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Location: Austin, TX/Chicago, IL/Houston, TX/Washington, DC
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Quote:
Originally Posted by dweebo2220
^^ personally I think there are 4 major US city categories: Northeast, Midwest, West, and Sunbelt.
Northeast, Midwest, West, & South. Those are the 4 "regions" that have always coexisted in the United States. There isn't a official region called "Sunbelt" that coexists with the others, look up why its called Sunbelt in the first place.
Los Angeles's Downtown in terms of activity is probably more so like Baltimore's. Been there, and it doesn't come anywhere close to San Francisco, Chicago, & Boston in terms of Downtown, and also for what it's worth, it has great bones to be a more active downtown than it already is but for the most part it doesn't seem to be as vibrant as it could be.
I've been told by people who live in LA that downtown is pretty dry and dead, especially considering a city of its size. I noticed there are SOME pics where there are lots of people, but I hear that is the exception to the rule. What is the truth?
The older/east side/Hispanic side of downtown has been vibrant for years. The newer/modern/west side of downtown rolled the sidewalks up at 5pm until just the last couple three years. Now the two areas meet and overlap. And while the number of Hispanic stores is decreasing, overall downtown is seeing more people and seeing more money than it has in years. The amount of people out and about in downtown is pretty incredible for LA although if you were from some other more vibrant city it might look a little sparse. It's getting there though. Pretty quickly too.
Downtowns are deceptive when you look at the buildings from a distance. Some might think that superficially Atlanta looks like downtown LA and maybe it does, but when you're standing in the respective downtowns they are very different. Atlanta buildings might be more impressive individually but they are are more spread out and it doesn't really feel old school big city. Downtown LA very much feels like you are in a big city downtown and you are. It's just smaller than it should be.
It's not that different than Dallas though. Just bigger in area. Plus downtown LA's older portion has more and taller buildings, but kinda similar. Not really SF or NYC though. Certain streets may remind you of those cities, but you never really could mistake downtown for one of those.
Thats a pretty bald statement to make but I respect your opinion.
It's a pretty common statement - in many "best downtown" or "most vibrant downtown" city-data polls San Francisco typically gets more votes than Philly. I think they're very comparable, SF just has a more bustling vibe and feels denser, which I prefer.
Northeast, Midwest, West, & South. Those are the 4 "regions" that have always coexisted in the United States. There isn't a official region called "Sunbelt" that coexists with the others, look up why its called Sunbelt in the first place.
that was a typo on my part. However, now it's got me thinking... there might be something to be said about cities like San Jose, Houston, and Phoenix being lumped together as "Sunbelt," with Los Angeles straddling the "west" and "sunbelt" categories.
Location: Austin, TX/Chicago, IL/Houston, TX/Washington, DC
10,138 posts, read 16,047,399 times
Reputation: 4047
Quote:
Originally Posted by dweebo2220
that was a typo on my part. However, now it's got me thinking... there might be something to be said about cities like San Jose, Houston, and Phoenix being lumped together as "Sunbelt," with Los Angeles straddling the "west" and "sunbelt" categories.
I don't know, just throwing it out there.
I've been to Los Angeles quite a lot, probably more than I can even recount, it along with Chicago & Bay Area seems to be my family favorite location to go during vacations and I have family there as well.
Los Angeles is a Sunbelt city in the West, it was the original Sunbelt city and its decades ahead of the others. The reason it is a Sunbelt city is because in terms of development, it was formed differently than New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, & even San Francisco.
Los Angeles while it has a very cool downtown, is the city in the United States that relies on Downtown the least, I suppose it comes from the fact that it has so many districts and so many business centers (Like Century City being one) spread across the city everywhere. Los Angeles is an extremely dense city and rightfully so, but its not accredited that it didn't form the same way like San Francisco.
Los Angeles owes lots of mobility to large freeways, with wide exchanges, much like a Sunbelt icon (large multilaner freeways), and large area covered and sprawling into other municipalities. It's become way more urban and denser because of decades of infill but it started off being like Atlanta or Dallas.
