Hating "suburbia" is actually a deeply suburban stance. The upper-middle-class, isolationist people who are now crowding into Williamsburg are the same sorts of provincial people that their forebears (the artists who can no longer afford to live there) fled suburbia to escape. That suburbia's biggest haters are (in origin and mindset) quite suburban is actually ironic rather than just sarcastic.
All this said, it's somewhat subjective what is a "suburb" versus what is a legitimate (and possibly charming) small town. And while Los Angeles is a large city, it's sprawling and ugly and has no moral high ground over some town adjacent to Philadelphia or Boston that happens to be "suburban" because it has a different city-name on its postal address.
All of this said, car culture is objectively bad. Suburbia was supposed to make it possible for middle-class people to save instead of throwing their disposable income away for the benefit of urban landlords, but over time the car (through escalating costs and the catastrophic time loss of traffic) became the new landlord. The clearing and leveling of forests to build tasteless, cookie-cutter houses is also objectively bad. The environment doesn't have a vote, but it should, because I'd rather have a healthy environment than 4600 SF of unneeded housing space for everyone. Suburbia gets such a bad rap in the U.S. because it's done wrong, both in terms of aesthetics and in terms of ecological footprint.
I agree broadly, but I feel obliged to stand up and defend Los Angeles here (needless to say, I am biased; I used to live there but do not currently).
If you have lived in a big city but have not lived in Los Angeles, it is not reasonable to use your experience to model Los Angeles. It is much more like a loose federation of nearby townships than it is a city like New York City. This is as much a cause is it is an effect of car culture and freeways; the two feed each other and cannot be meaningfully separated into cause and effect as far as I am concerned.
There are parts of "LA Metro" that I find charming, and parts that I find terrible. But there is nothing that I would call representative of the whole. Downtown vs Santa Monica vs Redondo vs San Fernando vs Eagle Rock vs Alhambra etc. Treating LA as a monolith is not a useful approximation. (to be clear, I spent a substantial amount of time living in major cities across Europe and the US, including London and San Francisco, so I'm speaking with a moderate amount of diverse experience).
> It is much more like a loose federation of nearby townships than it is a city
I'm finding this same pattern in the Bay Area too (moved to Mountain View last spring). Does this match your experience? I've never explored LA.
In any case, the many-small-town structure is kind of disorienting coming from a another city with a central, lively downtown, but I can also sort of see an appeal that the locality has. People who live in e.g. Mountain View or Palo Alto or Redwood City feel like they have a nice, small-town "main street" nearby in a way that most suburbs don't. Done right, small federated towns are not necessarily a bad way to scale. (Putting housing-density issues aside, of course; Mountain View in particular has a really nasty supply-constraint problem now that more and denser apartment buildings would go a long way toward solving.)
That said, there are things that you can't find in your own town, so you rely on the regional federated structure for those things, and then you have transportation issues because (i) it's less efficient to cover the decentralized area with mass transit than to build a spoke-and-hub system around a real downtown, and (ii) regional political coordination to build/improve systems like Caltrain/BART is much harder when you have a distributed governance structure. (Does LA have similar problems with coordinating city governments?)
So I think I prefer the 'single big central lively downtown' model better but both models are interesting, IMHO.
You touch on many things I have thought about for years :)
I think the Mountain View / Palo Alto / Sunnyvale area mirrors the San Gabriel valley structure pretty closely (with Palo Alto ~= Pasadena, Menlo Park+Atherton ~= San Marino, Sunnyvale+Mountain View ~= Glendale+Burbank). So in that sense they are similar in one particular region.
On the other hand, LA downtown is surrounded by confederate townships. San Francisco is in some sense a city on a hill. Similarly, there is nothing like the Venice / Santa Monica / Malibu cluster providing "coastal" political influence to the city. There is no way that, e.g., Pacifica or Half Moon Bay would ever be able to be first class citizens in local politics the way that Venice/Santa Monica/Malibu are in LA politics.
Continuing the contrast, the LA area doesn't really have anything like the East Bay.
I could go on and on, but I will leave it at that for now. I do think that anyone who thinks they have an opinion on LA, but hasn't lived there, should take a moment and think that maybe it really is different from their expectations or previous experience of large cities.
Edit: one could, I suppose, say that Long Beach is, in some sense, analogous to the East Bay. They are parallel in an economic and social class sense, but I still think the East Bay is much more of a cultural component of SFBA than Long Beach is of LA Metro.
I have lived in West LA for a couple of years, but spent most of my time in Australian 'cities' like Canberra and Darwin, but am also familiar with Sydney and Melbourne.
Large suburban cities without freeways suck (poor/incomplete public transport is assumed). Look at a map of Sydney or Melbourne and LA at the same scale. Compare the density of freeways. I really value the convenience that LA's grid of freeways provide. To have a car based suburban city without freeways seems the worst of all choices.
> Hating "suburbia" is actually a deeply suburban stance. The upper-middle-class, isolationist people who are now crowding into Williamsburg are the same sorts of provincial people that their forebears (the artists who can no longer afford to live there) fled suburbia to escape. That suburbia's biggest haters are (in origin and mindset) quite suburban is actually ironic rather than just sarcastic.
It's a false dichotomy. Manhattan is not the only way to build a dense city. It's not the most pleasant way to do so, either, but neither is it even the most unpleasant.
There are ways to build dense cities that people can afford to live in and actually enjoy living in. What there's not a lot of is political will to implement these ways of doing things, because location is assumed to be a zero-sum privilege people should pay for instead of a public good people should share.
> Manhattan is not the only way ... neither is it even the most unpleasant.
> There are ways to build dense cities that people can afford to live in and actually enjoy living in.
This is a subject that deeply interests me. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on what you consider viable alternative models; personally, Manhattan and its satellites seem the closest to a realistic (if obviously flawed) design strategy for achieving livable density.
All this said, it's somewhat subjective what is a "suburb" versus what is a legitimate (and possibly charming) small town. And while Los Angeles is a large city, it's sprawling and ugly and has no moral high ground over some town adjacent to Philadelphia or Boston that happens to be "suburban" because it has a different city-name on its postal address.
All of this said, car culture is objectively bad. Suburbia was supposed to make it possible for middle-class people to save instead of throwing their disposable income away for the benefit of urban landlords, but over time the car (through escalating costs and the catastrophic time loss of traffic) became the new landlord. The clearing and leveling of forests to build tasteless, cookie-cutter houses is also objectively bad. The environment doesn't have a vote, but it should, because I'd rather have a healthy environment than 4600 SF of unneeded housing space for everyone. Suburbia gets such a bad rap in the U.S. because it's done wrong, both in terms of aesthetics and in terms of ecological footprint.