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Old Posted Feb 23, 2023, 11:05 PM
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Los Angeles Densest Urban Area: Revision of Census Bureau Data

From Newgeography:

LOS ANGELES DENSEST URBAN AREA: REVISION OF CENSUS BUREAU DATA

by Wendell Cox
02/20/2023

Los Angeles has been restored to the position of densest major urban area (over 1,000,000 population) in the nation, according to Census Bureau data. The original announcement of urban area population and densities has been revised for the San Francisco-Oakland urban area (San Francisco urban area), which had been listed as the densest major urban area, passing the Los Angeles urban area. Los Angeles had been the nation’s densest urban area in the 1990, 2000 and 2010 censuses and has now been recognized as densest in the 2020 Census.

The previous newgeography.com article summarizing the new data has been revised, with a new table listing the 83 urban areas with more than 500,000 population shown in both this article and the previous.

The Revision

The revision places San Rafael-Novato in the San Francisco-Oakland urban area, as it had been in 2000 and 2010. The San Francisco-Oakland urban area had a revised population of 3,516,000, in a land area of 514 square miles, for a density of 6,843 per square mile (2,632 per square kilometer), an increase of 9.2% from the 6,266 reported for 2010, disregarding the changed urban area qualification criteria (Note 2). San Francisco’s 14th ranking in population is unchanged, and even with the additional population has been passed by the Seattle urban area, with 3,544,000 residents. Since 2010, the Seattle urban area grew by 15.8%, more than double the San Francisco gain of 7.2%. During the same period, the land area of the San Francisco urban area declined 1.9%.

There are six smaller urban areas denser than Los Angeles, the largest of which is Arvin, California, in Kern County, about 100 miles north of the Los Angeles central business district. The Arvin urban area had 19.385 residents in 2020.

The Los Angeles urban population density was 7.476 per square mile (2,876 per square kilometer), a 6.8% increase from the 2010 figure of 6,999. The population rose 0.7%, while the land area was reduced 5.7%, with the urban area criteria changes between the 2010 and 2020 censuses. The densest urban area was Mecca, California, located in Riverside County, east of Palm Springs and about 140 miles east of the Los Angeles central business district. Mecca had a density of 10,979.

Six of the 10 densest urban areas with more than 500,000 residents are in California (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Fresno and Bakersfield, as well as nearby Las Vegas (Figure 1).



[...]



New York’s not being the nation’s densest major urban area seems perplexing to many. The key to the high Los Angeles UA density is its small single-family lot size (photograph above). The average detached house lot in Los Angeles is 0.15 acres, approximately one-half the major metropolitan area average, and nearly 20% smaller than the average New York metropolitan area detached house size.

These small lots are typical of virtually all California urban areas. California has 35 of the 43 densest urban areas of all sizes in the nation. Indeed, California has the highest urban density of any state.

Perhaps the ultimate irony is that Los Angeles, so long demeaned by some planners as the ultimate in “sprawl” is, in fact, the least sprawling major urban area in the United States in relation to its land area.



Click the link for the complete article and graphs/graphics: https://www.newgeography.com/content...us-bureau-data
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Old Posted Feb 23, 2023, 11:47 PM
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Originally Posted by sopas ej View Post

Perhaps the ultimate irony is that Los Angeles, so long demeaned by some planners as the ultimate in “sprawl” is, in fact, the least sprawling major urban area in the United States in relation to its land area.
What a low-level take. LA is absolutely NOT the least sprawling major urban area, it just has built out almost all of the available flat land in the region at higher densities than occur in the eastern 2/3 of the country due to land and water constraints. LA sprawls from almost Santa Barbara to Palm Desert. To say it's the least sprawling metro is a joke. I guess you could claim LA has the most uniformly dense suburbia in the country.

We've been through this a million times on this forum. Suburbia is built out at higher densities in the Western US mostly due to water constraints. In places like Vegas you have pretty tightly packed suburban sprawl directly adjacent to uninhabited desert. That pattern would never exist in the east, because there's no need for it to. Density diminishes as you get further from core cities in those environments, and often bleeds into small towns that existed independently of the core city for many years. That makes these types of metros appear less dense on paper than western metros, but it doesn't mean that they sprawl more. Almost all of Vegas is sprawl, as there really isn't even a core city. Similar arguments with many CA places. Orange County is almost all sprawl, but it has pretty impressive density numbers. Same with the IE.
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Old Posted Feb 24, 2023, 12:22 AM
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Wendell Cox is a clown. He, along with Randal O'Toole and Bob Poole at the Reason Foundation, are among the biggest apologists for automobile use and sprawl.

