American Dream

washingtonpost.com
Out West, a Paradox: Densely Packed Sprawl
L.A. Area Growing Crowded the Fastest

By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 11, 2005; A01

Quotes:

SIGNAL HILL, Calif. -- Sure, it looks like sprawl.

From atop this hill near the port of Long Beach, greater Los Angeles splays out through the midsummer haze as a low-rise
suburban muddle stitched together by freeways.

But take a closer look: What you knew about sprawl turns out to be wrong.

The urbanized area in and around Los Angeles has become the most densely populated place in the continental United States, according to the Census Bureau. Its density is 25 percent higher than that of New York, twice that of Washington and four times that of Atlanta, as measured by residents per square mile of urban land.

And Los Angeles grows more crowded every year, adding residents faster than it adds land, while most metropolitan areas in the Northeast, Midwest and South march in the opposite direction. They are the sprawling ones, dense in the center but devouring land at their edges much faster than they add people.

Odd as it may seem, density is the rule, not an exception, in the wide-open spaces of the West. Salt Lake City is more tightly
packed than Philadelphia. So is Las Vegas in comparison with Chicago, and Denver compared with Detroit. Ten of the country's 15 most densely populated metro areas are in the West, where residents move to newly developed land at triple the per-acre density of any other part of the country.

"If you want elbow room, move to Atlanta or Charlotte or the countrified suburbs of Washington," said Robert E. Lang, director of Virginia Tech's Metropolitan Institute in Alexandria. "You probably aren't going to get it in the West. There, if you and your neighbor lean out your windows, you can hold hands."

This demographic pattern is having profound effects on housing construction, commuting and the quality of urban life.

In upper-income quarters of metro Los Angeles, density can be an aesthetic kick. When wedded to smart design and careful planning, it is a high-energy stimulant for suburban ennui, luring high-end stores, protecting open space and paying for toll roads that reduce traffic. But in poorer parts of the region, especially where large immigrant families have settled, density is a just fancy word for severe overcrowding.

Ten municipalities in the nation average more than four people per household -- and nine of them are in greater Los Angeles, according to the Census Bureau. In these mostly older neighborhoods of tract houses, density has a way of turning garages into illegal apartments, while strangling public schools, overwhelming parks and choking streets with cars. Problems born of overcrowding also have a way of being ignored by politicians, since many residents are illegal or poor or both -- and do not vote.

Bursting at the Seams

Open space in the West has always seemed endless. But deserts, mountains, huge tracts of federally owned land and a pervasive lack of water make much of the region unlivable. As such, it has remained the most rural part of the country in terms of land use while becoming the most densely urban in terms of where people live.

Sometime around the early 1980s, greater Los Angeles collided with these unforgiving restraints.

Still, newcomers kept pouring into the Los Angeles Basin, at a rate of about 2 million to 3 million a decade. They had to live somewhere, and many could not afford to settle in -- or did not want to drive for hours to -- suburbs way out in the desert or on the far side of the mountains.

So sprawl sputtered to an unplanned and unheralded halt. Los Angeles began "densifying dramatically," even at its fringe, according to an analysis of federal population numbers by the Brookings Institution's Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy.

From 1982 to 1997, as part of a uniquely L.A. phenomenon called "dense sprawl," an average of nine people occupied every acre of newly urbanized land in metropolitan Los Angeles, the Brookings study found. That is nine times the average in Nashville during those years, four times that of Atlanta and three times that of New York.

During these years, both the Washington and Los Angeles areas gained population at a brisk 30 percent clip. But Washington's growth gobbled up rural land at about twice the pace of Los Angeles', the Brookings study found. As a result, Washington had a 12 percent decline in overall density, compared with a 3 percent gain in Los Angeles.

Planned Communities

To understand how cheek-by-jowl western living can seem both gracious and roomy, it is instructive to look in on Susan DeSantis. She lives in a three-bedroom townhouse perched on a ridge of the San Joaquin Hills near the Pacific.

The home shares walls on two sides with neighbors. Yet from its soaring living room, neighbors seem not to exist, hidden behind landscaping that is tended daily by gardeners. From large windows and from the patio, the eye is drawn to the sky, the distant hills and Newport Bay.

"There is light and there is openness," said DeSantis, 55, a consultant in urban planning and a former director of housing for the state of California. "With housing in pods like this, you can get angles for views and privacy. It is the density that allows these design features. I can see my neighbors, if they are out on their patio, but it is very rare."

DeSantis lives in Newport Coast, a gated, master-planned development in Orange County, the nation's most densely populated suburban county. Most of the housing in Newport Coast has been built at a density of about seven units per acre. That leaves nearly 80 percent of the development's 9,493 acres as open space -- covered by chaparral, threaded with footpaths and overlooking the sea.

The master plan controls life in Newport Coast with a fussy rigor. It bans mortuaries, union halls and sanitariums for the mentally ill.
It permits gazebos, tennis courts and therapy baths. An "opaque screen" must shield all parked cars from arterial highways. "All landscaping shall be maintained in a neat, clean and healthy condition," by order of the master plan.

What it lacks in flexibility, Newport Coast makes up for in convenience. A six-lane road feeds cars in and out of the development so efficiently, DeSantis said, that in the past nine years she has never seen it clogged with traffic. The road connects to a nearby toll highway, part of a regional system of toll roads that cushions many Orange County commuters from the traffic congestion that torments much of the region.

By car, DeSantis is five minutes from the ocean, 10 minutes from high-end shopping and 15 minutes from John Wayne Airport.
She can also take commuter rail -- a station is about 15 minutes away -- to downtown Los Angeles or San Diego. Distances here are measured by time in a car. DeSantis said she has never once walked to a local grocery store, although the nearest one is 10 minutes away on foot.

Newport Coast is the final oceanfront piece in the largest private master-planned development in the United States. Begun
in the early 1960s by the Irvine Co., it is eight times the size of Manhattan and covers a fifth of Orange County.

"The Irvine Company persuaded a fairly conservative, mostly Republican market to buy a lot of attached housing by creating a product that was predictable and well-built," said Ann Forsyth,
a professor of urban design at the University of Minnesota and author of "Reforming Suburbia," a study of large planned communities. "But none of it is cheap."

Indeed, housing across Orange County is among the most unaffordable in the country. Just one out of 10 households earns the $165,000 a year needed to buy a median-priced house, which cost $702,000 in June, according to the California Association of Realtors. DeSantis bought her townhouse for $385,000 in 1996. Since then, she says, it has at least doubled in value. If she were buying now, she said, she could not afford Newport Coast.

Infill With a View

Land for new development in the Los Angeles area is all but unavailable -- at any price. Builders, though, have found a way to squeeze new housing into the old urban footprint. It is called "infill" and is widely viewed as the final frontier of home development in Southern California and across the urban West.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Graphic - Packed In:
Ten of the 15 most densely populated urban areas are located in the West.

[See the full article for more, including some pretty good photographs]