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

rustywasm

I joined the county's 2020 lidar building footprints (LARIAC) to the assessor roll, so every one of the 1,129,558 buildings inside the City of LA has a footprint, a height, and a year built for 98% of them. (All public info, but kind of a pain to grab.) The page extrudes them in 3D and plays the city filling in from 1880 to now. Colors are by decade, or switch to height and fly to downtown. Hover any building for its address, year, height, and footprint. Some things I found: the 1950s, not the 1920s, is the biggest decade still standing; the Valley visibly snaps into existence after the war; and downtown's 150-foot height limit shows up as a hard ceiling until 1957. Zoomed out it draws a 100 m grid because a citywide view can't carry a million polygons, and heights are exaggerated below street level zoom (the corner label says by how much). Stack: DuckDB spatial for the join, tippecanoe to PMTiles, MapLibre fill-extrusion, all static files on R2 with no server. City of LA only, since the parcel polygons I pulled stop at the city line. Happy to answer questions about the data or the rendering. [Just a fun project, no commercial relevance.]

enjoyyourlife

Nice! Would be better if it shows the difference between the ocean and other land

tcdent

I did a project recently where I extracted every Los Angeles building permit record for a property and was able to look at the evolution of its infrastructure and tenancy over time by embedding the permit documents into an image-based embedding model. Could be an interesting way to incorporate more granularity of the history of properties over time, although it dramatically increases the scope of data processed.

ZeWaka

Bit misleading since it only shows properties still standing, seemingly. So the older periods look extremely empty.

djmips

I noticed most of the tall buildings are sixties to eighties. Some more info about that here. https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/a-brief-history-of-l...

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.

ck2

wild to see that, reminds me vaguely of the amazing ariel photos by kite of San Francisco after the earthquakes in 1906 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:San_Francisco_in_ruin_edi... early 1900s to early 2000s was a wild and crazy ride for humanity when I was a teenager I used to run early morning before sunrise and I would never see a car, like maybe once per hour but these days it's like rush hour at 5am which is frustrating and annoying and then I realized in perspective that within my own lifetime from teen to 60 the world population has more than DOUBLED, so what I am experiencing makes some sense in that regard (plus technology advancement)

toyg

They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.

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.

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.

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/

valiant-comma

Very cool, but I think it'd be even better if the new buildings popped up rather than faded in.

kevo1ution

SF version would be quite boring

CorvusCrypto

Wow this is inspiring. I would love to see a very similar visualization for Stockholm, Sweden. I think there is a beauty in seeing a summarized history of expansion, and in reality I can't help but think this is a very fast population boom. One I am sure most metro areas would struggle with. Makes a lot of criticism of LA planning in hindsight feel very unfair.

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

andai

This is super cool. Seems to be quite laggy for me though, when the timeline reached 2026 and stopped, buildings still kept popping in for the next 30 seconds.

hughw

Now do Austin?

mark242

The obvious next step here is to do LA county, since so much sits outside the city limits.

tjwebbnorfolk

hey I feel like we should work together on something. I maintain https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/landrecordsus/us-parcel-laye... and https://landstats.com .

quaddoggy

Is this actually representing homeless encampments?