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Houston and Los Angeles densities are pretty different IMO and the characterisitcs of their sprawl is very different. L.A. is a good amount more dense, in the city itself and in the metropolitan area.
65% of Los Angeles lives in neighborhoods with more than 10,000 people per square mile. Some of these neighborhoods include Koreatown with 124,000 residents at 42,600 per square mile, Westlake with 117,000 people at 38,000 per square mile, East Hollywood with 78,000 residents at 31,000 per square mile, Pico Union with 45,000 residents at 25,300 per square mile, and MANY MORE. The core area of Los Angeles in the basin has about 2,600,000 people living in neeighorhoods from 10,000 people per square mile to 42,600 per square mile. This is MUCH more crowded than anywhere in Houston and comparing Houston density to L.A. density is like comparing L.A. density to New York City (no comparison). Houston is much more in common with places like Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, Phoenix, etc.... L.A. is sort of in a league of its own in the sunbelt.
Montrose in Houston has a density of about 9,800 per square mile and this is one of (perhaps the most) dense neighborhoods in Houston. It would be below average in L.A.
Further evidence of why L.A. and Houston are not that similar:
Los Angeles is ranked 9th by WalkScore of most walkable places. There are a lot of dense walkable neighborhoods here.
-47% of L.A. residents live in neighborhoods with Walk Scores of 70-100.
-84% of L.A. residents live in neighborhoods with Walk Scores of 50-100.
-16% of residents live in car dependent neighborhoods.
Houston:
-12% of Houston residents live in neighborhoods with Walk Scores of 70-100.
-54% live in neighborhoods with Walk Scores of 50-100.
-47% live in car dependent neighborhoods.
When you break things down on a neighborhoods by neighborhoods basis, Los Angeles' dense neighborhoods are A LOT more dense, with a higher proportion of residents in dense neighborhoods, than Houston. The two aren't that similar IMO.
L.A. density is actually more like the Miami area.
This comparison is not that drasitic and the Houston highest area of density is 17,000 people per sq. mile. Los Angeles is going to have higher higher density because it's more population and does inculde more multi-family homes (Houston is building lots of these within its core). The overall density of Los Angeles isn't that amazing and Houston currenty density of now is about 4k per square mile. I agree LA is more dense and urban than Houston, but the comparison is nowhere near like LA being compared to NYC.
Most won't care to admit their own city. However, I'll start it.
Boston. Sure, it's uber-urban at the core, but the suburbs are super low density and sprawl for miles. Because most of the towns just outside Boston started as independent rural communities long ago, there's a fight to keep them that way. In order to do that, zoning laws were enacted to make "minimum" lot sizes in order to preserve the "small town character" of these towns. Instead of higher density suburbs close to the city, the population is forced outward because the growth is such low density. Metro Boston now extends halfway across the state in a Westward direction towards Worcester, all the way North into Southern NH (inc. Portsmouth, Nashua and upto Manchester) and South into RI and towards Cape Cod. Metro Boston is about 1/3 the size of metro L.A. but covers nearly as much land.
Boston deserves credit for its urban core, but the suburbs are a sprawling, low density nightmare, though some do have nice, historic centers (Lexington, Concord, Hingham, Plymouth, Manchester etc).
This is a question where the stereotypes are very misleading. Some people are confusing low but continuous density with sprawl. LA is one of the least sprawling cities in the US. New houses there are almost touching each other and new towns are packed in tight against their neighbors.
The only empty spaces are where it isn't possible to build.
The big eastern cities.....NY, Boston, Philly, Washington sprawl just as much if not more than sunbelt cities because exurban development there is very scattered with empty land in between. You don't see that as much in Orlando or Phoenix or Houston or Dallas. In those places when you reach the edge of the built city that's it. Development just ends. Atlanta is the only southern city I know that really sprawls by leap frogging over itself.
Last edited by bryson662001; 01-11-2010 at 02:23 PM..
This comparison is not that drasitic and the Houston highest area of density is 17,000 people per sq. mile. Los Angeles is going to have higher higher density because it's more population and does inculde more multi-family homes (Houston is building lots of these within its core). The overall density of Los Angeles isn't that amazing and Houston currenty density of now is about 4k per square mile. I agree LA is more dense and urban than Houston, but the comparison is nowhere near like LA being compared to NYC.
OK, so that Houston neighborhood that is the most dense (which one if you don't mind me asking?) would be the 23rd most dense neighborhood in L.A. What percentage of people in Houston live in neighborhoods greater than 10,000 people per square mile??? The fact that 65% of L.A. is in neighborhoods greater than 10,000 per square mile shows that L.A. is much more dense than Houston IMO. Houston probably has what? 5% of its population in population in neighborhoods above 10,000 psm???
