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Single-family homes cover almost half of Los Angeles
- StudentStuff 8y agoI find most of LA really hard to spend time in. The mangled road network (Grids? Nah bruh, lets have lots of dead ends!), constant drone of traffic everywhere, and few things being walkable makes it not the most enjoyable place to visit. Seattle is up there on the traffic scale, but at least in the neighborhoods there aren't 6 lane monster roads criss crossing every which way, with few pedestrian crossings and no lanes for bikes or busses. Traffic calming has helped quite a bit too, though I imagine reducing a 4 lane road to a 2 lane road with parking, a center turn lane and bike lanes would get the average politician recalled down in LA.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoI lived in LA for about 30 years, and while it isn’t that walkable, there aren’t that many dead ends, and where there are, it is due to geography (canyons, mountains). It is also in large part gridded out.
- Rebelgecko 8y agoI think walkability also varies a lot within LA. At my previous apartment, I was about a 5 minute walk from 2 grocery stores, my dentist, my doctor, etc. Maybe a 15 minute walk to the beach.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoLA gets vilified for being sprawling and car-centric, as if its love of cars is why it sprawls. This is not true. It sprawled from the beginning before cars were the norm. It is rooted in the high cost of building infrastructure in a desert and how that necessitates building large tracts in one fell swoop to make the financing make sense.
- piyh 8y agoHow is building in a desert more difficult than building on a plain? Water is a municipal problem, not the builder's.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoMuch of the water for LA comes from the Colorado River. You have to build substantial infrastructure to pipe it in. Building a large swathe of stuff helps defray the cost of this essential infrastructure, without which you can't survive. Once you put in the pipes to get it there, you better build out enough homes and businesses to at least break even on that part of it or you are doomed.
- tomnipotent 8y agoSure, when you're building in 2018 with all the luxuries the modern world has to offer. Not so a hundred years ago.
- the_gastropod 8y agoThis is technically true, but kind of a stretch. The population of LA in 1900 was only ~100k people. By 1920, there were over 500k. And it continued to explode in growth through the '70s. The "sprawl" was less sprawly than it was a collection of multiple cities that have been annexed over the decades. In the 1890's, LA was 28 square miles (and that 28 "original" LA is still very evident today). Today, it's 469 square miles. LA's current sprawl is absolutely because of the car. There's a very clear reason old east coast cities and european cities look so much different than newer cities like LA.
- DoreenMichele 8y agoI have read a history of the origin of LA. It didn't agree with you. LA sprawled from the start. This likely made it well suited to developing their cult of the car, not the other way around.
- wwweston 8y ago
- neonhomer 8y ago> The mangled road network Have you ever been in Pittsburgh? I cannot fathom many cities have a worse network between the myriad of bridges, triangle shaped downtown and geography.
- radiorental 8y agoI'll see your Pittsburgh and raise you a Boston.
- village-idiot 8y agoThe city whose road network was designed by a spider on LSD.
- theandrewbailey 8y agoI'll raise you Canton Avenue. All the way to the top! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Avenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton_Avenue
- emodendroket 8y agoDriving in Boston is a nightmare... but you don't have to do it! Even if you're out in the suburbs you can park your car and ride the train in. LA doesn't afford you that option, really.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- DoubleCribble 8y agoIn Pittsburgh, it's the topography that thwarts you. In Boston it's the other drivers.
- DoubleCribble 8y agoNo kidding! I recently visited Pittsburgh and remarked to my passenger that I'd have zero (expletive deleted) chance of getting anywhere on time without a nav. More than once, I missed turnoffs and entire roads when navigating the hills outside of downtown.
- IvyMike 8y agoLos Angeles is a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit. That being said, the revitalized downtown, the slowly growing metro system, and uber/lyft to fill the gaps have made it better than it once was. It still is a massive monstrosity of a city, so it's never going to be as "walkable" as compact city like SF.
- bksenior 8y agoThis is a perfect way to put it "Los Angeles is a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit." Once you understand how to travel the city, it's hard to live anywhere else because quality of life is so ridiculously high. It's why people tend not to leave if they make it past their two year mark.
- village-idiot 8y agoShhhh, stop telling everyone!
- flyinglizard 8y agoGenuinely interested - what makes LA a great place to live?
