L.A.’s love of sprawl made it America’s most overcrowded place. Poor people pay a deadly price for the convenience of cars.
With the exception of cities like Philadelphia and Baltimore, Los Angeles has never been a sprawl of single-family homes. Rather, there have been scattered clusters of single-family homes, clustered together with large tracts of residential “downtown” land. It is a situation that has become untenable from two causes: first, the city is growing; second, the population of its metropolitan region is exploding.
By the end of the century, Los Angeles is projected to be the largest city in the world, growing by some 20,000 people every day. This growth is not taking place in the residential districts, but around transit and other destinations. It is becoming a place where housing is not necessarily available to everyone, especially poor people, who are increasingly living, working, and interacting in transit-rich environments.
For most of Los Angeles’s history, the city has been growing so rapidly that the urban centers of most communities have remained much the same size. Los Angeles is now the only major city in the United States where the central urban area is expanding. In the next decades, it will be the only major city in the world whose central urban area will grow larger than its metropolitan region. The rest of Los Angeles’s population will be moving to new, more suburban and rural settings.
What is often overlooked in this growth of Los Angeles is the city’s tremendous growth on its periphery. In the early 1990s, L.A.’s outer neighborhoods were characterized by sprawl: tract housing and small apartment complexes. Many of these neighborhoods still looked more like suburban cities than small communities. However, in the late 1990s, L.A.’s outlying areas began to resemble the suburbs, characterized by large apartment complexes and sprawling subdivisions. In 2006, the outlying areas of L.A.’s urban core began to look more like dense downtowns.
The outer neighborhoods have been largely ignored in discussions of L.A.’s growth. But they have contributed a great deal to this growth, and their growth is accelerating. In the mid-2000s, there were still fewer than 10,000 people in the outer areas. By 2008, there were some 80,000 people living in the outer areas and nearly 5 million people living within 5 miles of the city center.
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