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- Hacker News
- They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.by toyg
- Is there an alternative if 13 million people want to live somewhere?by lotsofpulp
- Paradise? LA was a big giant horrible underdeveloped wasteland in Spanish/Mexican times which, at the time in 1849, had 1,600 residents. Most of them had a largely pastoral life and life was brutal there.
LA under US rule is the prime example of what industrialized people can do to a place that lacked nearly everything of what it is at this moment: a world-class city.
Objectively, if it had stayed under Mexican rule, it’d resemble Yuma at best or Tecate at worst. I should know, my family lineage goes back to that era to both sides of the border.
by mag7269 - I noticed most of the tall buildings are sixties to eighties. Some more info about that here. https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/a-brief-history-of-l...by djmips
- Wikipedia has a nice visualization of the history of LA's tallest buildings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_L...
- Thank you! Great link!
And here is one that is just fun to watch because of Huell Howser --
Tallest Building | Visiting with Huell Howser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ziEDhCPjOQ
by rustywasm - Interesting visualization. I feel like it's misleading though because the presentation shows only Los Angeles City boundaries, not the area in general. LA City has that strange vertical shaft down the the port so the city could keep the taxes from the port, but the visualization shows the rest of the area as empty, which of course it is not. It also excludes Orange County, Riverside County, and the whole area north, the San Fernando Valley, and those all arguably are just as important to the story. In the end, I think the visualization ends up being a net negative in it's current form since it's very misleadingby socalgal2
- I did a project recently where I extracted every Los Angeles building permit record for a property and was able to look at the evolution of its infrastructure and tenancy over time by embedding the permit documents into an image-based embedding model. Could be an interesting way to incorporate more granularity of the history of properties over time, although it dramatically increases the scope of data processed.by tcdent
- Interesting idea. Is there a practical way to obtain those permit records at scale?by computomatic
- Having moved to LA this february, the sprawl is really something I had no true appreciation for until I moved here for real, and tried to run errands across town. It's a gigantic, beautiful, complicated place.by ericzawo
- It's a bunch of cats (mid-sized, and generally mid all-around, cities) fighting under a blanket. The history of the place is a reaction against New York, where the city is dense and had a bunch of super tall buildings. LA, as a region, said "well we don't want that and enacted a bunch of building codes to hamstring any single city in the region from potentially being a successful, mature urban center.
Pretty infuriating to visit Barcelona recently and see that there was a perfect example of good urban planning sitting right there for decades that LA could've simply copied. In the long run this region is simply incapable of maintaining its infrastructure with its tax base, even today you can see it starting to collapse.
- The density at least means you don't have to really run across town for much and can stay within a certain radius for most all your needs and wants. I mean look at the density of costcos alone. Many other metros might have 1 or 2 for the entire area. Then again a lot of other metros you basically can drive end to end in 25 miles.by asdff
- One the experiences for me that never gets old is coming in to LAX (flight path East to West) and the sprawl just goes on forever. The other crazy thing that 60% of the population speak a language other than English at home. So I think it has one of the best options for cuisine in the world, because it's all there (somewhere!)by rustywasm
- Funny, I built the same thing 9 months ago for Denver, CO - nothing too interesting other than 1 subdivision that exploded in growth over 1-2 years in the 70s. A lot of the older areas around Denver built up pretty quickly.by sevennull
- A complementary view of one point in time is the LA Noire video game's attempt to recreate a (condensed and simplified) 1940s LA environment, with 3D architecture, cars, and ongoing expansion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGPh2AcmG2A
The storytelling atmosphere is somber film-noire-ish, but there's simultaneously a feeling of national prosperity and potential for many (with notable unjust exceptions), like I think fewer people feel in more recent decades.
Would also be interesting to try to convey that kind of change over time, in an immersive way.
by neilv - Did not think of that - yes that is a really interesting idea. Totally different way with interacting with data. I'm going to ponder that...by rustywasm
- Bit misleading since it only shows properties still standing, seemingly. So the older periods look extremely empty.by ZeWaka
- Yes, great point. What was torn down, burned, destroyed, etc. along the way isn't here. This is the surviving city, not the city as it was.by rustywasm
- This is one of those 'hey, I can vibe code this in a weekend' projects. Just look at how the AI decided to the entire map in dark mode, making it nearly impossible to tell the ocean and the land apart.by sgt
- Los Angeles had the largest public transportation network in the United States until we paved over it[1]. We had over 1,300 miles! You could've gone from Huntington Beach to Downtown and all the way up to Burbank. You can see many of the maps of Los Angeles at the public library[2]. I don't live there anymore, love that place though.
[1] - https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/from-rail-to-roads-an...
[2] - https://www.lapl.org/research-guides/maps/maps-los-angeles
by wathef - It’s making a comebackby lokar
- Fun fact: this is the plot of the movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”by WD-42
- My mom (who is 97) has a vivid memory of seeing FDR in 1935 -- the whole extended family took the the Red Car from Compton to downtown to see his motorcade. She remembered the electric trams worked really well, especially for folks without much money.by rustywasm
- This is more like the construction date of buildings that have survived. Some early neighborhoods (like palms) have been completely replaced building by building so they really appear as dark here when they weren't. It had a downtown in the 1890s but all those buildings are gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palms,_Los_Angeles#/media/File...
it's basically this data: https://portal.assessor.lacounty.gov/ through this portal https://data.lacity.org/
by kristopolous - Exactly this -- This is more like the construction date of buildings that have survived. Everything demolished, burned, or replaced is invisible.
Probably should put that front and center.
by rustywasm - As others have pointed out, this is more about the age of existing buildings than the construction of the city, but it's pretty neat.
About ten years ago when we were working on Mapbox GL, I did a mobile-native viz like this to show off the vector tile tech. The blog post is still up (thankfully) which has a good bit of info on the data processing pipeline as well, ranging from Shapefile to GeoJSON to vector tiles on the backend to Swift on the frontend:
https://medium.com/mapbox/visualizing-an-entire-citys-buildi...
I always loved mirroring a phone to a large TV and showing this off at 60FPS. It was such fun tech to work on.
by incanus77 - It's amazing how little has changed in recent years in LA. The massive downzoning of the 1980s had its effect: prevent efficient land use, and channel money into the hands of landlords and homeowners from all newcomers.
LA is a ridiculously unaffordable place to live, not because it's nice, but because of an artificial shortage of built space, due to a monopoly on the permission to build.
by epistasis - There is also a completely unreasonable shortage of water for a much bigger city.by golem14
- To be fair NYC has taken the opposite approach and rents are extremely high there as wellby gradus_ad
- I have a dumb question. What is the eventual of efficient land use? Say we bulldoze a bunch of single family homes and get 10x as dense. Now we have 10x as many people per square kilometer. Is that an efficient use of land? Will there be someone saying at 10x population density that it's an inefficient use of space? If yes, what would they propose instead?