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Seems like way too much grass and setbacks to be urban though. These neighborhoods look like Takoma outside of the urban core in D.C. which isn't urban like Logan Circle etc.
Were just going to have to agree to disagree then, MDAllstar. I used to bike through Takoma Park on my daily commute from Shaw to College Park and can say with conviction that Takoma and Los Feliz are incomparable. If you want to make an educated comparison, I'd suggest you get off of streetview and visit LA in person so you can see both neighborhoods with your own eyes as I have.
Were just going to have to agree to disagree then, MDAllstar. I used to bike through Takoma Park on my daily commute from Shaw to College Park and can say with conviction that Takoma and Los Feliz are incomparable. If you want to make an educated comparison, I'd suggest you get off of streetview and visit LA in person so you can see both neighborhoods with your own eyes as I have.
I've been to L.A. I haven't been to that neighborhood though. Obviously, it's built nothing like NE cities so it's very hard to compare them. San Francisco on the other hand has more of an urban design in my opinion. L.A. doesn't connect their buildings which is probably my biggest issue with it. Downtown L.A. is urban though. The buildings come right up to the street and there is not grass. It's the style I'm talking about.
These can't be considered core neighborhoods. When you say Central LA, are you talking about the urban core?
Oh well I guess then just use the freeway loop as the core. I guess some parts of City West and Chinatown are also part of the core, but the freeway loop is close enough.
But Seattle is building its transit system right (at least by Western US cities standards) - mostly underground/grade-separated with a lot of the in-city stations at the center of busy urban neighborhoods.
The 3+ mile subway segment in the video below (opening early next year) will connect Downtown, Capitol Hill, and the U Distrct - three of the densest neighborhoods in the Pacific Northwest. And more high quality rail expansions that are funded/in construction are coming online in the next decade (with a forward-looking package to go to voters next year to continue that expansion during the following decade)
Yea, and eventually all the development and higher population growth of Seattle will perhaps eventually put it so far ahead of the others that they become no longer comparable. Maybe.
I wasn't trying to find a street that didn't look urban. That whole neighborhood looks like that for the most part. I was really trying to see what the boundaries for LA's urban core were. D.C.'s is about 25 sq. mile's before you get single family homes.
According to city-data, only 25% of the housing stock in Los Feliz is SFHs, most which are located in the hillside portion of the neighborhood surrounding Griffith Park. It's those hillside communities that drag the density down for Los Feliz, as they do in Silverlake and Echo Park.
The non hillside sections of these of these neighborhoods (like Los Feliz) are easily 90% apartment buildings. This is the predominant housing stock in Central Los Angeles, NOT the single family homes that get posted every time someone wants to knock the urbanity of LA.
Seattle has a far better mixed-use urban district than either LA or DC in that it combines one of the highest office worker densities with one of the highest residential densities. It has a fairly sizable collection of neighborhoods of high density/nightlife/walkability to a scale that really isn't all that less than DC. We're talking 8K ppsm vs 10.5K ppsm over a similar area. Both cities are pretty leafy green relative to San Francisco, which is now over 18K ppsm. I mean when people quote names of popular neighborhoods that come to define either city, the city's most desirable neighborhoods, both Seattle and DC each have a few that come to mind. Neither city has the sheer abundance of dense, highly popular neighborhoods that SF or Chicago have.
DC is just now getting there by building residential in the office areas and creating mixed-use districts, but Seattle's downtown is considerably further along than DC's in my opinion, while DC's outer neighborhoods aren't all that significantly further along than Seattle's. And both are building up in incredible amounts (and growing similarly rapidly, with Seattle growing slightly faster).
The point about high end retail is to point out that Seattle is urban/downtown-centric. The core of its shopping is arguably downtown! Sure there is Bellevue (probably the closest similarity Seattle has with Atlanta is how similar those two districts are to each other), but Seattle has one of the top downtown shopping experiences in North America. It's similar in scope if not a little larger than what Philadelphia has.
It takes a lot to get Americans to go downtown, let alone shop there. Seattle's downtown is the focal point of the region, not the suburbs.
The only place Seattle lacks in relative to DC or LA is having big city heavy rail. But when you look at modeshare, it beats out even LA's densest, most central spots. More people walk, bike, and take transit to work in Seattle despite not having a heavy rail or significant LRT/commuter rail system. That speaks volumes, to me.
I lived for years in Midtown Atlanta and was just there again. Sure there are some shiny new buildings atop some monstrous parking garages (an urban form you just won't find in Seattle except for maybe 2 older buildings out of dozens and dozens of residential high rises), but Midtown Atlanta is an absolute activity desert relative to Seattle. A few people here and there on the sidewalks. Some restaurants that do well. A few shops that are probably struggling (and no nationals). Sporadic office towers with 10+ level garages next to them.
I like Midtown better than I like Brickell in Miami. I think Midtown is great for the south. But Atlanta's busiest neighborhood and its shining star of big city urbanism is quieter than almost *any* neighborhood in Seattle at this point, let alone Seattle's inner core, which is just about as big city as it gets here in America.
Atlanta is probably a stretch at this point. I don't quite see how Seattle really has that strong of an argument with DC. Yes, DC has a pretty large portion dedicated to government buildings and monuments that simply does not allow for mixed-use zoning, but there are certainly large portions that do. Moreover, DC's mass transit system is so extensive, frequent, and heavily used that this limitation is pretty easily overcome.
