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I like the look of the Hollywood neighborhood better, Boston has nicer blocks elsewhere. California has a nice style in many parts, even if the apartment complexes are rather generic looking.
I thought the Allston neighborhood looks a bit denser. But looking up the numbers, the Hollywood example is nearly double the denstiy of the Allston one. That Hollywood tract is 67k / sq mile. There's one high rise apartment complex that might be skewing the density a bit.The Allston census tract is larger though.
Rowhouses can be dense. NYC brownstones are rowhouses. they are sometimes 3, usually 4 stories. 4 story brownstone block seem to be 55-60k / sq mile. Compare this:
This is what I call urban in L.A. Everything else doesn't fit the bill. If L.A. had rowhouses, then those would be urban too. Single family homes are not urban to me. At least not urban enough. Those area's in DC are what takes away from DC.
Obviously a place like Manhattan is more urban than a place like downtown Miami. There are degrees. Maybe you should read what I actually wrote.
No.
If that were the case, there would be no urban cities in the US if we looked at all the worlds cities. This sort of logic is just stupid and delusional IMO.
Quote:
Originally Posted by nei
did anyone pick up that munchitup's hollywood view is in a tract that is denser than every tract in DC (might have missed one or two, though)?
I did. The guy equating L.A.'s urbanity to Atlanta probably didn't.
Not always, depends on space in between. I can find you single family home neighborhoods with a higher housing unit density than rowhouse neighborhoods, though it's not a typical situation. But munchitup did not post a single family neighborhood! Here's a good study done by a western Massachusetts comparing different housing unit levels:
I was showing areas quite a bit outside of downtown that are primarily residential neighborhoods. It isn't anything about NE, citeis allover the world from Australia, Europe, Africa, South America, Asia are and can be built on a more human less autocentric scale. SF for instance is built entirely different than Los Angeles.
San Francisco and the bay is built urban but still car friendly by infrastructure for the most part I guess. It's the regulations like parking, violations, etc that make having a car in San Francisco harder. You're wrong about some of Asia, in China both Shanghai and Beijing are built to be more pedestrian and car friendly.
Maybe this is the model that works for both just like LA
I already know the area's around downtown are built dense even though most of them are area's people wouldn't want to live. I'm talking about common neighborhoods in LA which don't have any street walls.
Actually, it's pretty expensive to live in downtown LA these days and the habitable parts of downtown LA itself is fairly large. Besides, why should it be discounted? Every city is different. Just because downtown DC itself isn't much of a neighborhood doesn't mean that other cities can't include their downtowns. And when you stretch out into Hollywood, Westlake, Koreatown, etc. you are encompassing an area that's about the size of some cities.
And how does "grittiness" get measured in the real world on a quantitative level?
Here's the official grittiness point system:
Working class dive bar - 1 Point
Homeless guy begging for change - 3 Points
Subway car or elevated train with graffitti - 5 Points
Corner store or bodega that's a front for drug dealing - 10 Points
Redlight district with street walkers - 15 Points
Mafia controlled bookie joint - 20 points
Crackhead taking a dump in front of a burnt out rowhouse or tenement - 50 Points
So you have all these factors, yet no one has bothered to index them (neither East nor West Coast posters) nor even given consideration to how much weight each of these things have in whatever definition 'urbanity' comes in.
To make it simpler, people here are saying that a prevalence of stand-alone buildings and single-family homes do not make a place particularly urban. It's more semi-urban or dense suburb.
For example, here's a streetview of Bethesda, MD. This is considered semi-urban in the D.C. area:
Everyone here has been arguing for 170 pages without exactly defining what "urban" means?
Awesome. I'm sure if this was academia, a panel would have rejected everyone's theses because the very thing being argued has NOT been defined. Imagine reading a long body of work without a definition of what is being argued over or even a methodology that can be applied to every single city.
Homeless guy begging for change - 1 point
working class "ethnic" dive bar - 3 points
subway car or elevated train with graffitti - 5 points
corner store or bodega that's a front for drug dealing - 10 points
redlight district with street walkers - 15 points
mafia controlled bookie joint - 20 points
crackhead taking a dump in front of a burnt out rowhouse or tenement - 50 points
+1
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