Quote:
Originally Posted by memph
Even if you include Orange County, including the southern part around Mission Viejo, and Riverside-San Bernardino's urban area, LA still covers less land than the urban areas of NYC, Chicago and Atlanta, despite being second only to New York City's urban area.
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One of the problems with this type of analysis is that California has huge counties by east coast standards and big swaths of those counties are more or less uninhabited. You run into ocean on one side of the NYC metro and pretty quickly in the other direction you start to run into hills and steep slopes. The difference is that land around NYC has always been farmable - and pretty good farmland at that so there are villages around there that date to the 1600s and there are no unincorporated places. Even if its a village of 200 people it's still incorporated. Those places, even as exurban or rural as they are, get included in NYCs urban area but for some reason it's not the same thing when you're looking at LA.
LA (city) land area - 469 s/m & 3.9 million people = density 8,202 ppm
NYC + Hudson + Essex - 477 s/m & 9.8 million = density 20,593 ppm
Incorporated LA County - 1,400 s/m & 8.55 million = 6,107 ppm
NYC + Hudson + Essex + Bergen + Union + Middlesex + Nassau - 1,406 s/m & 13.48 million = 9,587 ppm
and btw - even if you exclude Manhattan from the above you still come up with a density of 8,568. And in case you don't get what I'm doing here - I'm excluding the less dense, unincorporated parts of LA & Orange County from the totals along with the roughly 1 million people that live in these ~3,300 square miles of unincorporated areas. I'm then comparing the
incorporated areas of LA & the OC to NYC and the counties that surround it. Since there are no unincorporated areas in the New York suburbs I'm using those whole county area and population stats. This gives a huge leg up to LA.
Incorporated LA County + incorporated Orange County - 1,915 s/m & 11.49 million = ~6,000 ppm
NYC + Hudson + Essex + Bergen + Union + Middlesex + Nassau + Monmouth - 1,875 s/m & 14 million = 7,466 ppm
People in greater LA don't actually live more densely than people in the NYC area it's that NYC has grown so big that it's started sucking the Poconos and the Lehigh Valley into its statistical orbit. Once you cross the mountains east of LA there's no one out there to suck in - because there's no water.