The LA metro area is indeed very dense but it also has significant sprawl. I agree, however, that the LA metro region is denser than the New York metro region. Once you get outside of New York City and the immediate suburbs, there are a lot of houses on half-acre lots. Westchester and Fairfield Counties are both immediately adjacent to New York and there are a lot of low-density, semi-rural communities in both counties. There is nothing really like that in Southern California. Orange County--- the stereotypical post-war sunbelt suburb-- is nearly twice as dense as Westchester and nearly three times as dense as Fairfield County.
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Old Posted Feb 24, 2023, 1:09 AM
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Oh I agree; he's like Joel Kotkin I guess, since Kotkin also likes to promote car use, even though he's an urban planner. WTF.

I posted the article mainly because it mentions a revision the Census Bureau made regarding the most dense metro area. In that instance, it seems rather objective.

And like you said, suburbs in the northeast, and I guess in the midwest too, can be a lot less dense than SoCal suburbs. I grew up in the LA area, so, when I first visited the northeast and went to some of its suburban areas (like Rockaway, NJ), they seemed more like small towns or even semi-rural to me.
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Old Posted Feb 24, 2023, 1:16 AM
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New Jersey is actually the one area in the New York metro area that has added a significant amount of housing. Westchester and the counties on Long Island are the laggards.

I grew up in Orange County and when I first moved to DC about twenty years ago, I thought parts of Orange County felt more urban than certain neighborhoods in upper Northwest DC.
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Old Posted Feb 24, 2023, 1:20 AM
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For example, here is Tenleytown in DC (by American University). Yes, it is dense by the metro station and along Wisconsin Avenue but if you get more than a block off of the corridor, many of the Gateway cities in LA County and communities in northern Orange County have denser housing.


Photo via Wikipedia.
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Old Posted Feb 24, 2023, 3:04 AM
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My parents have friends who used to live in Rockaway, NJ. I last visited them there in the late 1990s, before they moved back to California. The husband commuted into Manhattan. I didn't expect Rockaway to look like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.9097...4!8i8192?hl=en.

It looks totally small town/rural to me.

This is the town center: https://www.google.com/maps/@40.9010...4!8i8192?hl=en
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Old Posted Feb 24, 2023, 3:25 AM
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While no is denying that LA isn’t dense, these figures should be takin with a grain of salt as this density is not weighted, but simply “x” population over “why” area

Weighted density takes into account geographic population distribution where’s as urban area doesn’t.
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Old Posted Feb 24, 2023, 4:48 PM
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This has been discussed a lot.

Post ww2 car oriented cities have a more stable density pattern from Core-edge. Not getting very high but also not getting very low before ending on a dime to open wilderness.

Eastern cities that developed over much longer periods of time and before cars have hyper dense cores but rapidly fade into a ruralish sprawl.

As Ive said before when you take out the preserves and undeveloped land that are just in city limits the density picture changes a lot.

People will look at this list and be shocked at how low Boston scores on density because its very dense in a small area but the metro is very rural where western cities have higher average density across the metro even if the cores are not dense at all.

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Old Posted Feb 24, 2023, 4:54 PM
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Originally Posted by sopas ej View Post
And like you said, suburbs in the northeast, and I guess in the midwest too, can be a lot less dense than SoCal suburbs. I grew up in the LA area, so, when I first visited the northeast and went to some of its suburban areas (like Rockaway, NJ), they seemed more like small towns or even semi-rural to me.
New Jersey really has the full spectrum of suburbanity, or maybe we should call them bedroom communities? The Hudson County bedroom communities are denser than every major US city except NYC itself. Essex, Union, Bergen, etc., counties all have above average to average density. While outer counties in places like Morris County, western Passaic, etc., have semi-rural densities.

Westchester is somewhat similar although the drop off occurs much closer to the 5 boroughs than in NJ.

Long Island is probably the most standard suburbia. The density drop off starts in eastern Queens, so all of Nassau County is typical density US suburbia with almost nothing semi-rural looking. Western Suffolk looks much the same as Nassau, but you start to see the semi-rural character pop up at about the halfway point when going east.
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Old Posted Feb 24, 2023, 6:18 PM
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The census tract density threshold for determining a contiguous "urban area" is quite low. So by that measure LA and other western metros don't sprawl all that much. I think that's pretty accurate. People just have the wrong impression of what really constitutes sprawl. High density, tight-knit, gridded suburbia is actually an efficient use of space. In more developed areas there might be some multifamily mixed in there, with regularly spaced retail lined arterials, making the whole thing somewhat walkable and "urban-lite."
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Old Posted Feb 24, 2023, 6:21 PM
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Originally Posted by iheartthed View Post
New Jersey really has the full spectrum of suburbanity, or maybe we should call them bedroom communities? The Hudson County bedroom communities are denser than every major US city except NYC itself. Essex, Union, Bergen, etc., counties all have above average to average density. While outer counties in places like Morris County, western Passaic, etc., have semi-rural densities.

