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And walkability between Santa Monica and Long Beach, NY is not a close match and in terms of other factors for urbanity, Santa Monica by almost any measure should blow out Long Beach, NY.
This attempt to make them equivalent is absurd. Even the most unfamiliar person with both places will have an extremely difficult time reconciling your statement with pictures or a google maps stroll through the heart of both. It becomes even more absurd for people who have actually been to both. Santa Monica is densely built up in its downtown area and is built far more densely because it needs to support not just the large residential population, but the massive weekday commuter population it services as well as the large tourist industry that supports local, regional, domestic, and international visitors.
There are a lot of cogent arguments for why LA isn't urban--it should make sense to stick with the ones that actually hold.
I googled mapped Long Beach NY.
How in God's name anyone would thnk it's more urban than Santa Monica is crazy. Most of its main street resembles Santa Monica's inland boulevards, but less dense/commerial/interesting.
There's an area around the train station that's more urban, but very small. it's def far smaller than downtown Santa Monica or Main street or Montana Ave.
Broadway looks like a boring, dated residential area with nothing going on. I dont care if it has some old midrises. That means absoutely nothing.
The majority of its residential streets are far less dense than most of Santa Monica.
I dont even see how this place is more urban than Hermosa or Manhattan Beach. Forget Long Beach/SM/Venice etc. Just forget it.
How is this even possible? The centerpiece of SM is a giant suburban shopping mall, with a giant attached free parking garage. There are no real urban parts of SM except right along the Third Street Promenade.
In contrast, DuPont Circle is about as dense/urban as almost any neighborhood in the U.S. outside of NYC.
Have you ever been there? Ocean Ave is urban, and many streets around 3rd street are mixed use and full of restaurants/retail all the way out to 6th or Lincoln Ave.
There are people all over the place, not just third street. Dupont Circle is not as busy on the weekends as dwtwn SM.
Main Street is urban and active as well.
You have some bizarre thing against LA, and it just shows. Everything you say is false.
The Long Beach Ny thing is enough proof.
If you think some drab looking midrises with no retail is urban, more power to you. I'll take Hermosa Beach over that anyday, no question.
I bet most people would. I bet it's far more active too.
While downtown SM is urban, it is not as urban or walkable as DuPont. Having said that, I think that downtown SM is definitly more active than Dupont.....at least it is during summer.
Yes it is. I think downtown SM has to be one of the busiest places on the weekends in the country, really.
Santa Monica isn't particularly urban or walkable. The downtown pedestrian mall and beach areas are highly walkable, but that's a few blocks. And even those areas are dominated by a car-oriented mall with a giant parking garage with free parking.
The rest of the city isn't notably urban or walker friendly.
It's inlland neighborhoods look more walkable and interesting than freakin Long Beach NY. There's far more restaurants, cafes, retail, grocery stores, etc etc etc.
Get out here with that bias.
I bet you just picked a place with some old midrises, and said to yourself, "yup, this looks urban to me".
Doesnt look dense to me. Outside of the interesting Broadway, It's mostly blocks of single family homes, the exact thing these guys have said isnt urban.
Now it is urban? Because of the shotty midrises with no retail/commercial area?
I've been there, it is not mostly 1 family houses. I would say it's mostly 2 family houses and big apartment buildings.
It looks that way on google maps. Like NOLA said, it's the truth. even if it is two family homes, those streets still dont look denser than santa monica.
One street has some big apartment buildings.
The apartment buildings aren't mixed use though. Havent these guys been saying this stuff all along, and now this is suddenly somehow an exception for what urban is?
How in God's name anyone would thnk it's more urban than Santa Monica is crazy. Most of its main street resembles Santa Monica's inland boulevards, but less dense/commerial/interesting.
There's an area around the train station that's more urban, but very small. it's def far smaller than downtown Santa Monica or Main street or Montana Ave.
Broadway looks like a boring, dated residential area with nothing going on. I dont care if it has some old midrises. That means absoutely nothing.
The majority of its residential streets are far less dense than most of Santa Monica.
I dont even see how this place is more urban than Hermosa or Manhattan Beach. Forget Long Beach/SM/Venice etc. Just forget it.
Yea. I think BajanYankee's arguments, even when I disagree with them, are reasonable. Some of the other arguments put out by other posters just seem to be pulled out from the ether.
Uh, downtown LA has an intense urban environment for at least one square mile. I've been to L.A. plenty of times and it has a pretty walkable urban core.
I think you missed this quote upthread.
Quote:
LA needs to develop its city center. Downtown is the only place in LA where a contiguous, three-dimensional urban environment can sustain itself over several square miles. It is the only place in LA where you would be able to walk in any given direction and not experience a drop-off in action and intensity. This is the mark of pedestrian culture and it's how other cities exist.
Martin Wachs explains why this is the case in his work Auto, Transit and the Sprawl of Los Angeles: The 1920s.
Quote:
Between 1870 and 1910, the technology of urban transportation was advancing substantially. Entrepreneurs were replacing horse car lines with cable, steam and electric traction railways in Boston, Chicago, New York and Philadelphia. Similar technology was introduced in Los Angeles, but there it had different effects on the city. The eastern metropolises already had become mature cities before extensive street railway networks were developed, and they were characterized by high residential densities, with living quarters in proximity to industrial and commercial districts. The streetcars enabled those cities to add new residential districts beyond their older cores, through processes described by Sam Bass in his classic book Streetcar Suburbs (1962). Los Angeles, however, was just growing to maturity when street railways were introduced, and it had never developed a significant commercial and industrial core. Its first period of rapid growth, from a population of five thousand in 1870 to nearly 320,000 in 1910, coincided with the introduction of street railways and interurban electric lines. These made residential growth possible at relatively long distances from the commercial and industrial center, even when the region's population was quite small.
Scott Bottles makes a similar observation in his work Los Angeles and the Automobile.
Quote:
It is true that Los Angeles decentralized earlier and to a greater extent than other cities, but that was largely because of the fact that Southern California did not emerge as a major urban center until the twentieth century. Older metropolises such as Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco had by that time several layers of urban growth surrounding their downtown commercial districts which exerted strong centralizing forces on the rest of the city. Lacking such prior development, Los Angeles found itself less constricted and hence more easily adaptable to the automobile and a decentralized economy.
And that explains that poster's observation about LA's lack of a "contiguous, three-dimensional urban environment" outside of its CBD.
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