alt Hacker NewsWatch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)
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That takes too long!
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/
This shows not only how highly inefficient the land use is in LA, it also shows when it started happening. Towns that were planned before cars were introduced, have a much more efficient use of land. I.e. less space used for roads, but more greenery and the same amount of people and businesses. Barcelona and Paris was planned and built around 70 years before cars become commonplace. The city of the future is built around peoples quality of life and what is good for the economy, except the car industry. US car industry is slowly dying anyway, so the US should start making the country just as attractive to live in as Europe. Disclaimer: I am the founder of the architectural uprising in Norway.
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
Bit misleading since it only shows properties still standing, seemingly. So the older periods look extremely empty.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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 misleading
As an Italian I am always amazed when I remember that cities like LA or San Francisco are just 200yo. Here in Italy (but it’s the same for quite any city in Europe) every city can trace its roots back at least two thousand years.
Wow this is inspiring. I would love to see a very similar visualization for Stockholm, Sweden. I think there is a beauty in seeing a summarized history of expansion, and in reality I can't help but think this is a very fast population boom. One I am sure most metro areas would struggle with. Makes a lot of criticism of LA planning in hindsight feel very unfair.
Nice! Would be better if it shows the difference between the ocean and other land
Just started reading Shawn Levy's book, "The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont" which relates the history of the hotel, but I found the history of Hollywood and LA fascinating. Its a huge part of the story of the hotel and development of the areas surrounding the hotel.
Very cool, what ddi you build this with?
I added LA County data, and checked it against where I group up and where my mother and father grew up. Seems reasonably accurate so far.
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.
This is super cool. Seems to be quite laggy for me though, when the timeline reached 2026 and stopped, buildings still kept popping in for the next 30 seconds.
The obvious next step here is to do LA county, since so much sits outside the city limits.
Very cool, but I think it'd be even better if the new buildings popped up rather than faded in.
SF version would be quite boring
wild to see that, reminds me vaguely of the amazing ariel photos by kite of San Francisco after the earthquakes in 1906
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francisco_in_ruin_edi...
early 1900s to early 2000s was a wild and crazy ride for humanity
when I was a teenager I used to run early morning before sunrise and I would never see a car, like maybe once per hour
but these days it's like rush hour at 5am which is frustrating and annoying
and then I realized in perspective that within my own lifetime from teen to 60 the world population has more than DOUBLED, so what I am experiencing makes some sense in that regard (plus technology advancement)
Is this actually representing homeless encampments?
Like mould growing in a Petri dish.
it's amazing
Well done! What an illustration of the amazing spirit of the founders, followed by the glacial movement as we allowed NIMBYs to take control through more and more laws.
Brilliant.
the Wilshire Corridor view is completely wrong, it should be the stretch of tall buildings a bit above Century City in the Century City view.
hey I feel like we should work together on something. I maintain https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/landrecordsus/us-parcel-laye... and https://landstats.com.
Now do Austin?
I joined the county's 2020 lidar building footprints (LARIAC) to the assessor roll, so every one of the 1,129,558 buildings inside the City of LA has a footprint, a height, and a year built for 98% of them. (All public info, but kind of a pain to grab.)
The page extrudes them in 3D and plays the city filling in from 1880 to now. Colors are by decade, or switch to height and fly to downtown. Hover any building for its address, year, height, and footprint. Some things I found: the 1950s, not the 1920s, is the biggest decade still standing; the Valley visibly snaps into existence after the war; and downtown's 150-foot height limit shows up as a hard ceiling until 1957. Zoomed out it draws a 100 m grid because a citywide view can't carry a million polygons, and heights are exaggerated below street level zoom (the corner label says by how much).
Stack: DuckDB spatial for the join, tippecanoe to PMTiles, MapLibre fill-extrusion, all static files on R2 with no server. City of LA only, since the parcel polygons I pulled stop at the city line.
Happy to answer questions about the data or the rendering.
[Just a fun project, no commercial relevance.]
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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.