10 ms·

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

342 points by rustywasm 11d ago

rustywasm 11d ago
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.]
- drivers99 11d ago
  Didn't realize you could zoom in until I saw this. It looks really cool when you zoom in and it replaces the boxes with actual building shapes.
- axionbraid 10d ago
  [flagged]
enjoyyourlife 11d ago
Nice! Would be better if it shows the difference between the ocean and other land
- rustywasm 11d ago
  Good idea! Let me work on that...
- suncemoje 11d ago
  Agree, I personally also think dark mode never goes well with a map-based app...
  - slg 11d ago
    Especially with this sort of map regarding this specific city. For example, Beverly Hills is a separate municipality contained entirely within the borders of Los Angeles. It appears here like an empty black space no different from the ocean, lakes, mountains, and parks also scattered around the city. The styling of this map makes it impossible to tell if an area is truly undeveloped and if so, why. Throw in the way there appears to be arbitrary selection criteria for some buildings outside city limits that make them appear as lone buildings in undeveloped space, and I think it adds up to potentially give people a wrong picture of the area.
    - rustywasm 11d ago
      Yes, good point. The LA City data was rich, but the other communities have data in other places. I will see what I can do.
      - slg 11d ago
        Great, I'm sure getting more data for a complete picture of the area is a huge undertaking, but simply switching to the light map that shows the geography more clearly is a big improvement.
losteric 11d ago
[flagged]
- oijkuij 11d ago
  If you want to encourage folks to continue their efforts and really "build something", I think you'd want to ask your questions in a way that shows genuine interest and support, rather than ridiculing and questioning the level of effort involved. I agree, I'd love to learn where the dada was sourced! I'm also curious why it appears to come in waves, as opposed to each building going up independently (as I would have expected it to in reality). Cool idea! I can see my house from here haha.
  - rustywasm 11d ago
    The waves are partly real and partly me. LA genuinely built in bursts. The 1920s and the postwar decade each account for over 230,000 buildings still standing, and the 1930s and 1970s onward are much thinner, so even a perfect per-year animation would surge and pause. But really it's for performance -- I group buildings into 5-year bins and fade each bin in over its span, rather than popping each building at its exact year. A per-year filter on a million polygons re-tessellates every visible tile, which was too slow to animate, whereas fading pre-built layers is reasonably fast. Glad you found your house!
- dvt 11d ago
  > What cool problems did you (not the robot) solve? Building products has nothing to do with technical problems, just the end result. This is in contrast with things like writing a library or coming up with a new algorithm, or doing research, or even writing a technical blog post, etc. > or is it just pretty? People have been sharing "just pretty" things on HN for decades. It might be interesting, thought-provoking, discussion-worthy, or whatever. Even if this wasn't vibe-coded, it wouldn't be some monumental technical achievement. Your point is absolutely moot.
- rustywasm 11d ago
  This started as a data puzzle. There is a lot of public data but it's hosted by for-profit companies and the data models don't seem to be coherent (probably lots of good reasons for the data models being the way they are, so no criticism, and it's wonderful they are public.) So for LA City, they use Socrata (owned by Tyler Technologies -- NYSE: TYL) to host and publish open data. LA City also uses Esri's ArcGIS for geo-based data. So behind the scenes there is my code that builds a parquet database of * MyLA311 service requests * Permits * Construction Enforcement * Crime * Parcels Id with Polygons * Lidar So that part was a typical data-munging exercise, and it was fun & interesting to me to learn how public entities try and deal with IT budget cuts and service the community, etc. (For example, 311 requests for homeless issues are transferred to another department, so they all look they are closed immediately, but I never could find the agency data that ultimately resolved that type of request.) So I have a pile of data that is organized in a way that makes sense to me, but I could not build an interface that I liked. So I asked Claude to create a fly-over visualization to see what it could do with this data, and it blew my mind. I'm a life-long coder and I'm old, so it's an interesting experience to see how good these models and coding harnesses are, and how quickly they are improving. As to what makes this HN worthy? I enjoyed playing with the interface, and there might be more people than just me who love LA (warts and all) and its history and architecture. So it's interesting and I'm not asking for anything in return, so for me that satisfies the "HN Show" criteria. The deeper question for me right now is what does hacking mean when the coding is done by these systems? It's a different kind of hacking, and its makes things possible that impossible before, but it's a million miles away from 6502 assembly.
tcdent 11d ago
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.
