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Old Posted Apr 14, 2022, 7:29 PM
jmecklenborg jmecklenborg is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SAN Man View Post
California cities have dense suburbia, which is quite different from suburban midwest cities. Western cities generally have dense sprawl compared to the midwest and east coast, which is why I said they have stark differences in look and feel. Suburbs are suburbs though, it's not like we're comparing Manhattan to Orange County, so I see what you're saying that they're both similar because they're both auto-oriented.
The big difference between LA and pretty much the entire rest of the United States is that its spectacular postwar residential expansion was platted on prewar-sized lots.

Lot sizes in the United States worked roughly like this:
1800-1880 25x100
1880-1910 35x120
1910-1950 50x150
1950-2008 75x200

But in LA and Orange County, tens if not hundreds of thousands of postward SFH's were built on 40x80~ lots. Unfortunately, the main arterials are very wide, which reduced prevailing density, made it too easy to drive, and too depressing to walk.

The weird thing about walking anywhere in LA is that you get this weird sense for the relative slowness of walking that doesn't seem to exist anywhere in the east. I get this sense even around Fairfax, UCLA, etc., where the prevailing densities are quite high.