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Los Angeles a Good City?

C

Cooool

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Everyone seems to hate Los Angeles as a city. It's got a lot of problems (smog, crime, traffic, etc).

But it has an appeal to it that other suburban cities like Atlanta and Houston simply don't have.

Do you believe Los Angeles is a good city to live?
 
Chinese Jamaican Bloke said:
traffic jams, long commutes, isolating depressing suburbs which produced sheltered kids are not good appeals
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That can describe any Canadian or US city really, it is not unique to LA... after all, doesn't Toronto have worst commutes in the world?

I like LA a lot. Because it is a very interesting place, no matter what people say about it. Also, maybe because it is similar to Toronto, and I like Toronto. Toronto is the "Los Angeles of the North" is it not?
 
I thought Vancouver was LA North?

I just question how much of Los Angeles is actually safe. All of South Central is bad, the San Fernando Valley has some really bad parts, East LA has bad parts, and even Long Beach isn't the safest area. That covers just about every direction in the city. The only place that really has appeal, is West Los Angeles (Santa Monica, Bel-Air, Westwood, Beverly Hills, etc).

How would you say it is similar to Toronto doady?

I would much rather live in LA than somewhere like Atlanta or Dallas, places I'd rather die than live.
 
I think that LA is actually a great city. While there are obvious issues in it's planning in built environment that'll make it face major challenges in the near future, it really makes you feel like you're in a different world. LA could be an entire country, just all the different places that exist in it. All that needs to be done is make it a nicer place to live in specifically. That would be an amazing job to actually have, may I say, yet it doesn't look like people want to address the issues that are seriously hampering LA.
 
Cooool said:
I just question how much of Los Angeles is actually safe. All of South Central is bad, the San Fernando Valley has some really bad parts, East LA has bad parts, and even Long Beach isn't the safest area. That covers just about every direction in the city. The only place that really has appeal, is West Los Angeles (Santa Monica, Bel-Air, Westwood, Beverly Hills, etc).
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Well, you could cover just about every direction in Toronto and rule out large swaths of Scarborough, North York, Etobicoke, Mississauga, Brampton, etc. So it's not like we're much different.
 
I just visited LA for a few days and must say that it was better than I had anticipated. Yes, the area is huge and there are many parts of the City that are spoiled by surface parking lots and a strange mixture of types of building use (residential and industrial and commercial all in same area) but their newish subway is great and I was pleasantly surprised to find that as a senior citizen I could travel on it and the bus servicefor 25 cents! (It is also good that the City offers a regular direct bus to the airport for $7.)

I saw no areas I would consider unsafe but I did only go to the downtown core and the tourist spots.
 
had this same discussion with a buddy last week and we all agree that TO is like Los Angeles without the nice weather, hot girls, nice beaches and earthquakes.

1) Both a sprawling suburban cities without a soul or distinct identity but rather identified by certain nabes
2) Very multicultural and som of the best ethnic food from all areas of the world can be found.
3) Terrible commutes with a pretty shltty transit system
4) Driving in Markha/Richmond hill feels like certain parts of Orange County with all the asian plazas/malls
5) Driving down the 401 is like 405 freeway in los angeles
6) Shopping at sherway Gardens in the summer feels like you've been transported to suburban Santa monica or Beverly Hills with all the benz's and range rovers that women are driving along with a tiny chihuahua dog in toll.
7) Driving on Yonge feels like Wilshire blvd especially when you hit koreatown near yonge/sheppard.
8) Strong car culture where more people still rather live 10-15 minutes outside of the city core to avoid the riff raffs
9) Both are a short drive to gambling meccas of their respective countries (Vegas and Niagara Falls)

:D
 
Interesting points, but I disagree with:

1. "suburban city": neither LA or Toronto are suburban cities. LA may be a series of disconnected urban areas, and it may have sprawling suburbs, but it's not a suburban city. And certainly Toronto, at least the old city of Toronto, is one of the most urban in North America.

2. "shitty transit system": I can't comment on LA's because I've never used it, but Toronto is one of the best in North America.
 
I could agree with MBS-Guru if you're coming from a suburban perspective. If you live outside of the urban city proper (roughly Roncevalles to Woodbine and parts of the lower beach) those observations are spot on.

If your neighbourhood's main drag feels like a race course, (for example, Keele St in my area) than overall that area is dominated by car culture.
 
ganjavih said:
Interesting points, but I disagree with:

1. "suburban city": neither LA or Toronto are suburban cities. LA may be a series of disconnected urban areas, and it may have sprawling suburbs, but it's not a suburban city. And certainly Toronto, at least the old city of Toronto, is one of the most urban in North America.

2. "shitty transit system": I can't comment on LA's because I've never used it, but Toronto is one of the best in North America.
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i don't know why i said suburban city, i meant to say both cities have extreme urban sprawl. Both are definitely urban cities.

However, the car culture is the strongest tie in between both cities .... it's slowly changing in TO but it's going to take a long time but people's attitude change.
 
LA's transit is actually not bad. I'd say that it's quite comparable with Toronto with good bus service but a lackluster RT backbone. I think that both transit systems have similar problems in terms of expanding their RT network, but Toronto has very obvious corridors to expand across. So I think that LA will continue to cluster their subways around the city core, and then send LRTs out into the suburbs to connect the dots of regional rail.

While LA's doing pretty poorly right now, all is certainly not lost. In fact, I think it's got the perfect structure to be a great city, partly based on the way it's sprawl is set up. Let nobody fool you, LA is giant. But if it fueled it's growth into a similar kind of thing that the GTA is doing with places to grow and avenues, it'd be more like a country than a city, which I think is great. One great big urban area with tens of millions of people that would take a lifetime to explore.
Unfortunately, there's a lot preventing that. Suburbanization is still fracturing the city outwards, while there's plenty of room to intensify avenues beautifully and create little downtown city centres. And there's an obvious class struggle throughout Metro LA, with a very prevalent underclass and a lot of gangs and general crime. I think it'll be impossible to get LA even up to Canadian levels of crime, but there's a lot of work that can be done. And cleaning up the slums gives a great clean slate for mid-density neighborhoods and city centres. Suburbanization also needs to be stopped, as there's already plenty of suburbs, and current suburban growth could be turned into mid density redevelopment, just like Toronto.
 
Both Los Angeles and Toronto ARE suburban in the sense that their inner cities (i.e. the part of the cities developed before the war) are very small relative to the size of the metropolitan area. Montreal for example has a larger inner city than Toronto, but a smaller urban area overall. You just have to look at their population in 1950 (LA) and 1951 (Toronto) relative to other US and Canadian cities and relative to their current population to see evidence of this.

But MBS-Guru is wrong when he says that Los Angeles and Toronto have "extreme urban sprawl." LA and Toronto are the densest urban areas in the US and Canada; their density that rivals that of European urban areas. Los Angeles and Toronto has a history of building suburbs differently, at very high density. Most of the Toronto area's high rise buildings are in post-war suburban areas.

As for car culture, I don't think Los Angeles has a very dominant car culture by US standards. It is unique compared to the rest of the US? Maybe not. Suburban Toronto on the other hand doesn't really have much of car culture as at all. When a purely post-war suburban corridor like Finch Avenue has 71 second bus frequency, it is hard to make a case about car culture being a defining aspect of Toronto.
 
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