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Atlanta...by a wide margin. I don't think ATL initially foresaw what it would become, and parcels were a lot larger and retained more of the forested ambiance. One "fly-over" on Google Earth will tell you that in an instant.
Umm let's not get carried away here. Sure Los Angeles is more urban as it darn well should be considering the size difference, but Atlanta is more of a mixed bag than you are giving credit for. We have sfh's, new urbanism mixed-use developments, row homes and brownstones in places.
Some of Atlanta's historic neighborhoods offer intimate, narrow streetscapes as well. We're not attempting to emulate LA, but Atlanta feels nothing of a backwater.
Atlanta is definitely more suburban. We've got two good-sized urban districts: downtown and midtown. Buckhead is dense-built suburban.
People say Atlanta was never planned to become what it is, and that's true. But neither were most other cities that wound up with a nice grid. The reason Atlanta lacks a grid outside of the main area is because the land that is now metro Atlanta was once rural, deep south agricultural land. The network of dirt roads mainly connected important places (like mills, churches, bridges, and so forth), and ran directly from place to place. They also had to pay attention to the hilly topography, and tried to run roads right along the spines of hills so they wouldn't get washed out during storms. And they had to deal with small creeks and rivers which are all over the region and run year-round.
So I guess you can blame lack of planning, but you'd have to be extremely visionary and determined to tell a bunch of farmers who lived out in Duluth, Georgia in 1870 that they really ought to lay their thoroughfares out on an east-west grid in order to accommodate the sprawling metropolis that will be here in 150 years. Out west, this was a lot less of a problem since the rural population generally was a lot smaller prior to the cities growing up.
And not all suburbs are created equal. I love the leafy old streetcar suburbs (Inman Park, Virginia Highland, etc), which are the real flavor of Atlanta and which many tourists miss entirely. There's a lot more in common between Inman Park and downtown Atlanta than there is between Inman Park and south Forsyth County.
Atlanta and L.A. are two of the most unfairly maligned cities on this site (Houston is up there too), so I guess it stands that they would be compared like this.
L.A. is no doubt more "urban", but Atlanta is by far the most surprising city to me in terms of its urbanity. I go there for business a lot and am always impressed. ATL is more "suburban" and less dense than L.A., but most cities are. And ATL seems to have a whole lot going for it.
(the traffic, though, OMG I'm from L.A. and am not sure how the people of ATL put up with the traffic -- especially on the surface streets)...
Atlanta, GA - 8,634 Permits - 28% Multifamily Housing
Los Angeles, CA - 9,895 Permits - 77% Multifamily Housing
Washington, DC - 16,501 Permits - 51% Multifamily Housing
Phoenix, AZ - 9,081 Permits - 20% Multifamily Housing
New York, NY -13,973 Permits - 91% Multifamily Housing
I threw a couple other cities in for comparison. This helps paint a picture of the urban form the Atlanta metro is taking vs. that the Los Angeles metro is taking.
Atlanta and L.A. are two of the most unfairly maligned cities on this site (Houston is up there too), so I guess it stands that they would be compared like this.
Funny, I'd rather live in any of these than some of the iceboxes people here rave about.
Compared to LA, the less urban areas of Atlanta feel pretty rural. The more urban areas that were shown in the above ATL streetviews remind me of the medium-urban areas of the San Fernando Valley.
Can't compare it to Detroit as I've never been there but I get the feeling that Detroit appears more urban, but a decaying, bombed-out urban. I'd take Atlanta for sure.
detroit in a certain radius feels about as urban as la but it dies off very quickly. When I get to flat rock I might as well be drinking well water and farming (and that's only 40 mins from dt). But then again LA metro is what? 3 times as big? So that's to be expected.
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