- computomatic 11d ago
  Interesting idea. Is there a practical way to obtain those permit records at scale?
  - tcdent 11d ago
    I had an LLM reverse engineer the API protocol of LADBS and extract the content I wanted. Wether that scales from one property to many (rate limits for one) I don't know, but I didn't encounter anything in the thousands I extracted.
ZeWaka 11d ago
Bit misleading since it only shows properties still standing, seemingly. So the older periods look extremely empty.
- sgt 11d ago
  This is one of those 'hey, I can vibe code this in a weekend' projects. Just look at how the AI decided to the entire map in dark mode, making it nearly impossible to tell the ocean and the land apart.
- rustywasm 11d ago
  Yes, great point. What was torn down, burned, destroyed, etc. along the way isn't here. This is the surviving city, not the city as it was.
djmips 11d ago
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-los-angeles-tallest-buildings https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/a-brief-history-of-l...
- rustywasm 11d ago
  Thank you! Great link! And here is one that is just fun to watch because of Huell Howser -- Tallest Building | Visiting with Huell Howser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ziEDhCPjOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ziEDhCPjOQ
- tomjakubowski 11d ago
  Wikipedia has a nice visualization of the history of LA's tallest buildings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Los_Angeles#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_L...
entelechy0 11d ago
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deleted 11d ago
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ericzawo 11d ago
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.
- asdff 11d ago
  The density at least means you don't have to really run across town for much and can stay within a certain radius for most all your needs and wants. I mean look at the density of costcos alone. Many other metros might have 1 or 2 for the entire area. Then again a lot of other metros you basically can drive end to end in 25 miles.
  - oblio 11d ago
    I'm confused. LA doesn't strike me as dense. How dense can you get with huge areas of single family homes?
    - asdff 11d ago
      8200/sqmi on average. Even the single family home areas punch above their weight compared to the rest of the country because lots are mostly only 50ft wide and most all build-able land is put to some sort of use already.
    - ianburrell 11d ago
      LA is the densest major urban area in the country. The MSA isn't dense cause it includes all of Los Angeles County which is half desert and mountains. But the built up area beats Chicago and New York cause it has consistent, medium suburban density, 7400 people per sq mi. The others have dense city, New York City is 29,000 people per sq mi, but the far suburbs drop off.
      - deleted 11d ago
        [deleted]
- rustywasm 11d ago
ck2 11d ago
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_edit2.jpg 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 11d ago
They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.
- lotsofpulp 11d ago
  Is there an alternative if 13 million people want to live somewhere?
  - toyg 11d ago
    Somewhat sadly, the reason a lot of the ancestors of those 13 millions moved there was that they wanted an unpaved paradise. Unfortunately, humans do not know restraint.
- mag7269 11d ago
  Paradise? LA was a big giant horrible underdeveloped wasteland in Spanish/Mexican times which, at the time in 1849, had 1,600 residents. Most of them had a largely pastoral life and life was brutal there. LA under US rule is the prime example of what industrialized people can do to a place that lacked nearly everything of what it is at this moment: a world-class city. Objectively, if it had stayed under Mexican rule, it’d resemble Yuma at best or Tecate at worst. I should know, my family lineage goes back to that era to both sides of the border.
  - thisismyopinion 11d ago
    Funny. It's concrete hell.
  - toyg 11d ago
    One's "underdeveloped wasteland" is someone else's untouched paradise. Particularly someone like Joni Mitchell.
  - Hnrobert42 11d ago
    Was it that a big, giant, horrible wasteland because it was undeveloped? That is, was there something bad about it other than being undeveloped? Personally, I love living in the city AND land in its natural state. Also, GP was quoting a song lyric.
epistasis 11d ago
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.
- kfarr 11d ago
  And don’t forget prop 13, there’s negative incentive for property to change hands and develop.
