You can't just casually link to that page and claim it's talking about San Franciso. It's comparing the LA mega sprawl to SF-Oakland-Fremont. Fremont! The very definition of suburbia.

So yeah, if you head off from urban areas and include their low density suburban outliers, LA looks kind of sort of urban. But now I'm just repeating the grandparent's point: people who care about urban-ness are likely to consider both Fremont and LA suburban hell holes.

My point is that it's wrong to think of Los Angeles as the epitome of sprawl. It is not. It is an outlier of density compared to most American cities.

"So yeah, if you head off from urban areas and include their low density suburban outliers, LA looks kind of sort of urban."

This is explicitly the thinking I dispute. Look at the data. It is weighted density for each metropolitan area. It is a statistic used to eliminate the problem of arbitrary borders making data noisy.

To be clear: I'm a fan of weighted density. It's better than simple density. It's just that it still suffers from selection effects. I think it's still just an unsolvable problem. Which suburban areas get glommed on to the dense core? Weighting reduces the impact of low density glommers, but if you glom on as many people as the urban core has from medium density suburbs, with a different culture and self identification, you get an inaccurate picture.

It's true that LA has some urban bits. And it's suburban bits aren't nearly as suburban as in other places.

It's more about the central problem of defining urban. To me, Fremont isn't even vaguely the same region as SF. SF has cultural attractions, Fremont does not. In Fremont, you need a car (I once walked 3 miles through Fremont to get to my bed for the night. I got a lot of bemused stares).

SF, and Boston, and Manhattan, feel like they're cities, and people who live in the outlying regions don't claim they live in the recognizable urban core. LA has a few dense zip codes, but everyone, including all the folks in relatively low density areas, feels like they live in LA.

After chasing a few pointers you end up at this post which defines weighted density: http://austinzoning.typepad.com/austincontrarian/2008/03/per...

I agree that it looks like a much more useful statistic than ordinary density, and is relatively insensitive to arbitrary inclusion / exclusion decisions of outlying areas like the grandparent complains about. Thanks for linking that site.

Glad you found it useful. The census bureau itself shifted to tract weighted density with the 2010 census, but I couldn't find a good city ranking on their site.

Look at this data:

http://www.zipatlas.com/us/zip-code-comparison/population-de...

LA has some of the densest zip codes in the country. If we look at the top zip code by metro, the ranking is NY, Boston, SF, Seattle (???), LA, Chicago, Washington.

LA the city and LA the county are not same thing.