Westchester is somewhat similar although the drop off occurs much closer to the 5 boroughs than in NJ.

Long Island is probably the most standard suburbia. The density drop off starts in eastern Queens, so all of Nassau County is typical density US suburbia with almost nothing semi-rural looking. Western Suffolk looks much the same as Nassau, but you start to see the semi-rural character pop up at about the halfway point when going east.
Nassau County reminds me of Orange County. I wouldn't really consider that sprawl. I would consider the western half of Connecticut to be sprawl.
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Old Posted Feb 24, 2023, 7:45 PM
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Nassau County reminds me of Orange County. I wouldn't really consider that sprawl. I would consider the western half of Connecticut to be sprawl.
All of Nassau was built out by about 1970, so it probably doesn't fit the modern image of sprawl. Also New York metro doesn't really have modern sprawl in general. The vast majority of housing built since 1980 in the NY metro has been multi-family.
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Old Posted Feb 24, 2023, 11:32 PM
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New York sprawl is not very contiguous so it is harder to define the urban area. Furthermore, suburbs built to emphasize the public realm are probably going to include greenspaces, which I don't see as much of in suburban Los Angeles compared to suburban New York. Of course on the Maps I also see there is some extreme low density exurbia surrounding New York which should not be ignored, but overall it is probably not as sprawling as the stats suggests.

That said, I think if there is a big metropolitan area that should be the poster child of sprawl, Dallas or Atlanta are probably better candidates than LA.
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Old Posted Feb 25, 2023, 9:49 PM
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Once you get outside of New York City and the immediate suburbs, there are a lot of houses on half-acre lots. Westchester and Fairfield Counties are both immediately adjacent to New York
I noticed that several yrs ago when I traveled beyond manhattan & wanted to see the burbs of the NYC area, otherwise known as the tri state area. Unlike the often postage sized tract lots in most of LA's older (& newer) burban areas, I could tell that devlprs in metro NY over 70 yrs ago set aside more acreage for each residence than what was done in the LA area. I think even NY's levittown of the 1950s has larger lots than its counterpart in LA, lakewood, did, which is about 15 miles from dtla.

I've always wondered if devlprs in certain east coast metros felt they could give away more land per household than what was done by devlprs in the LA area going back to the early 1900s.

Going outside the US, I notice that paris's burbs, which are at a distance from France's capital as Anaheim is from LA, reminded me of OC over 60 yrs ago....when it was still full of orange groves & bean fields. I was curious how things like Paris's amusement parks place...real estate wise...overall in France compared with the way similar attractions are located in the LA area.
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Old Posted Feb 25, 2023, 9:59 PM
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Of course on the Maps I also see there is some extreme low density exurbia surrounding New York which should not be ignored, but overall it is probably not as sprawling as the stats suggests.

This is where weighted density comes in handy. New York has some super-low density exurban suburbs, but relatively few people live in them. The vast majority of people living the NYC MSA live at densities far higher than those anywhere else in the country.
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Old Posted Feb 25, 2023, 10:17 PM
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more alike than different, but based on these drive thru vids, I think houses in Levitttown may sit on a bit more land than houses do in Lakewood...but not sure. They may be actually almost identical in sq footage of property.


Video Link


Video Link


Video Link


this is an aerial view of levittown...



This is an aerial view of lakewood...so I think devlprs in the LA area have historically been tighter in the amt of land they've wanted to set aside for each residence, unless it was being sold to wealthier homeowners.


Last edited by citywatch; Feb 25, 2023 at 11:05 PM.
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Old Posted Feb 26, 2023, 4:41 PM
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Nassau County has like 60% of the population density as the city of Los Angeles, so I doubt you'll notice a ton of difference between lot sizes in Nassau and much of mid-century suburban areas in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Going north from NYC is a bit different. The changeover from tightly built tract housing to houses on big lots happens somewhat closer to the NYC border. But I think the towns going north are generally a lot older than the ones on Long Island, so it was harder to acquire the large pieces of farmland to create the tract housing.

Last edited by iheartthed; Feb 26, 2023 at 5:01 PM.
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Old Posted Feb 27, 2023, 6:38 AM
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Originally Posted by iheartthed View Post
Nassau County has like 60% of the population density as the city of Los Angeles, so I doubt you'll notice a ton of difference between lot sizes in Nassau and much of mid-century suburban areas in Los Angeles and Orange counties.
Are you referring to LA's unweighted municipal population density, which includes large swathes of unpopulated mountain ranges?
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