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I assume that here you're using the term "suburb" as the Australians do rather than in the American political sense, because unless I'm mistaken, isn't Canoga Park within the corporate boundaries of the City of Los Angeles?
I am, however, aware that the San Fernando Valley and the Foothills behave as though they are a different city from LA. The Philadelphia analog would be Northeast Philadelphia.
Here's a not atypical intersection on Roosevelt Boulevard, the Northeast's principal thoroughfare, in its upper reaches (the "Far Northeast"). The pedestrian infrastructure is in place, but the design of the 12-lane-wide highway definitely makes walking not just unpleasant but potentially life-threatening if your aim is to get from one side of the Boulevard to the other.
On the other hand, this intersection in the central Northeast — Cottman Avenue is considered the dividing line between the Near/Lower and Far/Upper Northeast — is somewhat walkable, and in the Street View I link here, there's even someone crossing Cottman. (Note also the trolleybus wires hanging over Castor.) But this too is not as dense as the LA or Houston streetscapes presented here. Nor, for that matter, is it as dense as the railroad-suburb downtowns along the Main Line, like Bryn Mawr, which I posted a street view of upthread.
Age has something to do with it, as does local density.
The built form of LA lacks the blocks of rowhouses or mid-rise apartment buildings found in the older cities of the Northeast, and even the vast expanses of bungalows in South Central don't look as dense as the "workingman's" rowhouse tracts of much of North or West Philadelphia (pairing these because they're similar in demographics).
The transformation of downtown LA into a place that more closely resembles other US downtowns after the removal of the height limits and building technology advances matters, but remove DTLA from the picture and Los Angeles still doesn't look like San Francisco. I can't think of an LA neighborhood where freestanding SFRs are as closely packed together as are San Francisco's "painted lady" Victorians, for instance.* Most of the dense garden-apartment complexes found all over the Westside look more "suburban" than, say, Columbia Road in DC's Kalorama/Adams Morgan neighborhoods.
I know I've said this before on this thread, but I think it's worth repeating here: California metropolitan areas are denser than their East Coast counterparts because their suburban areas are developed at more uniform densities than those on the East Coast, and that uniform density is above that of most East Coast suburbia. The East Coast metros have a much higher density gradient than the California ones do. Were I to post a railroad-suburb downtown (such as Ardmore, Pa., White Plains, N.Y., or Silver Spring, Md.) here, it would look more "urban" than the suburban streetscapes in Houston and LA shared in the posts immediately above this one. But in addition to the Ardmores and Medias, we have the Troopers, Blue Bells and West Deptfords to cancel out the denser places. But it's on the character and appearance of those denser places that East Coast champions hang their claim of greater "urbanity," and I don't think they're totally off base in making that claim.
*Edited to add: But those "snout house" suburbs in LA and Orange counties do pack houses just about that close together — they look more like San Francisco, Chicago or parts of Queens than they do Baldwin Hills in that respect.
I wouldn't have picked Canoga Park as an example, yes it is in L.A. city limits. An earlier post linked something in Riverside city limits so I went along with it without pointing out that fact. The Valley being independent from the Los Angeles basin is exaggerated, probably a relic of the 1980's. The downtown subway takes you into the valley, where you can transfer in North Hollywood to the G line BRT that goes through the whole valley, and Amtrak makes stops in the Valley after coming from downtown L.A.
Its funny that height limits would be brought up for Los Angeles, because I think that urbanists would consider pre-modern skyscraper L.A. to the peak of its urban appearance. Bunker Hill was a residential neighborhood that lost out to skyscrapers.
To the many on this forum who are perpetually upset that Los Angeles doesn't look exactly like San Francisco, here is a good example of pre-skyscraper L.A.'s compact houses backed up against the old downtown skyline:
I wouldn't have picked Canoga Park as an example, yes it is in L.A. city limits. An earlier post linked something in Riverside city limits so I went along with it without pointing out that fact. The Valley being independent from the Los Angeles basin is exaggerated, probably a relic of the 1980's. The downtown subway takes you into the valley, where you can transfer in North Hollywood to the G line BRT that goes through the whole valley, and Amtrak makes stops in the Valley after coming from downtown L.A.