And yes, there are definitely issues with LA that make the ranking a bit tricky with it. It's an oddball of the bunch with a sprawl that became heavily infilled starting from multiple nodes that slowly mesh.
Seattle started urbanizing it's core in the 80s/90s. Atlanta didn't really start until the 2000s and even then, most of it's multi-family construction was in the suburbs when Atlanta metro growth was insanely high. I wouldn't really even say Atlanta has really started urbanzing it's core until the 2010s. Atlanta definitely feels like it's about 25-30 years behind Seattle in urban development and the biggest problems with Atlanta still is that multi-family construction is going in several areas and not concentrated in it's core. You'll have Downtown, Midtown, Eastern neighborhoods, Buckhead, Perimeter, Vinings. Atlanta would have EASILY been an urban walkable city by now if it concentrated all of it's development to a 10 square mile central area.
The problem is the jobs are so scattered among several districts in the metro area that it warrants multi-family construction now in say Perimeter because that's where the jobs at.
Seattle is much centralized than Atlanta is so you have a large majority of the high paying jobs in downtown whichs means multi-family construction is centralized in or near the downtown area which is why you have such a large, dense core surrounding the downtown area.
I always wonder how large the urban cores of Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas would be if 40% of their growth they've gotten over the last 2-3 decades was urban development instead of suburban. I mean, their skylines alone would be insanely large.
^^^Part of Atlanta's other problems involve its zoning codes and design reviews. What gets passed as a successful urban project in Atlanta would not be legal in cities like Seattle. But the flip side is that there are not market economics in Atlanta to support the kinds of projects that get built in Seattle. And market economics come from supply/demand theory, generally speaking, and the demand to live in Midtown Atlanta or build an office there just isn't the same as it is in central Seattle.
Yes, eventually Atlanta will get there (and I'm more bullish on Atlanta's future urbanity than say Dallas's, despite Dallas's superior economy). But as it stands today, it can't be uttered in the same sentence as Seattle when discussing urbanity, and other smaller cities such as Minneapolis, Portland, Denver, San Diego, or even Milwaukee are also at least a league ahead of Atlanta in terms of walkability/urbanity.
Seattle started urbanizing it's core in the 80s/90s. Atlanta didn't really start until the 2000s and even then, most of it's multi-family construction was in the suburbs when Atlanta metro growth was insanely high. I wouldn't really even say Atlanta has really started urbanzing it's core until the 2010s. Atlanta definitely feels like it's about 25-30 years behind Seattle in urban development and the biggest problems with Atlanta still is that multi-family construction is going in several areas and not concentrated in it's core. You'll have Downtown, Midtown, Eastern neighborhoods, Buckhead, Perimeter, Vinings. Atlanta would have EASILY been an urban walkable city by now if it concentrated all of it's development to a 10 square mile central area.
The problem is the jobs are so scattered among several districts in the metro area that it warrants multi-family construction now in say Perimeter because that's where the jobs at.
Seattle is much centralized than Atlanta is so you have a large majority of the high paying jobs in downtown whichs means multi-family construction is centralized in or near the downtown area which is why you have such a large, dense core surrounding the downtown area.
I always wonder how large the urban cores of Atlanta, Houston, and Dallas would be if 40% of their growth they've gotten over the last 2-3 decades was urban development instead of suburban. I mean, their skylines alone would be insanely large.
True, but there is the significant rapid transit linkage among most of those job centers--but you're right, Atlanta is a stretch. I'm guessing Houston and Dallas, both of which I'm completely unfamiliar with, would probably fall along the same lines where there's rapid progress and the sheer size of the metros means that there's a slight argument to be made that the absolute area of walkable areas, even if small in proportion, isn't completely awful, but simply still doesn't quite compare in total to what might be found in the other cities I listed.
^^^Part of Atlanta's other problems involve its zoning codes and design reviews. What gets passed as a successful urban project in Atlanta would not be legal in cities like Seattle. But the flip side is that there are not market economics in Atlanta to support the kinds of projects that get built in Seattle. And market economics come from supply/demand theory, generally speaking, and the demand to live in Midtown Atlanta or build an office there just isn't the same as it is in central Seattle.
Yes, eventually Atlanta will get there (and I'm more bullish on Atlanta's future urbanity than say Dallas's, despite Dallas's superior economy). But as it stands today, it can't be uttered in the same sentence as Seattle when discussing urbanity, and other smaller cities such as Minneapolis, Portland, Denver, San Diego, or even Milwaukee are also at least a league ahead of Atlanta in terms of walkability/urbanity.
Funny because I actually think Seattle's midrise developments are ugly and the Southeast region midrise developments look a lot better, particularly the North Carolina cities. Seattle has great highrise development, but midrise architecture leaves a lot to be desired, very soviet like.
Atlanta's highrise development is starting to get interesting though like this new condo project proposed in Buckhead. The rentral and condo market in Atlanta is actually very strong at the moment. If trends continue, Atlanta is posed to become the 12th most expensive city to rent in just after Seattle and San Diego by this fall.
Here's the recent condo proposed in Buckhead:
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