- taurath 8y agoThere's always activity and something interesting and new everywhere, but you can still get privacy and quiet. Very open culture, easy to make friends (though can be hard to find good ones). Easy to find an enclave you like (if you can afford it).
- borkt 8y agoIt has every type of food known to man, and often truly authentic restauarants if not neighborhoods devoted to specific regions/groups. People are generally much nicer than the bay area, and the weather is great most of the time. Proximity to the Ocean, not too far from mountains, LAX goes everywhere basically. I agree that it is not a place to visit, but the 2 years I lived there were great.
- CodeWriter23 8y agoOh they’ve done away with the 6-lane artery. ALL of those roads in Los Angeles now have a dedicated, hardly used Bike Lane in each direction. More Traffic. More Pollution due to more stop and go. And little benefit to the people. I’m all for Bike Lanes where enough people will actually use them to create a benefit that outweighs the impact of losing that lane, like DTLA. Or Manhattan. But across sprawling LA, where people take on an extra commute 1.5 hrs/day to get their kids to the “good” school, the shotgun approach to deleting traffic lanes is just stupid.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fjabre 8y agoYou really cannot think of LA as a traditional city. It is a collection of sprawling neighborhoods. There are plenty of walkable neighborhoods in Los Angeles. This is a common misconception. More than in Seattle is my guess but Seattle is much smaller. Apples and Oranges. Weather plays a big role of course as many find Seattle too depressing to live in for most of the year.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- slg 8y ago>As Morrow points out, Los Angeles was zoned to hold up to 10 million residents in 1960. By 1990, the city had capacity for just 3.9 million residents. That single line sums up a huge source of problems in Los Angeles from high rents to homelessness to traffic to lack of public transit. People want to move to, live in, and work in the city, but its zoning laws have unnaturally restricted growth for decades.
- GW150914 8y agoSurely part of the problem is that so many people love or want to live in a place that long-term, can’t get water, is subject to deveststing earthquakes, and is overpopulated in terms of what can be sustained in a sane manner over time? It seems like the last thing to do is fill the place up with more people. Even if you reject that premise, what you call “unnaturally restricted growth” is being applied to a truly massive city. What would unrestricted growth look like exactly? After all was said and done, would it still be such a desirable place to live? I get the impression from CA property discussions (of SF especially) on this forum, that anything which drives up rents and makes it hard for the typical person on this forum to live there is de facto, wrong. It’s obvious and the received wisdom that the solution is to build build build. Are you so sure the solution for everyone who isn’t looking for a high-end techie salary (i.e. most people) isn’t for the industry to be less concentrated in one city? Plus the whole water poured into a desert and earthquake things. Now I realize this is all a massively unpopular viewpoint around these parts, but these parts are at their most “in a bubble” around this issue I think. It’s no shock that the people who stand to benefit most from their preferred solution are fanatically in favor of it, especially when the alternatives involve (in the short term) sacrifice, and ideologically undesired outcomes like continued regulation. The thing is, between people who spent a lifetime in a city not wanting it to turn into blocks of high-rises, and an influx chasing VC money, there really is more than the dichotomy of “the virtuous” and “the NIMBY.” Everyone here would benefit from reading Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner. Edit: I knew going in that this was going to be downvoted to death, but I hold out some hope that it can get some thoughtful rebuttals too. Preferably light on the glib “Natural disasters happen in many paces” canard.
- 8y ago
- emodendroket 8y agoI found Los Angeles pretty unpleasant in that it combined all the least pleasant parts of suburban living with the least pleasant parts of urban living; I guess this is part of why.
- fjabre 8y agoI actually find it a benefit that you can have a house with a yard in the middle of LA. Compare that to New York where people are stacked up on top of each other like ants. For the cost of a studio apartment in Manhattan one could rent a free standing house in Los Angeles and with year round beautiful weather.
- jayd16 8y ago>For the cost of a studio apartment in Manhattan one could rent a free standing house in Los Angeles and with year round beautiful weather. Shhh. This is why Silverlake is full of New Yorkers now. If anyone asks, its terrible here.
- zjaffee 8y agoIt blows my mind that Silverlake is attractive to former New Yorkers in the way that it is. It's far less walkable than the nearby neighborhoods that are just as trendy from Los Feliz to Highland Park.
