Comment by lokar

11 hours ago

And LA is more dense than NYC

But the absolute size matters. The actual “city like” part of SF is really small.

Where do you draw the boundaries or LA and NYC? This is imporant to test your hypothesis.

  • The city boundaries, which I admit is kind of arbitrary/weird for LA (city). If you include the county, or MSA it's obviously way less dense.

    What bothers me the most is how so many Americans seem to have this irrational fear of cities. They think they are more dangerous, dirty, difficult, etc than they really are, by a wide margin. And they vastly under-estimate the amenities and quality of life they bring, along with the extent to which they make all of the wealth of the country even possible.

    They wring their hands and complain that allowing more building will turn their city into NYC, which is just crazy on the face of it.

    •     > The city boundaries
      

      Brandolini alert. It only took me 7 seconds to Google search to disprove this statement. How long until we have an auto-bot that will just reject stupid, lazy, false comments like this?

      My Google searches:

          > los angeles city density
          > 8,210 people per square mile
      

      Next:

          > new york city density
          > 29,303 people per square mile
      

      So, NYC is 3x the density of LA.

    • Look, I've visited NYC and there's a lot of nice things, such as mass transit that basically works, food options everywhere, etc. I liked it more than I expected I would.

      But there's not a lot of peacefulness. There's certainly not peacefulness outside my bedroom windows anywhere I could afford to live. Sleeping with windows open and waking to birdsong rather than traffic sounds is quality of life for me.

      4 replies →

    • Honestly a lot of arguments will be settled if the posters location was known. Culture influences a lot of wrong opinions.