Why Los Angeles is Denser Than You Think

Here’s a weird fact you probably didn’t expect. Los Angeles — the sprawling metropolis of car-culture and suburbia — is actually the densest urban area in the United States, even denser than New York. How is that possible?

Keep Urbanity rolling:

References and Data:

The data came from the 2021 5-Year American Community Survey, accessed through the 'tidycensus' package in R and plotted using ggplot2. (Using population data from the decennial census would have been a bit more precise but I had issues getting data for all the relevant geographies.)

The Median Lot Size in Every U.S. State in 2022

[humanecities]

Density can also feel so much more intense when the only way to get around is by car. Recently, we visited Banff and my sister commented how quiet it was. “There aren’t many people here” she said. But I pointed out, there are just as many people as usual, they just removed cars from Banff Ave. And the busses they run are electric. Everyone was talking, but it was so much quieter without cars. I think people in LA would feel much less “full” if the area weren’t so car-dependent.

[trayveonjohnson]

As someone who is actually from Los Angeles, I can tell you that LA has a way of hiding it’s density that other older cities might not, similar to the way European cities manage to carry their density without building tall. I want some of you from other places to remember this, “In LA there is always a house behind a house”, sometimes a whole apartment building that you can access through alleys between the streets. That alone has a way of doubling or tripling the density without changing the street appearance. It’s a way of keeping human scaled density that most newer cities here in the west employ.

I live in downtown San Diego, which is 110 miles from DTLA. I literally pass by 10 million people on that 1.5-2 hr drive, this is before even arriving into the city of Los Angeles. We’ve never had a shortage of people wanting to move to Southern California. It’s a desirable area despite what naysayers may think about its form. People come here for the natural beauty more so than the built environment, although that is beginning to change now that the area is completely filled out and turning back on itself.

[birdo]

It's really apparent when you look down on NYC and LA. NYC looks like its development is pulled towards Manhattan as the central node where the suburbs have these massive gaps, whereas LA is flat like a pancake with every square inch filled in between the mountain ranges and ocean. As someone from LA, when I visited NYC and looked down on Manhattan from the top of the Empire State, I was surprised to see undeveloped open land in New Jersey. In LA, if you hike the Santa Monica mountains, you cannot see the end of LA (because its so vast) and it's all filled in.

[salakast]

LA's lot sizes really provide so much potential for a world class city, thank god they're finally being used for things other than detached SFHs.

[squirlez]

Ever since I learned about this statistic I've thought it was pretty funny, since a visit to LA and NYC would be enough to immediately write off the statistic as not particularly useful. The population adjusted measure feels much closer to reality, in my experience. That said, LA does have plenty of dense pockets that are nice places to hang out.

[OntarioTrafficMan]

Population weighting would be a good way to characterize bus crowding. Usually agencies use the average load per bus or proportion of buses which are overcrowded, but passengers are disproportionately likely to experience the overcrowded buses since they have the most people on them.

[yukko_parra]

The difference between classical and population weighted density is quite remarkable.

Using Sydney's inner city vs Melbourne's inner city for comparison. (all units in people per square km)
True (County) Density:
Sydney: 8690pp/km2
Melbourne: 4765pp/km2

w census plots with less than 500pp/km2 removed "non rural, non industrial":
Sydney: 10778pp/km2
Melbourne: 9206pp/km2

Population weighted:
Sydney: 25767pp/km2
Melbourne: 50764pp/km2

seems like melbourne has tall towers and sprawing parks in the centre, unlike the more built up sydney, just by this measure alone.

[fernbedek]

Population weighted density is good for experience, but overall average is good for addressing sprawl that devours farmland and natural areas. Both definitely have value.

