both desirable and semi-walkable. The pedestrian-friendly wealthy areas tend to be distributed more on the western fringes of the city, and aren't really cohesive. You can live near one, and take advantage on foot, but you likely will have to drive and park to walk to the others.

https://www.google.com/maps/@34.0617335,...XqEv2_k0fAg!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu

This is one block north of that. Koreatown isn't SF or NYC, but it's well above any other sunbelt city. Western Ave isn't a "walkable" street in Koreatown, and nobody has ever said that.
Koreatown has a mix of smaller commercial streets and then streets like Western, Vermont, Olympic.

I wouldnt take walkscore seriously for anywhere.
Little Havana is in the 90s! lol

[Chisouthside]

LA from Koreatown to Boyle Heights feels pretty dense and like a real city. it might extend beyond that but thats from my experience walking that stretch various times.

[sopas ej]

Originally Posted by hipster duck

Just by sheer numbers, LA might have 1 million people living in areas that you can walk around - although for many, the walking experience is subpar. But are those places all stitched together by decent public transit? Like, would you travel from Abbot Kinney Blvd in Venice to downtown Pasadena by public transit given other choices the way that traveling from Downtown Berkeley to the Mission seems like a no-brainer with BART?

Pasadena to Abbot Kinney can be done all by public transit. In fact when the Regional Connector opened, my partner and I went from South Pasadena to Abbot Kinney to eat at Gjelina, all by public transportation. But that's a distance of about 25 miles; downtown Berkeley to the Mission is about 13 miles, and only 10 BART stops away.

[38 Geary]

Originally Posted by sopas ej

Pasadena to Abbot Kinney can be done all by public transit. In fact when the Regional Connector opened, my partner and I went from South Pasadena to Abbot Kinney to eat at Gjelina, all by public transportation. But that's a distance of about 25 miles; downtown Berkeley to the Mission is about 13 miles, and only 10 BART stops away.

Yeah, LA is also massive. When you look at the inner core LA (Central, DTLA, and South LA) on a map, it's already huge, and then you scroll out and see that it also includes the West LA, the area around LAX, and then the SFV all the way out to Santa Clarita and Calabasas. It's almost too big for its own good. All of that land combined is probably equivalent to all the usable land of the entire Bay Area. Then if you include the OC and everything out to the IE, it'd be like if the Bay Area sprawled out to Stockton and Modesto.

[LA21st]

Originally Posted by Chisouthside

LA from Koreatown to Boyle Heights feels pretty dense and like a real city. it might extend beyond that but thats from my experience walking that stretch various times.

It def goes northwest into East Hollywood/Hollywood. Those residential streets are getting denser every year it seems like. If you walked from Hollywood/La Brea to Wilshire and Koreatown, it would feel dense. The Sunset Blvd into Echo Park/Silver Lake/Los Feliz corridor is pretty busy/urban as well.

Excluding Hancock Park, I'd say LA becomes less dense at Century City. Generally speaking. The flats of Beverly Hills are denser than people think.

[wwmiv]

I’m a big fan of disaggregating into more than two groups of cities. Los Angeles certainly doesn’t belong in the same conversation or typology of urbanism as New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco, etc., but it also doesn’t really belong in the same conversation as Houston, Dallas, or Atlanta.

Los Angeles boomed MUCH earlier than any of them, with its foray into major city status beginning in 1920 and unfolding until 1960. We all like to refer to Los Angeles as comparable to the post-war boomburbs, but the reality is that its bones are built on the basis of one of the largest interwar streetcar networks in the entire country. Interwar design principles fundamentally differ from their post-war counterparts, just as much as they differ from pre-war principles:

• pre-war: largely attached or semi-attached single family dwellings and apartment blocks sometimes built with alleyways and on grids with people reliant on foot and transit for mobility;

• interwar: largely detached, but narrowly spaced, single family homes and apartment blocks usually built with alleyways and on grids with people reliant on transit and vehicles for mobility;

• post-war: largely detached and dispersed single family homes and apartment complexes rarely built with alleyways or grids with people reliant on only vehicles for mobility;

Los Angeles is prototypically an interwar city which built on those bones with even more post-war stuff as well, not some kind of monolithically post-war suburban hellscape like Houston.