This is an archival story that predates current editorial management.
This archival content was written, edited, and published prior to LAist's acquisition by its current owner, Southern California Public Radio ("SCPR"). Content, such as language choice and subject matter, in archival articles therefore may not align with SCPR's current editorial standards. To learn more about those standards and why we make this distinction, please click here.
Geographically, Los Angeles isn't quite like the other older cities (particularly those east of the Mississippi), and a new program that allows you to transpose our city limits on a map for comparison really hammers the point home. The program MAPfrappe by the self-storage site SpareFoot compares Los Angeles to thirteen other cities plus the Great Lakes and Grand Canyon to boot.
Los Angeles' oddly shaped city limits—which include the Hollywood Hills and the narrow strip of land that leads to San Pedro—easily swallow New York City (then again, even San Diego is bigger than the five boroughs). Much is made of Los Angeles becoming increasingly dense—and it is—but NYC still has more than double the population with a land mass that's about two-thirds the space. San Francisco, Seattle and Boston are dwarfed by Los Angeles, and Chicago is about half our size.
The even more auto-centric Houston sprawls beyond us. And then if you click through to the rest of the map, you can see how we stack up against tiny international cities like Paris and Amsterdam or the massive Shanghai.
