Is L.A. More Crowded Than New York?

Traffic congestion and overcrowding are daily reminders that a lot of people live in Los Angeles. This allows the claim that the city of Los Angeles is more dense than New York City to fall on willing ears. There’s only one problem. The city of Los Angeles is NOT more dense than New York City. A recent study by UCLA urban planning students Sandra O’Flaherty, Andrea Osgood, and Lara Regus sheds some light on the facts and how confusion arises from various definitions of density.

When discussing density it is important to distinguish between population density and housing density. Population density measures the number of people per unit of land and varies depending on the time of day. Housing density is the number of homes per unit of land.

The maps below show that New York City is considerably more dense than the City of Los Angeles; it has a higher population density. The darker colors indicate the highest levels of density. Los Angles has only a few small dark areas surrounded by large white areas while New York has several areas with the darkest red and a lot of areas with darker shades of pink.

How do the densest areas of New York City and the City of Los Angeles match up? One of darkest census tracts in New York City has approximately 187,000 people per square mile and one of the darkest census tracts in the City of Los Angeles has approximately 96,000 people per square mile.

In “L.A. the King of Sprawl, Not at All,” (LA Times, 10/23/05) Robert Bruegmann reports that according to the U.S. Census Los Angeles is the densest urbanized area in the country. The U.S. Census defines an urbanized area as “core census block groups or blocks that have a population density of at least 1,000 people per square mile and surrounding census blocks that have an overall density of at least 500 people per square mile.”(www.census.gov) This isn’t urban in the sense of a city, but rather urban in the sense that it is not farmland, open space or wilderness.

The “urbanized area of New York” by this definition is roughly the NE Corridor which includes 28 different counties in 3 different states; it is home to 18 million people and has a population density of approximately 5,000 people per square mile. The “urbanized area of Los Angeles” has 12 million people and includes five different counties; it has a population density of approximately 7,000 people per square mile. Though it is true that the urbanized area of Los Angeles has a greater population density than the urbanized area of New York City, the urbanized area of Los Angeles is half the size of New York City’s. The statistical trick that Bruegmann claims to be non-existent is indeed very present. If the urbanized area of Los Angeles was close to the size of that of New York we would begin to see a very different picture.

Read the full report.

View the presentation.

View the poster.

Maps created by: Sandra O’Flaherty, Andrea Osgood, and Lara Regus