[alejandroviasus]

I clicked on this video and paused at 2 seconds, absolutely perplexed by the title. Thinking it was cheap click bait, I searched for every source that told me the population density of US cities, and all coming out with NYC at #1. What flew over my head was the fact that 100-200 square miles or so of LA is uninhabitable mountains and sprawled suburban/rural zones, so LA's "urban area" is technically more dense, since it covers less square miles. What's absolutely nuts is that if housing codes allowed for NYC levels of density, then we'd see LA's metro area compete in size to Tokyo. Wild. thanks for swerving me for a sec. This is an amazing channel. Now onto the video!

[carkpop]

So we're just cherry picking definitions to make a clickbait title? Like I'm sorry but, how is San Bernadino it's "own metro area" since it doesn't follow the traffic patterns and commutes of LA, but North Sea Long Island(which also looks gerrymandered in this image), a small town that's a 2.5 hour drive without traffic out of Manhattan, is considered the NYC metro?

Unless you mean San Bernadino is *too big* to be a part of LA's metro area, so it becomes it's own thing... then why is Newark count towards NYC? Is it really that more dependant on NYC than San Bernadino is to LA?

Like, just the outrageous hypocrisy of not going by city limits due to Gerrymandering, but then literally doing your own gerrymandering of NYC's metro area to include farm land and suburbia that has nothing to do with NYC is so disingenuous. You'll have people watching this video saying 'Fun fact, LA is more dense than NYC', when that's only true when you include a 2.5hr drive radius around NYC

[blores]

Living in LA and getting into urbanism, this kinda reaffirms my belief that if LA were so inclined, we could eventually work our way into becoming America's version of Tokyo, a city that's also pretty spread out and mostly uniformly populated throughout. We'd either have to massively build out transit liens of every sort everywhere, which probably isn't cost effective, or densify in each individual LA city's downtown and become a sort of giant region of interconnected villages with transit linking the cores and suburbs filling in the gaps.

Also helps call out the BS when people say LA isn't dense enough for mass transit everywhere just because it's not NYC dense all around. We're definitely sprawling but it's not like we're low density. It was crazy to find out my "small" city in LA between LA and LB was in the top 10 most dense city in CA, and we only have 2 circular bus routes that only operate on the weekdays!

[muhilan]

I guess it’s because LA is surrounded by mountains and deserts so it can’t expand outward to get that super low density exurbia.

[tomtaber]

I live in San Mateo County, in the San Francisco Bay Area. Most people think of this county as suburban. But the reality is that most of the county consists of water and steep forested mountains. The cities are squeezed in a narrow urban/suburban corridor between the bay and the Santa Cruz Mountains. This inhabited area is only a couple of miles wide, and even much of that is quite hilly. There is no room for the urban/suburban area to sprawl outward and there is no room to build any more single family detached houses. New housing consists of apartment buildings, condos, and town houses built on underutilized land in the existing urban area such as parking lots and strip malls.

[alexhaowenwong]

Los Angeles suburbs like Irvine are closer in density and layout to Brampton, ON than they are to Frisco, TX. Both Canada and California have a very sharply defined suburban-rural boundary, while the rest of the US tends to have a transitional zone of exurbs.

[TohaBgood]

You guys are just awesome! You explain in clear human terms the concepts that most urbanists, especially youtube urbanists, get wrong!

That you for all you do! This is amazing work!

[qolspony]

NYC has a lot of large parks. And the density drops off a lot after you leave the city.

[edwardmiessner]

The population weighted density shows Boston and Philadelphia to be not much denser than Miami and San Diego. Yet Boston and Philly have extensive rail transit systems and Miami and San Diego less so. The two northeast cities also have extensive parks while the latter two are noted for their dense suburban sprawl. It's not just the density but what the city was built around (horse-and-buggy and railway vs. automobile and freeway)

[sinisterdesign]

Any statistic that would treat LA as "dense" says more about the uselessness of the statistic than it does anything useful about the cities involved.

[steemlenn]

I do this example for wealth inequality:
If you have 1 person having 10 million dollar, and 9 persons having nothing, on average you have 10 millionaires.

[definitelynotacrab]

Great video, really love how yall approach this from multiple ways of calculation