In fact take a look at the city populations by decade, and next to some of the decades, look at the density for the cities and notice how for a large part Los Angeles was an outlier to the other cities in the Top 10. Los Angeles since then has come a long way, but its development was the example for what other spread out Sunbelt cities are like.
It's a western city, with a western vibe, but its form of development is nothing outside of Sunbelt, its matured to become more urban, more dense, more city like yes, but its where and how the city started off. Los Angeles is a one of a kind city, the only one of its kind, and the very first of its kind, in my opinion.
Yeah, you're right. I'm very familiar with LA's history and, indeed, it was the first large city to be built at low densities, but as you know this was due to the red cars. The central cities of Portland, Seattle, and Denver are very similar in density to early Los Angeles. San Francisco is really only different because it was confined to a small area. But go over to Oakland and Berkeley and you see a landscape much more similar to old Los Angeles (albeit still denser due to the confinement of the hills).
Los Angeles really "became" a sunbelt city after WWII. I agree that it started the whole thing. And something can be said about LA's early real estate-dominated economy foreshadowing the sunbelt experience, but LA was already "LA" pre-WWII/pre-freeway. It wasn't significantly less dense pre-WWII than Seattle, Portland, or Denver, it was just significantly bigger. And, yes, car culture was indeed stronger in LA due to the tremendous boom of the 20s and the prosperity the city experienced, as well as the significant oil reserves LA has.
When LA decided in the 40s and 50s to go all out with freeways, it did so by cutting into existing urban fabric. True, the valley and southeastern areas were more or less shaped by the growing freeways, but this only accounts for about a half of what we think of as "LA."
When I think of "sunbelt" cities I think of cities that became large (over 500,000) only after the advent of Freeways. While there are of course portions of Houston and Dallas and Atlanta that are old streetcar suburbs, they don't form the structure of the city anywhere near as much as they do in LA.
In other words, I'm sticking to my guns that LA is a hybrid (Portland/Seattle/Denver)/(Phoenix/Houston/Atlanta) city.
This is off-topic anyway! but yes, downtown LA has always been unimportant since the 1950s--before that, all of the rail lines still were heavily focused there and it was by far the "center" of the city.
Last edited by dweebo2220; 02-22-2011 at 09:56 PM..
I've been to Los Angeles quite a lot, probably more than I can even recount, it along with Chicago & Bay Area seems to be my family favorite location to go during vacations and I have family there as well.
Los Angeles is a Sunbelt city in the West, it was the original Sunbelt city and its decades ahead of the others. The reason it is a Sunbelt city is because in terms of development, it was formed differently than New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, & even San Francisco.
Los Angeles while it has a very cool downtown, is the city in the United States that relies on Downtown the least, I suppose it comes from the fact that it has so many districts and so many business centers (Like Century City being one) spread across the city everywhere. Los Angeles is an extremely dense city and rightfully so, but its not accredited that it didn't form the same way like San Francisco.
Los Angeles owes lots of mobility to large freeways, with wide exchanges, much like a Sunbelt icon (large multilaner freeways), and large area covered and sprawling into other municipalities. It's become way more urban and denser because of decades of infill but it started off being like Atlanta or Dallas.
In fact take a look at the city populations by decade, and next to some of the decades, look at the density for the cities and notice how for a large part Los Angeles was an outlier to the other cities in the Top 10. Los Angeles since then has come a long way, but its development was the example for what other spread out Sunbelt cities are like.
It's a western city, with a western vibe, but its form of development is nothing outside of Sunbelt, its matured to become more urban, more dense, more city like yes, but its where and how the city started off. Los Angeles is a one of a kind city, the only one of its kind, and the very first of its kind, in my opinion.
As the original sunbelt city, Los Angeles straddles the line between the two time periods. While what is outside of downtown has sprawled far out, the downtown is still quite dense from its early days and its closer suburbs and the older among the cities that have since been engulfed by the sprawl still show some traditional urban forms.
