Greater Los Angeles

• 1. Introduction

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  Greater Los Angeles stretches across nearly 34,000 square miles of Southern California, yet only 2,281 square miles of that is continuous city. The rest is mostly mountain and desert. In 2023 the U.S. Census Bureau estimated its population at more than 18.3 million, behind only New York among American metropolitan areas. Those figures place it among the largest megacities in the world. They also raise awkward questions. Where does a region like this actually begin and end? Why does a place famous for sprawl turn out to be packed more tightly than its rivals? And who lives there, when so many residents do not identify with the region as a whole?

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• 2. Counting the Counties

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  Five counties make up Greater Los Angeles. Ventura County lies at the western edge, San Bernardino and Riverside counties mark the east, and Orange County sits to the southeast of Los Angeles County at the center. The Census Bureau draws this wider region from commuting patterns and calls it the Los Angeles-Long Beach Combined Statistical Area. By land area, it is the largest metropolitan region in the United States.

  Three contiguous urban areas sit inside that boundary. The Inland Empire covers Riverside and San Bernardino counties. The Ventura and Oxnard area covers Ventura County. The Los Angeles metropolitan area, often shortened to Metro LA, covers Los Angeles and Orange counties and held about 13 million people in the 2020 census. That makes it the fourth largest metropolitan area in the Western Hemisphere.

  San Diego-Tijuana touches the region at San Clemente and Temecula, yet it is left out. Camp Pendleton interrupts the development between them, so the two urban areas are not contiguous. Both still belong to a Southern California megalopolis that extends across the border into Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico.

  Inside Los Angeles County, the borders get stranger. It is the most populous county in the United States and holds over a quarter of all California residents. The city of Los Angeles grew by annexing smaller towns, so Beverly Hills is almost completely surrounded by it. Santa Monica and Beverly Hills count as the Westside, while Hawthorne and Inglewood are linked with South L.A. Most of the county's land is unincorporated, and the Santa Monica Mountains, the San Gabriel Mountains and the Mojave Desert block much development there. Palmdale and Lancaster show how building has filled in along the fringes instead.

  No official map names the pieces. The Los Angeles Times divides the area into more than a dozen regions, from the Antelope Valley and the Eastside to the Verdugos and the Westside. Downtown Los Angeles is roughly enclosed by three freeways and a river: the Harbor Freeway to the west, the Santa Ana Freeway to the north, the Los Angeles River to the east and the Santa Monica Freeway to the south. The San Fernando Valley, known simply as The Valley, is a basin ringed by mountains north-northwest of downtown.

  South Orange County residents often try to be identified apart from Los Angeles, even though both counties share one metropolitan area. Commuting shows the imbalance. Only 1.63 percent of Los Angeles residents commute to Orange County for work, while more than 6 percent of Orange County commuters head to Los Angeles. Residents of Riverside and San Bernardino counties, meanwhile, often make a longer commute in the opposite direction, toward Los Angeles and Orange counties.

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• 3. A City Without a Center

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  In 2000, the Los Angeles-Orange County urbanized area was the most densely populated in the United States, at 7,068 people per square mile. The New York-Newark urbanized area recorded 5,309. That result cuts against the region's reputation for sprawl, which comes from history. Los Angeles became the poster child of big cities that grew up with suburban-style development, long before such development appeared across the country.

  The city of Los Angeles proper is thinner on the ground, at roughly 8,300 people per square mile. New York City has about 27,500, San Francisco 17,000, Boston 13,300 and Chicago 11,800. Some neighborhoods within five miles of downtown exceed 20,000 people per square mile. The region's overall density comes from its many dense suburbs and satellite cities. Small lots and low-rise buildings are the norm, and zoning rules keep the buildings low.

  By 1920, Los Angeles had risen from relative obscurity to become the tenth-largest city in the country. It grew at the moment suburban patterns first became possible. During the 1920s it was already the first large American city to build major clusters of jobs, shopping and culture outside its traditional downtown, in places such as Mid-Wilshire, Miracle Mile and Hollywood. Greater Los Angeles therefore became the earliest large American metropolitan area with a decentralized structure. Its main commercial, financial and cultural institutions are scattered instead of gathered in one central district.

  Downtown Los Angeles remains the historical business district, but most commercial activity sits elsewhere. The edge cities include Century City, Wilshire Boulevard in Koreatown, Hollywood, the Sunset Strip in West Hollywood, Universal City, the Warner Center in Woodland Hills, and Sherman Oaks and Encino. Employment follows the same pattern, so many people commute in all directions, with a large portion heading to municipalities outside the city of Los Angeles.

  Since the COVID-19 pandemic, downtown has suffered very high commercial vacancy rates, along with blight, homelessness, drug use and crime. Entire skyscrapers were reportedly sold for less than large estates in Bel Air. Smaller downtowns elsewhere, in Long Beach, Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank, Santa Ana, Anaheim, Riverside, San Bernardino, Irvine and Ontario, carry weight of their own.