  - syspec 11d ago
    Do you own your home? Here in Ca? You know that property tax is 1.4ish % and goes up by 2% a year, pretty much no matter what? On a 1.5M house, that's starting at 17K a year and each year it goes up 2%, so it compounds. That's 17k a year Just to stay in your own home. People who don't pay property taxes here in ca, act like prop 13 means zero property taxes
    - dbmikus 11d ago
      That is close to the average rate of inflation, though. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
    - codemac 11d ago
      They go up much more than 2% in literally every other state, California is the cheapest place to own property for >10 years. You can argue against property taxes entirely, but Prop 13 definitely means that families, businesses, and all property owners work very hard to never sell, never reassess, and never change their tax rate.
    - stouset 11d ago
      While I think the goal of Prop 13 is laudable, a few reforms would cut some of the biggest downsides: it should be be for primary residences, where the named owner is the primary resident. This would eliminate the tax break for commercial property, prevent it from being abused for second homes, and avoid the property trust shenanigans that have allowed some properties to change hands without a reset in the taxes paid.
neilv 11d ago
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 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.
- rustywasm 11d ago
  Did not think of that - yes that is a really interesting idea. Totally different way with interacting with data. I'm going to ponder that...
kristopolous 11d ago
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:The_Palms_1893.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palms,_Los_Angeles#/media/File... it's basically this data: https://portal.assessor.lacounty.gov/ https://portal.assessor.lacounty.gov/ through this portal https://data.lacity.org/ https://data.lacity.org/
- rustywasm 11d ago
  Exactly this -- This is more like the construction date of buildings that have survived. Everything demolished, burned, or replaced is invisible. Probably should put that front and center.
- blululu 10d ago
  Yes. The description is quite misleading. The fact that it is simply an overlay of the current map is also misleading. Looking at the west side, it completely skips the canals period of Venice. Marina Del Rey evolved considerably into its current form. Ballona creek was only dammed in the 30s. Etc.
- 3RTB297 10d ago
  Also noticeable as the first buildings show up - each one isolated and miles from anyone else? Generally not how human habitation clusters up, even if it was all farms to start.
  - kristopolous 10d ago
    this is the best resource I know of https://mil.library.ucsb.edu/ap_indexes/FrameFinder/ https://mil.library.ucsb.edu/ap_indexes/FrameFinder/ It genuinely is much more sporadic then you think. 1 or 2 houses, then empty blocks with streets there, then 1 more, then some building ... For a modern version, look up california city - modest suburban homes respectably maintained with cars in the driveway surrounded by endless nothing. I have to presume there's some people that look at this and say "wow, this is perfect".
valiant-comma 11d ago
Very cool, but I think it'd be even better if the new buildings popped up rather than faded in.
kevo1ution 11d ago
SF version would be quite boring
CorvusCrypto 11d ago
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.
- esseph 11d ago
  LA county has about the same population as Sweden.
wathef 11d ago
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-and-back-again-the-rebirth-of-l-a-s-public-transit https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/from-rail-to-roads-an... [2] - https://www.lapl.org/research-guides/maps/maps-los-angeles https://www.lapl.org/research-guides/maps/maps-los-angeles
- rustywasm 11d ago
  My mom (who is 97) has a vivid memory of seeing FDR in 1935 -- the whole extended family took the the Red Car from Compton to downtown to see his motorcade. She remembered the electric trams worked really well, especially for folks without much money.
  - davidw 11d ago
    > worked really well, especially for folks without much money That's probably part of the reason they got rid of them. You still see that argument used against transit: "it will bring _____ to our part of town".
    - khazhoux 11d ago
      The trams went away because of cars and buses, not because of racism.
      - cobbzilla 11d ago
        It can be both. Highways didn’t get built for poor folks, but did get built right through many of their neighborhoods.
    - bean469 10d ago
      The main reason as far as I'm aware was due to intense lobbying from car companies. It makes absolute sense from the perspective of Ford, etc. to have alternative modes of transport be removed from the streets
andai 11d ago
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.
- rustywasm 11d ago
  Yep, that was my misconfiguration of the CloudFlare cache. Hopefully fixed now.
deleted 11d ago
[deleted]
hughw 11d ago
Now do Austin?
mark242 11d ago
The obvious next step here is to do LA county, since so much sits outside the city limits.
