Quote:
Originally Posted by mello
Is Seattle the most urbanized core outside of the NE cities, Chicago, and SF? I know LA has tons of midrise chunkiness in its "Historic Core" district but when you look at Seattle from a couple of angles it looks extremely developed and when you peer down there are many smaller buildings packed in amongst the talls.
This is kind of like a thread that showed off the same characteristics of Atlanta's core as well. So maybe ATL, Seattle and LA are in a similar league when it comes to their inner 5 square miles or so.
Here are the differences I see: LA has those few blocks of straight up street walls of 10 to 14 floor old ass buildings from 1915 through the 1930's that make that area of downtown seem very dense.
ATL: Has a very linear shape to its built up CBD due to a freeway running right along side of it and I'm not sure why it didn't spread out on the other side in a more circular manner, someone from there can answer that.
Seattle: Buildings are more oriented towards the waterfront because that is the only one of the 3 I'm discussing that has one. So building heights are kind of terraced up the hill from Puget Sound. Best mix of residential thrown in to the CBD, compared to the others.
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Based on the NYT population maps from 2010, LA had a lot of density, often in the 30,000-60,000/sm range on the downtown fringes (mostly west) but Atlanta had very little, topping out around 20,000/sm around Midtown but typically 1/2 or 1/3 of that. Seattle probably averages similarly to LA...around 20,000/sm in maybe three square miles in 2010, peaking a little over 50,000. I'm sure all of three are adding tons of housing right now.
That said we have tons of room to grow. Today is a huge boom (the photos show last year's version) but we'll need another boom or two to even approach the best cities.