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• 4. Rails and Freeways

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  The Pacific Electric Railway, nicknamed the Red Cars, was the largest electric railway system in the world during the 1920s. It was privately owned and ran electric streetcars, interurban cars and buses. Organized around the centers of Los Angeles and San Bernardino, it connected cities in Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. In the early twentieth century it spread population outward, leaving a network of fairly dense but separate cities linked by rail. Automobiles later filled the gaps between those towns with lower-density settlements.

  The narrow-gauge Los Angeles Railway, called the Yellow Car system or LARy, shared dual-gauge track with the Red Cars. The shared track ran on Main Street in downtown, directly in front of the 6th and Main terminal. It also ran on 4th Street and along Hawthorne Boulevard, south toward Hawthorne, Gardena and Torrance.

  Freeway construction began in the 1950s, and growth pushed ever outward from then on. The region is a junction for interstates arriving from the north, east and south. It also holds California's three principal north-south highways: Interstate 5, U.S. Route 101 and State Route 1. Interstate 15 shows how quickly the city ends. After Barstow it crosses desolate desert toward Las Vegas, and Baker is the only significant outpost along the way.

  The Los Angeles Metro Rail system totals 115.5 miles of track and 101 stations, with over 360,000 daily weekday boardings. Four of its lines are light rail and two are rapid transit. The tunnels were built to withstand earthquakes of up to magnitude 7.5, because a major fault area lies close by. In the third quarter of 2012, the light rail lines were the second busiest in the country after Boston, with 200,300 average weekday boardings. By 2019 they were the most heavily ridden light rail system in the United States.

  Metrolink operates 67 stations on eight lines, and most of them radiate from Los Angeles Union Station. Amtrak runs the Pacific Surfliner to San Diego, Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo. Its long-distance Coast Starlight continues to the San Francisco Bay Area, Portland and Seattle. The whole region has only one suspension bridge, the Vincent Thomas Bridge in San Pedro, and one cable-stayed bridge, the Long Beach International Gateway.

  Los Angeles International Airport, known as LAX, sits 16 miles from downtown. It is the only airport that serves as a hub for all three American legacy airlines: American, Delta and United.

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• 5. Growth on the Fringe

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  Orange County began as farmland, growing citrus and avocados and pumping oil. In the 1950s, Interstate 5, the Santa Ana Freeway, tied it to Los Angeles and turned it into a bedroom community. By the 1970s it had become an economic center in its own right, with tourism and electronics among its industries. Disneyland Resort and Knott's Berry Farm draw visitors, and the television show The O.C. showcased its wealthier areas. None of its original downtowns serves as the county's core.

  Residents often split the county figuratively into North County and South County. North County, including Anaheim, Fullerton and Santa Ana, is older, more ethnically diverse and more densely built. South County, with Laguna Beach, Mission Viejo, Newport Beach and San Clemente, is more residential, affluent and recently developed. Irvine is the exception, as an ethnically diverse center of employment. Some people now use the El Toro Y interchange as the dividing line instead.

  The Inland Empire was once a center of citrus production and became an important industrial area by the early twentieth century. Route 66, and later Interstate 10, made it a key transportation hub. After World War II, land developers bulldozed acres of farmland to build suburbs for the expanding region. Today it holds the largest concentration of warehousing and intermodal facilities in the world. Riverside, San Bernardino and Ontario are its major cities, and Riverside and San Bernardino counties absorbed most of the region's population increase between 2000 and 2006.

  The edge of the region is hard to pin down. California's own definition stops short of the eastern desert, leaving out Adelanto, Apple Valley, Victorville, Anza, Idyllwild and Lucerne Valley. The census definition runs further and includes the entirety of both counties, among them Joshua Tree National Park, the Mojave National Preserve and the border towns of Needles and Blythe. Temecula, in the southwest, is more economically tied to San Diego County. Meanwhile, development is spreading past the San Bernardino and San Jacinto Mountains, and the Coachella Valley, Barstow and the Morongo Basin may now count as part of the region.

  Central and southern Ventura County were small coastal towns until U.S. Route 101 was expanded and drew commuters from the San Fernando Valley. In the 1960s, the highway became a full freeway. Many working-class white families left East and Central Los Angeles for the Conejo Valley during the 1960s and 1970s. Open-space advocates still battle those who say business development is needed. In 2003, median home prices in the Conejo Valley ranged from $700,000 to $2.2 million. The northern part of the county remains largely undeveloped, mostly within the Los Padres National Forest.

  Droughts and wildfires have grown more frequent in the twenty-first century, and the region's water security has become a development issue.

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• 6. Who Lives Here

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  The 2020 census counted 18,644,680 people in Greater Los Angeles. Of those, 46.3 percent were Hispanic of any race, about 8,630,090 residents, and the largest share traced their ancestry to Mexico. Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Honduran, Peruvian, Puerto Rican, Colombian and Cuban communities are also important. About 5.5 million residents were born abroad, and most immigrants came from Latin America and Asia.