OK, so that Houston neighborhood that is the most dense (which one if you don't mind me asking?) would be the 23rd most dense neighborhood in L.A. What percentage of people in Houston live in neighborhoods greater than 10,000 people per square mile??? The fact that 65% of L.A. is in neighborhoods greater than 10,000 per square mile shows that L.A. is much more dense than Houston IMO. Houston probably has what? 5% of its population in population in neighborhoods above 10,000 psm???
I don't think we have many neighborhoods over 10,000 psm. Like I said; Los Angeles is more population; Houston's density is increasing all over the city.
Last edited by blkgiraffe; 01-11-2010 at 02:34 PM..
This is a question where the stereotypes are very misleading. Some people are confusing low but continuous density with sprawl. LA is one of the least sprawling cities in the US. New houses there are almost touching each other and new towns are packed in tight against their neighbors.
The only empty spaces are where it isn't possible to build.
There's actually such a thing as dense sprawl, and LA is the epitome of such a phenomenon. Sounds oxymoronic, but it's not.
There's actually such a thing as dense sprawl, and LA is the epitome of such a phenomenon. Sounds oxymoronic, but it's not.
It depends on your definition of sprawl, which is somewhat ambiguous. Acording to this definition LA has fewer characteristics of sprawl then most other US cities because of density, land use, lot size, lack of greenbelts etc. It covers a large area because it is just a big city with a lot of people. Urban sprawl - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
To me the biggest characteristic of sprawl is the "leap frogging" phenomenon where empty space seperates patches of develpment on the ourskirts of cities, which isn't found as much in sunbelt cities as it is in the big, older east coast cities.
In terms of sheer amount of land use compared to population size, it's probably either Detroit, the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex, or Atlanta. They are all huge. To get a sense of Detroit's sprawl, compare the area on a map to the footprint of Toronto-Hamilton, Ontario. Toronto has its own problems with sprawl, but despite having more people, it is far more compact than the wave after wave of "mile roads" that ring out from Detroit.
The DFW metroplex is over 90 miles wide diagonally, if you stretch a line from Springtown (west of Ft. Worth, and connected to the rest of the area by a belt of low-density sprawl) to Terrel (east of Dallas).
Atlanta has low-density sprawl basically from the north end of I-575 down to towns like Newman, which also covers around 90 miles.
As for cities that sprawl more than most people expect, I'd have to go with both Portland and Seattle. Seattle has tremendous sprawl up and down the I-5 corridor, from Arlington down to Olympia, which is surely over 100 miles by road. And the public transit is pathetic. Portland has a better light rail system, but the city outside of downtown isn't nearly as dense as people seem to expect. There is low-density sprawl stretching out well into the state of Washington, and for many miles out to the east and west.
I think the most dense major metro area in the US is probably San Juan, Puerto Rico. Something like 2.5 million people fit into a relatively compact space, by US standards. And it tends to feel denser, too, when you drive around.
I think the Chicago area is definitely one of the most sprawled in the country. You have the city that everyone pays attention to - and it's a pretty dense city. 12,500 people per square miles over 230 square miles. Most people who visit don't make it that far out to reach the burbs and really explore.
If you think about it though, there are roughly 7,000,000 people who live in the suburbs of Chicago. That would still be one of the largest metros in the country even if you slapped off the entire central city.
That area of 7 million people is REALLY sprawled for the most part. Sure there are some very dense suburbs near the city, but then you get to the thousands and thousands of square miles of low density suburban area over a dozen counties. One of the reasons for this is that there are hundreds of suburbs that each have their own growth pattern and developed with vacant land inbetween. It's much different than many areas out west or down south where there's an extremely "clean" line between the urban area and the rural areas outside the metro. Tracts of land are developed one by one as they spread out from the center.
Here it's like 200 suburbs that are all growing at once in every direction, toward each other, outward from the metro, 5-8 miles from the other growing suburbs with farmland inbetween.
It's a huge mish-mash, but takes up a LOT of room. From the Northwest suburbs and up in Wisonsin over to the Michigan border is something like 180 miles of sprawl. You hit sprawl around Joliet or up in McHenry county and you're still over 50 miles from the central areas of Chicago.
To me living in the city without a car, the "burbs" are just this massive THING out there surrounding the city that I've been too enough times, but nowhere near enough times to actually experience the entire thing.
It's roughly estimated around 500 square miles have been built up on the fringes of the metro area from 1970 through 2000.
Last edited by Chicago60614; 01-11-2010 at 07:24 PM..
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