- TheTrotters 8y agoBut then you have no choice but to get everywhere by car. It's an awful life for some people.
- nikanj 8y agoAnd 14% of it is parking! https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/12/parking-los-angeles-maps-study/418593/ https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2015/12/parking-los-a...
- Avshalom 8y agoTo be fair you can subtract out "almost half of Los Angeles" and still be left over with an entire Chicago... with room to spare.
- zjaffee 8y agoIt's important to not forget that half of the land in Los Angeles is the Santa Monica Mountains (hollywood hills, ect), and the San Fernando Valley. Now, there are still neighborhoods in central areas that don't have much multifamily housing, but these are the areas that need to be targeted. Multifamily sprawl is just as bad if not worse than single family home sprawl, as it only feeds into traffic. The real problem in LA is a lack of proper transit oriented development, especially around employment. I should also add that LA is the densest metro area in the US, largely because even though LA has so many single family homes, subdivisions are far smaller than you see in NYC suburbs.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago> Multifamily sprawl is just as bad if not worse than single family home sprawl, as it only feeds into traffic. I agree. Constantly intensifying car traffic is at the heart of LA's (and Southern California's) problems. LA (and Southern California) will not improve its car traffic density problem for at least another generation (and probably multiple generations).
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ishikawa 8y agoIMHO what happened is that several cities appeared 150 years ago, they grew and are still growing. Suburbs have grown but there are few cases of cities starting to emerge in the last 40 years and that is also a way to grow.
- dawhizkid 8y agoI've never lived in LA, but if I did it seems like the neighborhood you choose to live in would drastically impact your experience in a much more severe way than other cities because of how long it takes to get from point A to point B i.e. if you chose to live downtown then basically forget seeing friends or dating someone who lives in Venice. The only condition in which I could see myself living there is if my average commute was < 30 minutes, if I had a core group of friends that lived in the same neighborhood as me, and if I enjoyed the social aspects of the neighborhood I lived in.
- smileysteve 8y agoAccurate form my time there in 2015; When our vcs asked if I would move there, it was a "I love it right now because I'm near the beach, but if I lived somewhere I could afford, I'd never be able to make it to the beach".
- zjaffee 8y agoVenice to Downtown is 25 minutes if you make the drive after 8:30-9pm, where on the weekends it can be the same the entire day. It does suck when you have a concert you want to get to that starts at 8, but you do get used to it. Note that this distance is close to 15 miles anyways, where virtually no one in NYC is traveling that distance in less than an hour.
- CydeWeys 8y agoAll of NYC except Far Rockaway and parts of Staten Island are within 15 miles of midtown, as well as the densest part of NJ including Newark, Jersey City, and Hoboken. And also the three large airports in the region (JFK, LGA, and EWR). I rarely travel more than a couple miles on a daily basis. My point being, distance is relative to the density of the city. When the city is dense you don't need to travel long distances, so comparing travel time per distance straight across isn't a relevant comparison. But you're still off anyway; the average subway speed is 17 mph, and LIRR/MetroNorth are considerably faster since they make fewer stops.
- LAite2 8y ago
- teslaberry 8y agoraise gas taxes, maybe that will help LA become a city, that or it will be abandoned.
- dnhz 8y agoStill though, LA is the densest metropolitan area in the country. Also from curbed (source being the census): https://la.curbed.com/2012/3/26/10385086/los-angeles-is-the-most-densely-populated-urban-area-in-the-us https://la.curbed.com/2012/3/26/10385086/los-angeles-is-the-... If you've been to LA, you know that those single-family homes are nearly touching each other and that the cityscape is very built, with hardly any empty space. Yes it's overall not transit friendly, but it's still a huge area that you can reasonably call urban.
- gesman 8y agoI was just flying over LA on sunday and had to take a picture of this "single house ocean": https://imgur.com/a/iMWExcv https://imgur.com/a/iMWExcv Very unusual view.
- King-Aaron 8y agoThis is what it's like in many cities across Australia - personally I don't find it particularly unusual.
- golemiprague 8y agoThat's why Australian cities are so boring
- chrisper 8y agoIs there a reason you are flying in a HighVis vest?
- gesman 8y agoLol It was cold! And it’s Gore jacket :)