  Non-Hispanic Asian residents make up 13.8 percent of the population. Chinese ancestry is the largest group at roughly 6.1 percent, followed by Filipino at about 3.1 percent, Vietnamese at 2.0 percent and Korean at 1.9 percent. Non-Hispanic Black residents account for 6.1 percent. Among Middle Eastern ancestries, Jewish residents total about 600,000, or 3.2 percent, and Armenian residents number about 1.2 percent.

  Ethnic enclaves give the region its polyglot character. They include Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Thai Town, Little Armenia, Little Ethiopia, Little Bangladesh, Historic Filipinotown, Little Saigon and Tehrangeles in West Los Angeles. Hollywood has a Little Moscow, and San Pedro has Croatian Place and Via Italia. The Chinese enclaves of the San Gabriel Valley and several separate Koreatowns add to the list.

  Politics in the region are divided. Los Angeles County is a Democratic stronghold today, yet it voted twice each for Richard Nixon, in 1968 and 1972, and for Ronald Reagan, in 1980 and 1984. Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties have historically leaned Republican but have begun shifting leftward. Ventura County is politically divided.

  A 1966 article in Time predicted that Greater Los Angeles would pass New York in population by 1975. Its definition of the region wrongly included San Diego, which is a separate metropolitan area. A 1989 article in The New York Times predicted the crossover by 2010, with Los Angeles reaching 18.3 million. New York had already passed that number by half a million people in 2007. By 2009 the New York area held 22.2 million people to Greater Los Angeles's 18.7 million, a gap of about 3.56 million. Percentage growth, however, has been higher in Greater Los Angeles over recent decades.

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• 7. Ports and Industry

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  Greater Los Angeles produced a $1.528 trillion economy in 2022, counting the whole combined statistical area. Only Greater Tokyo and the New York area are larger. Hollywood, in the city of Los Angeles, is known as the movie capital of the United States. The region's economy leans heavily on television, motion pictures, interactive games and recorded music. Paramount Pictures, 20th Century Studios and Universal Studios all sit in the area, and The Walt Disney Company is headquartered in nearby Burbank.

  The Port of Los Angeles occupies 7,500 acres of land and water along 43 miles of waterfront. It is the busiest container port in the United States and the eighth busiest in the world. Next door, the Port of Long Beach covers 3,200 acres with 25 miles of waterfront and is the second busiest in the country. Long Beach alone handles more than $100 billion worth of goods a year and supports more than 316,000 jobs in Southern California. In 2004, the top trading partners at the Los Angeles port were China at $68.8 billion and Japan at $24.1 billion.

  The metropolitan area ranked third among American exporters in 2014, with shipments totaling $75.5 billion. That was 40.8 percent of California's merchandise exports, led by computer and electronic products at $18.6 billion and transportation equipment at $15.3 billion. Mitsubishi, Hyundai, Honda and Mazda keep their U.S. headquarters in the area, which makes it a hotspot for Asian car manufacturers. Nissan and Toyota used to be headquartered there too, but Nissan moved to Tennessee and Toyota to Texas.

  Occidental Petroleum left Los Angeles for Houston in 2014. The city once hosted five Fortune 500 companies, including Health Net, Reliance Steel and Aluminum, AECOM and CB Richard Ellis. As of 2024, all five have moved elsewhere. Coastal land values and the rents they command contribute heavily to the region's output, yet there are worries that those high values feed a long-term housing affordability problem and could threaten future growth.

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• 8. Games and Spectacles

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  The Rose Parade, the Laguna Beach Pageant of the Masters and the Newport Beach Christmas boat parade fill the region's calendar. So do the Vans U.S. Open of Surfing, the Sawdust Art Festival and the 626 Night Market. The Academy Awards, Grammy Awards, Primetime Emmy Awards, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards are all held in the region. In 1999, a total of 23.8 million visitors stayed at least one night.

  All sports combined, college and professional, the Los Angeles area holds more national championships than any other city in the United States. It has over four times as many as the entire state of Texas and just over twice as many as New York City. Professional teams include the Dodgers at Dodger Stadium, the Angels at Angel Stadium, the Lakers and Clippers in basketball, and the Kings and Anaheim Ducks in hockey. UCLA and USC field the region's two largest Division I football programs.

  After the 1994 season, the Los Angeles Rams left for St. Louis, and the Los Angeles Raiders returned to their original home of Oakland. Both moves came down to the lack of an up-to-date NFL stadium, and the region went more than twenty years without a team. Stadium proposals came and went between 1995 and 2016. After the 2015 season, the Raiders, Rams and Chargers all filed plans to relocate to Los Angeles. On the 12th of January 2016, the Rams were approved to move. On the 12th of January 2017, the Chargers announced they would join them. Both teams now share SoFi Stadium in Inglewood.

  Los Angeles is the only American city to have hosted the Summer Olympics twice, in 1932 and in 1984. Lake Placid hosted the Winter Games twice, in 1932 and 1980. The city is scheduled to host the 2028 Summer Olympics, which will make it the third city to host three Olympic Games, after London and Paris.

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