Watch Los Angeles get built, one building at a time (1880–2026)
Parcelscope's interactive map visualizes every building in Los Angeles, with each structure colored by the decade it was built. Users can pan, tilt, and zoom to watch the city fill in from 1880 to today, exploring areas like Downtown, the Wilshire corridor, Century City, Venice, and the Valley. The map uses LARIAC 2020 building outlines and LA County Assessor roll data, with heights exaggerated when zoomed out.
Watch the city fill in from 1880 to today.
- epistasis
It's amazing how little has changed in recent years in LA. The massive downzoning of the 1980s had its effect: prevent efficient land use, and channel money into the hands of landlords and homeowners from all newcomers.
LA is a ridiculously unaffordable place to live, not because it's nice, but because of an artificial shortage of built space, due to a monopoly on the permission to build.
- kristopolous
This is more like the construction date of buildings that have survived. Some early neighborhoods (like palms) have been completely replaced building by building so they really appear as dark here when they weren't. It had a downtown in the 1890s but all those buildings are gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palms,_Los_Angeles#/media/File...
it's basically this data: https://portal.assessor.lacounty.gov/ through this portal https://data.lacity.org/
- incanus77
As others have pointed out, this is more about the age of existing buildings than the construction of the city, but it's pretty neat.
About ten years ago when we were working on Mapbox GL, I did a mobile-native viz like this to show off the vector tile tech. The blog post is still up (thankfully) which has a good bit of info on the data processing pipeline as well, ranging from Shapefile to GeoJSON to vector tiles on the backend to Swift on the frontend:
https://medium.com/mapbox/visualizing-an-entire-citys-buildi...
I always loved mirroring a phone to a large TV and showing this off at 60FPS. It was such fun tech to work on.
- wathef
Los Angeles had the largest public transportation network in the United States until we paved over it[1]. We had over 1,300 miles! You could've gone from Huntington Beach to Downtown and all the way up to Burbank. You can see many of the maps of Los Angeles at the public library[2]. I don't live there anymore, love that place though.
[1] - https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/from-rail-to-roads-an...
[2] - https://www.lapl.org/research-guides/maps/maps-los-angeles
- ZeWaka
Bit misleading since it only shows properties still standing, seemingly. So the older periods look extremely empty.
- neilv
A complementary view of one point in time is the LA Noire video game's attempt to recreate a (condensed and simplified) 1940s LA environment, with 3D architecture, cars, and ongoing expansion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGPh2AcmG2A
The storytelling atmosphere is somber film-noire-ish, but there's simultaneously a feeling of national prosperity and potential for many (with notable unjust exceptions), like I think fewer people feel in more recent decades.
Would also be interesting to try to convey that kind of change over time, in an immersive way.
- socalgal2
Interesting visualization. I feel like it's misleading though because the presentation shows only Los Angeles City boundaries, not the area in general. LA City has that strange vertical shaft down the the port so the city could keep the taxes from the port, but the visualization shows the rest of the area as empty, which of course it is not. It also excludes Orange County, Riverside County, and the whole area north, the San Fernando Valley, and those all arguably are just as important to the story. In the end, I think the visualization ends up being a net negative in it's current form since it's very misleading
- ericzawo
Having moved to LA this february, the sprawl is really something I had no true appreciation for until I moved here for real, and tried to run errands across town. It's a gigantic, beautiful, complicated place.