Its funny that height limits would be brought up for Los Angeles, because I think that urbanists would consider pre-modern skyscraper L.A. to the peak of its urban appearance. Bunker Hill was a residential neighborhood that lost out to skyscrapers.
To the many on this forum who are perpetually upset that Los Angeles doesn't look exactly like San Francisco, here is a good example of pre-skyscraper L.A.'s compact houses backed up against the old downtown skyline:
Don't count me among the "perpetually upset." Here what I'm doing is explaining why the East Coast partisans claim the upper hand on "urbanity" rather than denying that LA is urban. FTR, let me state that it clearly is, and I'll draw another parallel with a city I am intimately familiar with later on in this post to explain why some see it as less urban still.
Thanks for posting that. The residential blocks of 1948 Bunker Hill shown in that film do look more like San Francisco than they do now, and it wasn't "suburban" then and isn't now. But what those side-by-side comparisons also show to me is:
Oddly enough, LA by 1948 had already demolished a chunk of its urban fabric — there's one street in that footage where parking lots dominate (or at least that is largely bereft of buildings).
"DTLA" hadn't really encompassed Bunker Hill yet in 1948, while in 2014, it has overrun it. The 2014 Bunker Hill is actually more uniformly developed than the 1948 one.
I'd say that film shows as effectively as anything I can think of how LA's urban core now looks more "big city" than it did in 1948. The knock on LA as recently as 1980 was that it was "50 suburbs in search of a central city" — well, those suburbs have definitely found that central city at last.
And here's where the parallel with my hometown of Kansas City comes in. LA is known for its freeways, but KC actually has more of them relative to its population than LA does — the most freeway lane-miles per capita of any large US city. The pave-the-earth crowd uses this as a poster child for their position because drivers there lose fewer hours sitting in congested traffic each year than in any other 2m+ US metro (398th of 404 cities worldwide according to the latest Tom Tom Traffic Index).
But I'd like to suggest that it's also because, from what I see on the ground, not just the metro but even the central city is less densely built than LA. The modest airplane-bungalow neighborhoods of its east side — I grew up in one of them, in one of only seven two-story houses on a block of about 40 bungalows — are comparable in appearance to South Central LA, but on the whole, there are fewer neighborhoods where apartment buildings dominate the way they do on LA's Westside (there are, however, two streets lined with mid- to high-rise apartment buildings in the city, one in its middle and a second across Brush Creek from the Country Club Plaza).
It has a downtown that has gotten a live/work/play retrofit within the last 20 years, but that downtown as of now has only three high-rise residential buildings in it. Its historic residential section resembles Bunker Hill 1948 both topographically and in terms of the type (but not appearance) of the housing on it.
And thanks to an impressive revival of rail transit in LA, that city is less of a drive-everywhere place than Kansas City (whose bus service also stinks, even if it is free) is. (It's also a "back to the future" development for LA, many of whose neighborhoods and suburbs grew along the Pacific Electric Railway's Big Red Car lines that extended from its downtown in the 1920s.)
Yet people don't dump on KC the way they do LA. Maybe that has to do with LA receiving lots more pop-culture exposure than KC, which doesn't even register as a Big City on some people's radar screens despite it being one of the 50 largest metros and core cities in the country. But it was also one of the country's biggest cities when LA was still in essence an overgrown pueblo — every city that's bigger than KC to its west and southwest was smaller than it in 1900. That downtown and the (much like Bunker Hill, partly razed but now being redeveloped) district between the core and the city's Union Station, I guess, give KC the "legacy city" status that the East Coast partisans also give to San Francisco — but not either of Southern California's two big metropolises.
(Edited to add a personal disclosure: I've had relatives living in the LA area since I was young; I first visited the city in 1966, when I visited great-aunts and uncles who lived in Willowbrook and Altadena. The latter great-aunt had relocated to Baldwin Hills by the time of my second visit in 1980, when my mom, a VA nursing administrator, was stationed at VA Brentwood. I haven't been back to LA since then.)
