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If we're counting San Francisco as too cold and DC as part of the north and excluding Puerto Rico, then the warm bits of the country with the largest expanses of walkable areas where car ownership won't mean your quality of life craters in comparison would probably be, in order:
Los Angeles
Honolulu
San Diego
Miami
New Orleans
Austin
Richmond
Key West strikes me as pretty dense, as well when it comes to Florida cities/towns. St. Augustine feels dense in some parts of it, as well. And I think certain St. Augustine streets(at least in the old Spanish building part of town from centuries ago), are car free.
You also forgot Savannah, which to me also feels pretty dense for a Southern city. I sometimes wonder if you could classify certain parts of Pensacola and Mobile, as dense? Those are 2 cities I've been meaning to street view further, but hadn't done so yet myself.
Key West strikes me as pretty dense, as well when it comes to Florida cities/towns. St. Augustine feels dense in some parts of it, as well. And I think certain St. Augustine streets(at least in the old Spanish building part of town from centuries ago), are car free.
You also forgot Savannah, which to me also feels pretty dense for a Southern city. I sometimes wonder if you could classify certain parts of Pensacola and Mobile, as dense? Those are 2 cities I've been meaning to street view further, but hadn't done so yet myself.
These are all nice in parts, but their urban walkable cores are much smaller than even the smallest of the ones I mentioned. I should mention though that some of these are actually places with different decent-sized nodes of walkable cores, namely Los Angeles and Miami. Los Angeles has several fairly large nodes and its largest are the largest of any of the cities mentioned. Miami has two fairly large nodes with one being that of downtown Miami and its environs and the other outside of Miami city proper within the separate municipality of Miami Beach.
One city along the lines of Savannah is Charleston, South Carolina. Both of their downtown cores are really cute and pretty bustling especially with the tourism, but they're much smaller and in some ways less full-fledged neighborhoods for living than that of the other cities I mentioned.
I remember a conversation I had some time ago with someone from California. I am from Chicago and we were discussing the relative merits of Chicago and Los Angeles. I said the best American city I could imagine would be if you transplanted Chicago's built environment into the LA basin. (Now obviously you'd have to quake-proof all of those brick buildings.) He agreed.
I'm just using that as an example of what I mean by a dense, northern-style city in a warm climate. It's just a historical accident that large cities predating the automobile developed in the colder parts of the US. Especially now that we have air conditioning, there is no reason such a city could not exist in a warmer part of the country.
San Francisco comes the closest to being this city, and it's highly desirable for these reasons. Still the dense parts don't feel big enough. DC also comes close but the weather is not really ideal. Los Angeles is the great missed opportunity, but actually I think it has the best chance to outgrow its car-centric design of any sunbelt city.
I think there is tremendous demand for attractive, dense cities in warm climates in this country, as seen by the desirability of places like SF, which don't even complete the vision I described in my first paragraph.
I'd like to believe a city like LA could continue to develop (and not just densify - LA is already pretty dense) into a city more like New York, Chicago, or Boston. I worry though we'll never build cities like that again because of cars.
I disagree about SF - the dense parts are actually pretty big, especially if you package it with Oakland and Berkeley across the bay. You mentioned DC, but I'd say SF and the Bay Area core are substantially denser and more urban than DC.
Also, what about Portland and Seattle? They're not warm per se and get a lot of rain, but have climates closer to the Bay Area and Northern California than the Midwest or East Coast.
So y’all are just gonna completely ignore the fact that New Orleans already exists and has a pretty sizeable pre car urban fabric eh? I guess new and shiny urban in Miami is a hotter topic here.
Yeah, New Orleans is dense and has developed public transit. Streetcar lines could be bigger but when I visited them I really liked them.
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