The Eternally Sprawling City, Cont'd
As expected, some readers had trouble believing the statement below that "the densest metropolis in America is Los Angeles." Guillaume Lessard's reaction was typical:
By what measure such a result be obtained? It may be possible to find a certain way to make it beat NYC, but that's because NYC ends fairly suddenly, and LA hardly does. If you look at strict city limits, then LA is 3 times as sparse as NYC. If you look at the county level, then the whole of LA County (a very large county) is only 20% more populated than NYC (a land area 12 times smaller). The metropolitan area of LA is less populated than the metropolitan area of NYC, and which area is larger? Well, LA, of course. At first blush, the only way I can see to make the above statement be true is to exclude NYC from the USA. The number mentioned in the article you cite matches the data I can find (~7600 per square mile); it's just that the number I can find for the density of NYC is ~26000 per square mile.
As a social, economic, and cultural unit, New York does not "end suddenly." To the contrary, the local area stretches well into New Jersey and Connecticut. Yes, those places are psychologically and politically different from NYC proper (and even more different from Manhattan), but Manhattan Beach and Pasadena aren't part of L.A., either. And the San Fernando Valley, while politically part of the city, has long been psychologically separate; even the mailing addresses say Tarzana or Van Nuys, not Los Angeles.
In response to my query about the numbers, Bob Bruegmann, author of Sprawl: A Compact History
The only good measure of urban densities is the census bureau's "urbanized areas." These include central cities and all of the adjacent land over 1000 people per square mile (which is roughly the limit of the regularly developed suburbs and the exurbs and rural areas beyond). Using this measure the LA urbanized area had a density of over 7,000 people per square mile in 2000 making it at least the densest large urbanized area in the US. In fact, I think it is the densest urbanized area in North America (Toronto comes in at 6800 according to the Canadian census which has a similar definition of urbanized area) but I would want to do some further checking before swearing to that latter.
The problem with every other measure is that it relies on artificial political boundaries. So cities that happen to have large boundaries will appear to be very lightly populated and cities whose boundaries are tightly drawn can appear to have very high densities when, in fact, these figures have very little relationship to the actual densities at the center, at the edge or at any other given point. The same is true for "metropolitan areas" which are based on the arbitrarily drawn county lines. These are particularly useless in California where a county like San Bernardino or Riverside is counted as "urban" by the census because a little piece of it is urbanized whereas the vast majority of the county, stretching all the way to the Nevada border, is almost unpopulated desert.
There is an extremely useful compilation of statistics for urbanized areas and their densities on Wendell Cox's demographia.com.
Most of the problems people attribute to L.A.'s sprawl--notably traffic and long travel times--are actually caused by its density. The same is true in New York, however defined. Forget driving to New Jersey or Connecticut. It can take 45 minutes to travel the roughly five miles from the Upper West Side to Greenwich Village, even if you take the subway. When you pack a lot of people close together, the place tends to get crowded. That's great for culture and commerce, but it ratchets up social stress and makes getting places harder.