Don't count me among the "perpetually upset." Here what I'm doing is explaining why the East Coast partisans claim the upper hand on "urbanity" rather than denying that LA is urban. FTR, let me state that it clearly is, and I'll draw another parallel with a city I am intimately familiar with later on in this post to explain why some see it as less urban still.
Thanks for posting that. The residential blocks of 1948 Bunker Hill shown in that film do look more like San Francisco than they do now, and it wasn't "suburban" then and isn't now. But what those side-by-side comparisons also show to me is:
Oddly enough, LA by 1948 had already demolished a chunk of its urban fabric — there's one street in that footage where parking lots dominate (or at least that is largely bereft of buildings).
"DTLA" hadn't really encompassed Bunker Hill yet in 1948, while in 2014, it has overrun it. The 2014 Bunker Hill is actually more uniformly developed than the 1948 one.
I'd say that film shows as effectively as anything I can think of how LA's urban core now looks more "big city" than it did in 1948. The knock on LA as recently as 1980 was that it was "50 suburbs in search of a central city" — well, those suburbs have definitely found that central city at last.
And here's where the parallel with my hometown of Kansas City comes in. LA is known for its freeways, but KC actually has more of them relative to its population than LA does — the most freeway lane-miles per capita of any large US city. The pave-the-earth crowd uses this as a poster child for their position because drivers there lose fewer hours sitting in congested traffic each year than in any other 2m+ US metro (398th of 404 cities worldwide according to the latest Tom Tom Traffic Index).
But I'd like to suggest that it's also because, from what I see on the ground, not just the metro but even the central city is less densely built than LA. The modest airplane-bungalow neighborhoods of its east side — I grew up in one of them, in one of only seven two-story houses on a block of about 40 bungalows — are comparable in appearance to South Central LA, but on the whole, there are fewer neighborhoods where apartment buildings dominate the way they do on LA's Westside (there are, however, two streets lined with mid- to high-rise apartment buildings in the city, one in its middle and a second across Brush Creek from the Country Club Plaza).
It has a downtown that has gotten a live/work/play retrofit within the last 20 years, but that downtown as of now has only three high-rise residential buildings in it. Its historic residential section resembles Bunker Hill 1948 both topographically and in terms of the type (but not appearance) of the housing on it.
And thanks to an impressive revival of rail transit in LA, that city is less of a drive-everywhere place than Kansas City (whose bus service also stinks, even if it is free) is. (It's also a "back to the future" development for LA, many of whose neighborhoods and suburbs grew along the Pacific Electric Railway's Big Red Car lines that extended from its downtown in the 1920s.)
Yet people don't dump on KC the way they do LA. Maybe that has to do with LA receiving lots more pop-culture exposure than KC, which doesn't even register as a Big City on some people's radar screens despite it being one of the 50 largest metros and core cities in the country. But it was also one of the country's biggest cities when LA was still in essence an overgrown pueblo — every city that's bigger than KC to its west and southwest was smaller than it in 1900. That downtown and the (much like Bunker Hill, partly razed but now being redeveloped) district between the core and the city's Union Station, I guess, give KC the "legacy city" status that the East Coast partisans also give to San Francisco — but not either of Southern California's two big metropolises.
(Edited to add a personal disclosure: I've had relatives living in the LA area since I was young; I first visited the city in 1966, when I visited great-aunts and uncles who lived in Willowbrook and Altadena. The latter great-aunt had relocated to Baldwin Hills by the time of my second visit in 1980, when my mom, a VA nursing administrator, was stationed at VA Brentwood. I haven't been back to LA since then.)
The built form of Los Angeles has historically incited confusion and scorn from outsiders as they can never really put a finger on what it exactly is. If Kansas City had grown much larger, you can bet there would be outrage over why it doesn't look more like Chicago, etc.
To be fair, San Francisco is deserving of legacy status over soCal cities, but there seems to be a lingering outrage that Los Angeles "cheated" by having the land afforded by its basin. If it were a "real city" there would be some kind of tight constraints around a small municipal border, or so the logic seems to go.
One thing is for sure, a huge mistake was made in transforming Bunker Hill from a residential zone to a glorified office park, if those houses were maintained today, it would make for as or more iconic of a photo as the painted ladies.
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