Most American associate "sprawl" and "LA" together, but I have to say I found the city to be quite densely built. I found the suburbs to be quite dense as well. I'd wager money that most of LA's suburbs are more densely built than a lot of the old urban neighborhoods here in Ohio.
There's not much undeveloped, unused land in LA, or even in its suburbs in the Inland Empire. I would say Rancho is a lot more dense than most suburbs here in Ohio, or even the outer parts of cities here. My uncle lived in a luxury apartment complex, and everything was quite tightly packed together. Townhomes on top of garages. Buildings packed close to other buildings. I live in a more modest apartment complex in Columbus, OH, and it's quite differnt. There's a sprawling gate area at the front. There's lawns and ponds off to either side. There's woods in between apartments. There's multiple ponds. There's big green spaces that don't seem to be doing anything. And there's an enormous amount of surface parking.
The surface parking is what surprised me the most about the LA area. Here in Ohio, the amount of parking they build for strip malls and such is ludicrous. They make gigantic lots that stretch as far as the eye can see. They fill up maybe 20% on a busy day. You can go to the mall the day after Thanksgiving and find parking pretty easily. In contrast, most of the parking lots in Rancho were pretty tiny. If you go to a Target or a fast food restraunt on an off peak hour, you may actually need to drive around a bit to find parking. Speaking of fast food, you don't see as many McDonald's, Wendy's, Subway's, etc. like you do here in Ohio. There's a strong local preference for Sushi and Mexican food throughout LA. I think I saw maybe 2-3 McDonald's the whole time I was there. Here in Ohio, you will see that many McDonald's if you drive about 5 miles. Anyway, the smaller parking lots definitely make things more compact and cut down on the sprawl.
Even rich people's houses in California seem to be quite modest in size. We drove by some luxury developments on the foothills of the mountains. Most houses in the $800,000 range in California appear to be rather compact, boxy structures with the garages up front and tightly integrated into the strucutre. Also, the houses are built on tiny lots and jam packed pretty close together. Here in Ohio, $800,000 houses are rare. Most rich people will spend about $500,000-$600,000 tops on the house, even if they have a lot more dough. And the typical large suburban houses here have seperate appearing units, with the garage often in its own wing. And lots of sprawling lawn space between the houses, as well as woods and ponds in between.
I took the train into the city a number of times and also drove on I-10. In the past I've been all the way down to Mission Viejo, so I've seen a decent bit of LA. This time we also drove to Temecula. At least between San Bernardino and LA, the settlement is non-stop without interruption, and incredibly dense compared to other metros LA gets compared to like Dallas or Detroit. And there doesn't seem to be a square foot of land in LA that's not "doing something". Here in Ohio there's lots of land in suburban and even urban areas that's just empty or wooded or whatever and doesn't seem to be "doing something", if that makes any sense. The one conspicuous exception to this in LA is the mountains, which are relatively or absolutely unpopulated. That probably brings down the density figures for LA artificially.
Hope you enjoyed my comments.
EDIT: The commuter trains in LA are remarkably clean and fast. The subway is better than I thought it would be, though it only goes to a limited number of tourist places. Buses should be avoided in LA entirely. I think the city is definitely best seen by car, but the public transportation is better than what visitors might imagine.>
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