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I wonder who voted for Colorado Springs and why they did? Just seems like a strange choice.
Most of these choices are bizarre. I'm wondering if Denver might have a reasonable argument, those it's still much less dense and much smaller, in form maybe it's a bit more similar than Houston. No clue.
I don't think you really get it. You know the two or three blocks that you guys go crazy over in Hollywood? There are some cities that have those two or three blocks replicated over and over and over and over again over an area of several square miles without seeing parking lots, SFHs and strip malls! They're like a better version of Santa Monica that doesn't transform into sprawl after a few blocks.
So no, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison. You can't compare two neighborhoods three miles apart in Los Angeles to two neighborhoods three miles apart in Paris. What's in between those neighborhoods is drastically different.
What the hell are you talking about?!
The two neighborhoods are the same distance to their respective CBDs. That makes it fair comparison. This isn't handicapping San Francisco. You guys have a tendency of comparing your peak densest neighborhoods, the ones typically closest to your CBDs, to L.A. neighborhoods much farther away. I've even seen Center City pics lines up next to Santa Monica pics! Santa Monica is 16 miles away from DTLA.
Just because you cannot pleasantly walk between East Hollywood and DTLA does not mean it does not function in a very similar way to the Sunset. Again both are mostly residential communities with no discernible job center and are what would be considered "streetcar suburbs".
I think you guys cling to this "pleasantly" thing in an effort to minimize the importance of the city's built environment. As if the built environment is some minor aesthetic detail--like choosing between a blue and red Porsche--that has no signficant impact on function. A city that's coherent in its built environment will both look and function very differently from a city that's not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by munchitup
It's proven over and over again that LA is very dense, both as far as jobs, residents and everyday amenities. I think this sprawl would in some way or another be able to be proven statistically, right?
As Shoup has repeatedly stated, things like parking have been long overlooked in urban planning circles, and as such, there's not yet any method of quantifying sprawl in that sense. But that doesn't mean that parking lots don't contribute to sprawl. A fact is not wrong because it's not documented. It just means that it's not documented.
But the fact that LA is far more decentralized from a jobs perspective is something that has been documented. And that has a major impact on how the city functions as a whole.
The main reason downtown LA and adjacent neighborhoods have so many empty parking lots is because it's on the whole not a well-off part of the City.
More often the pedestrian-friendliness of a neighborhood has to do with economics than it does any inherent "dna" of urban design.
Would you say that the hostility towards pedestrians in parts of Downtown St. Louis or Downtown Hartford is because of the "dna" of the place? No, it's because of urban renewal, disinvestment, and clearance of under-utilized buildings for liability reasons. In other words, it was because of something done to it. I think of LA in the same way.
Sure, LA has wider streets than many cities, even downtown and in adjacent districts--these streets were widened in the 20s under a major widening campaign.
LA has definitely been hurt by auto-oriented policies, but to say that it has auto-oriented policies in its blood would be inaccurate.
LA was just one of the first cities to try auto-orientation out, and it ended up retrofitting a lot of the city to be better for cars than people.
I think a great deal of the damage associated with this can be undone. Sidewalks can be widened, investment can return (parking lots are already getting eaten up), street space can be given over for public space, etc.
What LA has to undertake to re-retrofit itself to be pedestrian friendly again is much less than what almost all other sunbelt cities would have to do. I fully believe that 20 years from now people will not consider LA on the whole a pedestrian-unfriendly place. We've already started to think about our streets as surplus capacity--capacity that can be given over for public space or bike or bus infrastructure. As this continues you'll see a very different city emerge, one that will actually fit quite nicely into the LA that already exists.
This isn't handicapping San Francisco. You guys have a tendency of comparing your peak densest neighborhoods, the ones typically closest to your CBDs, to L.A. neighborhoods much farther away. I've even seen Center City pics lines up next to Santa Monica pics! Santa Monica is 16 miles away from DTLA.
Probably Santa Monica is a spot out-of-towners are familiar with and has some structural density in the touristy sections. No one visiting Philadelphia would bother visit any area more than maybe 1-2 miles from Center City. Manayunk or Chestnut Hill might nice enough but they're usually off the radar. You almost did the same thing previously. You mentioned Beverly Hills as adding to LA's density as you add to 50 square miles. I started going through the numbers. Beverly Hills may be pedestrian friendly and structurally dense in its commercial areas and it has some relatively dense residential tracts. Ditto, but maybe not as much for Pasadena. But Beverly Hills isn't one of the densest neighborhoods of the city; they're mostly a ring going from the west to south of downtown. Most of these areas are rather poor. I'm not going to argue poor people = less urban but having the fact most of these are low-income suggests they're not considered all that desirable places to live and there's a relatively lower demand for these neighborhoods, and also not neighborhoods people pay lots of attention to. Koreatown and Hollywood get some attention but otherwise? Pico-Union? Westlake?
Most other cities have a similar situation but not as extreme. NYC has Harlem, Washington Heights, the West Bronx and some poorer parts of Brooklyn among its denser neighborhoods, but plenty of its more urban neighborhoods are rather well-off, which gives out-of-towners a partially misleading view of the city.
I think you guys cling to this "pleasantly" thing in an effort to minimize the importance of the city's built environment. As if the built environment is some minor aesthetic detail--like choosing between a blue and red Porsche--that has no signficant impact on function. A city that's coherent in its built environment will both look and function very differently from a city that's not.
As Shoup has repeatedly stated, things like parking have been long overlooked in urban planning circles, and as such, there's not yet any method of quantifying sprawl in that sense. But that doesn't mean that parking lots don't contribute to sprawl. A fact is not wrong because it's not documented. It just means that it's not documented.
But the fact that LA is far more decentralized from a jobs perspective is something that has been documented. And that has a major impact on how the city functions as a whole.
Meh. More like, you're clinging to "pleasant" because precious few facts support your opinion.
The residential density, the housing density, the walkscores (i.e. amenities), the concentraton of jobs in Los Angeles have all been well-documented. Not only does L.A scores high on all of these metrics, in many cases it surpasses "traditional" urban cities.
I wouldn't go that far but out of the cities listed, it's probably the closest to Los Angeles. I'm surprised Houston isn't on the poll.
It was a joke lol. I've never thought about Miami when I'm out in LA. There are at least 6 other cities in the world that come to mind but Miami is not one. Rio de Janeiro is the one I think most closely of LA (without the same density and architecture) but culturally and socioeconomically that's a stretch.
What LA has to undertake to re-retrofit itself to be pedestrian friendly again is much less than what almost all other sunbelt cities would have to do. I fully believe that 20 years from now people will not consider LA on the whole a pedestrian-unfriendly place. We've already started to think about our streets as surplus capacity--capacity that can be given over for public space or bike or bus infrastructure. As this continues you'll see a very different city emerge, one that will actually fit quite nicely into the LA that already exists.
This too is the biggest difference I see between LA and other Sunbelt cities. Mostly what needs to be done is a re-tweaking instead of an over-haul. The vast majority of now-improving Los Angeles neighborhoods are still 5-10 years away from their peak, other than maybe Santa Monica which is just a few years (and one LRT line) away. But just comparing what I see now to even 5-10 years in the past is astounding. Hollywood / Vine looked completely different, as does Hollywood / Western. Soon Sunset / Gower will be unrecognizable. Because it is happening in so many parts of town there is a real momentum building in LA and it won't take a terribly long time.
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