Los Angeles has the highest population density in the nation:
Yes, that was the word “highest,” not a smudge on your monitor. At 7,068 people per square mile, Los Angeles is considerably denser than New York-Newark, which ranks fourth at 5,309 people per square mile (behind San Francisco-Oakland and San Jose as well as Los Angeles). How could this be?It is true that Los Angeles’s downtown disappoints, especially when compared with such thriving urban cores as Midtown Manhattan, Downtown San Francisco, or Chicago’s Loop. [...] However, despite the fact that Los Angeles’s center is comparatively low-density, its peripheral areas are considerably denser than the suburbs of other cities.
Los Angeles’s homes sit on very small lots, in part due to the difficulty of providing water infrastructure to new developments. (Other southwestern cities share this trait.) Moreover, Los Angeles has a large immigrant population that lives at very high densities. The area also has very few vacant lots.
So if the fundamental characteristic of sprawl is low density, Los Angeles is the least-sprawling city in the nation. (The least dense among the 40 largest metro areas is Atlanta.)
I have to agree with this comment that density figures depend greatly on scale:
Comparing LA density to the entirety of the New York metro area is disingenious. The New York metro has a proper center — NYC — with a density of of 27000/sq mi — and hence proper proper public transport. LA doesn’t. Of course if you include the Hamptons and bucolic Litchfield, Connecticut, into your statistics for New York, you can prove anything.