The density numbers for Los Angeles are skewed early on as Los Angeles started by incorporating a very large region--however, little of that region was really developed (and a significant amount of the annexation had to do with securing water). This could be analogous to how we look at large cities like Houston which are reasonably dense at their core despite having very low densities--however, Los Angeles's downtown was built to a much more compact and larger extent. If you look at pictures of Los Angeles from the early part of the 20th century, you'll see that the downtown region back then was fairly built-up in both density and size--especially Bunker Hill. Unfortunately, much of the original buildings of Bunker Hill were subsequently plowed over for skyscrapers (too bad they couldn't choose another area of Los Angeles to bulldoze over as Bunker Hill had a lot of great historic architecture).
So yea, while I don't agree that it was completely later infill that made Los Angeles dense in its downtown, I do agree it's a weird straddler and a different city from both the sunbelt cities of the latter half of the 20th century and cities that were built up in previous ones.
I've been to Los Angeles quite a lot, probably more than I can even recount, it along with Chicago & Bay Area seems to be my family favorite location to go during vacations and I have family there as well.
Los Angeles is a Sunbelt city in the West, it was the original Sunbelt city and its decades ahead of the others. The reason it is a Sunbelt city is because in terms of development, it was formed differently than New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, & even San Francisco.
Los Angeles while it has a very cool downtown, is the city in the United States that relies on Downtown the least, I suppose it comes from the fact that it has so many districts and so many business centers (Like Century City being one) spread across the city everywhere. Los Angeles is an extremely dense city and rightfully so, but its not accredited that it didn't form the same way like San Francisco.
Los Angeles owes lots of mobility to large freeways, with wide exchanges, much like a Sunbelt icon (large multilaner freeways), and large area covered and sprawling into other municipalities. It's become way more urban and denser because of decades of infill but it started off being like Atlanta or Dallas.
In fact take a look at the city populations by decade, and next to some of the decades, look at the density for the cities and notice how for a large part Los Angeles was an outlier to the other cities in the Top 10. Los Angeles since then has come a long way, but its development was the example for what other spread out Sunbelt cities are like.
It's a western city, with a western vibe, but its form of development is nothing outside of Sunbelt, its matured to become more urban, more dense, more city like yes, but its where and how the city started off. Los Angeles is a one of a kind city, the only one of its kind, and the very first of its kind, in my opinion.
Yeah, you're right. I'm very familiar with LA's history and, indeed, it was the first large city to be built at low densities, but as you know this was due to the red cars. The central cities of Portland, Seattle, and Denver are very similar in density to early Los Angeles. San Francisco is really only different because it was confined to a small area. But go over to Oakland and Berkeley and you see a landscape much more similar to old Los Angeles (albeit still denser due to the confinement of the hills).
Los Angeles really "became" a sunbelt city after WWII. I agree that it started the whole thing. And something can be said about LA's early real estate-dominated economy foreshadowing the sunbelt experience, but LA was already "LA" pre-WWII/pre-freeway. It wasn't significantly less dense pre-WWII than Seattle, Portland, or Denver, it was just significantly bigger. And, yes, car culture was indeed stronger in LA due to the tremendous boom of the 20s and the prosperity the city experienced, as well as the significant oil reserves LA has.
When LA decided in the 40s and 50s to go all out with freeways, it did so by cutting into existing urban fabric. True, the valley and southeastern areas were more or less shaped by the growing freeways, but this only accounts for about a half of what we think of as "LA."
When I think of "sunbelt" cities I think of cities that became large (over 500,000) only after the advent of Freeways. While there are of course portions of Houston and Dallas and Atlanta that are old streetcar suburbs, they don't form the structure of the city anywhere near as much as they do in LA.
In other words, I'm sticking to my guns that LA is a hybrid (Portland/Seattle/Denver)/(Phoenix/Houston/Atlanta) city.
This is off-topic anyway! but yes, downtown LA has always been unimportant since the 1950s--before that, all of the rail lines still were heavily focused there and it was by far the "center" of the city.
Seattle's population density is nearly 7400 people/sq mile - very close to LA's current density and twice as high LA in 1940.
Id put Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver in a completely different category than LA and sunbelt cities. They had different development patterns with different drivers.
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