Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)

Visualization & Data

• Project stitches LA County lidar building footprints to assessor data: ~1.1M buildings with footprints, heights, and build years (≈98% coverage).
• Buildings are extruded in 3D and animated chronologically (1880–2026), with color schemes by decade or height.
• Uses DuckDB spatial, tippecanoe → PMTiles, MapLibre fill-extrusion, static hosting on R2; performance tuning includes grid simplification when zoomed out and exaggerated heights when zoomed farther out.
• Users note it looks especially good when zoomed in to actual building shapes; initial lag issues were attributed to cache misconfiguration.

Limitations & Misleading Aspects

• Only existing buildings are shown; demolished, burned, or replaced structures are invisible. Several commenters find this historically misleading and think it should be made explicit.
• Early decades thus appear much emptier than they were; examples include Palms and Venice canals areas that had earlier dense development now gone.
• Initial version focused on LA City boundaries, making neighboring cities (e.g., Santa Monica, Beverly Hills) look like empty voids; later extended to LA County but still misses broader metro context.
• Dark basemap and lack of clear ocean/land differentiation make geography and “why is this area empty?” hard to understand.
• Some specific views (e.g., Wilshire Corridor) are called out as inaccurate.

Related Projects & Possible Extensions

• Suggestions include: adding LA building permit histories, expanding to other cities (Austin, SF, Denver-style), and more immersive, time-specific recreations akin to the LA Noire game.
• Linked resources: assessor and city open data portals, aerial photo archives, transit and tallest-building histories.

Urban Form, Zoning & Housing

• Visualization reinforces perceptions of LA’s vast sprawl and inefficient land use: large areas of single-family homes, wide roads, and parking.
• Debate over density: some argue LA’s built-up area is among the densest in the U.S. due to consistent medium density; others find it intuitively “not dense.”
• Major theme: massive 1980s downzoning (from theoretical capacity ~10M to ~4M residents) and heavy regulation are blamed for:
  • Restricting new construction and “freezing” cities in amber.
  • Pushing growth to far-flung suburbs/“Inland Empire,” increasing traffic, infrastructure costs, and water use.
  • Making LA “ridiculously unaffordable” via artificial scarcity.
• Others note that earlier zoning would have required huge investments in transit and water to be realistic.

Property Tax (Prop 13) Debate

• Extended argument over California’s Prop 13:
  • Critics: creates massive tax disparities between long-term and new owners; discourages sales and redevelopment; entrenches hereditary advantages; locks people into underused land; shifts tax burden to newcomers.
  • Defenders/nuancers: property tax is still substantial; measure originally aimed to protect long-time residents from rapid tax hikes; some propose targeted reforms (primary residence only, exemptions/deferrals for low-income seniors).
  • Discussion of alternatives (deferral until sale, senior exemptions in other states) and whether removing Prop 13 would both re-balance taxes and increase housing-market liquidity.

Transport History

• Reminder that LA once had the largest public transit network in the U.S. (Red Cars, ~1,300 miles of rail) before it was dismantled in favor of cars and buses.
• Some attribute removal to car/bus industry lobbying and class/race fears about “who” transit would bring; others emphasize the general shift to autos.
• Note that rail transit is slowly returning.

Water, Energy & Environment

• Disagreement on whether LA faces a fundamental water shortage versus a political/allocation problem:
  • One view: no real shortage due to nearby ocean; desalination powered by a single nuclear plant could cover all demand.
  • Counter-view: core problem is wasteful agricultural water use (e.g., thirsty crops in deserts), entrenched water rights, and political reluctance to reallocate from powerful farmers; desalination seen as overengineered and slow relative to simple policy changes.
  • Further rebuttal: building anything large (nuclear/desal) is itself hampered by regulatory/bureaucratic “bloat”; shifting rights is also costly and contentious; debate centers on whether redistribution (seen as zero-sum) or new infrastructure (growing the “pie”) is more realistic.
• Some argue downzoning and sprawl are environmental disasters: higher per-capita water and infrastructure use than if LA had densified.

Reactions to LA & Growth

• Many are awed by the sheer scale and rapidity of LA’s expansion; comparisons to mold in a Petri dish and “paradise paved over.”
• Mixed emotional tone:
  • Appreciation for climate, geography, and cultural diversity (including food).
  • Strong criticism of car-centric planning, wide roads, “concrete hell,” and the sense of a “paradise lost.”
  • Reflections on how young LA is compared to European cities, yet how dramatically it transformed in just 150 years.
• Some argue hindsight criticism of LA planning is unfair given the speed and scale of growth; others see obvious missed opportunities to emulate more human-scaled European urban forms.