- rustywasm 10d ago
  Just added LA County. I spot checked a few places I know, seems to be pretty accurate.
tjwebbnorfolk 11d ago
hey I feel like we should work together on something. I maintain https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/landrecordsus/us-parcel-layer https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/landrecordsus/us-parcel-laye... and https://landstats.com https://landstats.com.
quaddoggy 11d ago
Is this actually representing homeless encampments?
HardCodedBias 11d ago
Well done! What an illustration of the amazing spirit of the founders, followed by the glacial movement as we allowed NIMBYs to take control through more and more laws. Brilliant.
gregjw 11d ago
What is that huge gap near Venice?
- mark242 11d ago
  To the north is Santa Monica, its own city.
socalgal2 11d ago
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
fsckboy 11d ago
the Wilshire Corridor view is completely wrong, it should be the stretch of tall buildings a bit above Century City in the Century City view.
incanus77 11d ago
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-buildings-live-with-runtime-styling-453fe7e39ae6 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.
sevennull 11d ago
Funny, I built the same thing 9 months ago for Denver, CO - nothing too interesting other than 1 subdivision that exploded in growth over 1-2 years in the 70s. A lot of the older areas around Denver built up pretty quickly.
burningChrome 11d ago
Just started reading Shawn Levy's book, "The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont" which relates the history of the hotel, but I found the history of Hollywood and LA fascinating. Its a huge part of the story of the hotel and development of the areas surrounding the hotel.
theycallmeritik 10d ago
it's amazing
rustywasm 10d ago
I added LA County data, and checked it against where I group up and where my mother and father grew up. Seems reasonably accurate so far.
globular-toast 10d ago
Like mould growing in a Petri dish.
andretti1977 10d ago
As an Italian I am always amazed when I remember that cities like LA or San Francisco are just 200yo. Here in Italy (but it’s the same for quite any city in Europe) every city can trace its roots back at least two thousand years.
sshussain270 10d ago
Very cool, what ddi you build this with?
thomasfl 10d ago
This shows not only how highly inefficient the land use is in LA, it also shows when it started happening. Towns that were planned before cars were introduced, have a much more efficient use of land. I.e. less space used for roads, but more greenery and the same amount of people and businesses. Barcelona and Paris was planned and built around 70 years before cars become commonplace. The city of the future is built around peoples quality of life and what is good for the economy, except the car industry. US car industry is slowly dying anyway, so the US should start making the country just as attractive to live in as Europe. Disclaimer: I am the founder of the architectural uprising in Norway.
shevy-java 10d ago
That takes too long!
SachaSOL 10d ago
It's impressing to see how people's expansion so fast
21asdffdsa12 10d ago
Could one- theoretically- after the Big One - rezone a ton of flattened land to mixed use - and have europe style appartment blocks? https://maps.lacity.org/lahub/rest/services/Geotechnical_and_Hydrological_Information/MapServer https://maps.lacity.org/lahub/rest/services/Geotechnical_and... https://public.gis.lacounty.gov/public/rest/services/LACounty_Dynamic/Hazards/MapServer/9 https://public.gis.lacounty.gov/public/rest/services/LACount...
physhster 10d ago
Seems to be blocking users outside of the US, FWIW...
bishopcapintel 10d ago
Most of West Los Angeles was actually wetlands that were dredged to create areas suitable for development. This was a relatively little-known fact that I learned by attending the USC Library Archive Days, usually held in October. Most of what is now Culver City, all the way to the coast was essentially filled with water until it was dredged. We tend to think of LA as some sort of arid desert, yet, at least for the Westside, it was anything but dry land. Also of note, LA actually had a fully functioning subway system up until the late 1920s/early 1930s, very similar to London and NYC, although not quite as large obviously. You can find photos of people standing on the crowded platforms during the Roaring 20s waiting to take the subway into and out of DTLA in the archives. There were also the Red Cars that ran until the late 1950s I believe. They took passengers as far as OC to the south, and out into the SFV to the northeast. So public transportation was abundant in LA even before the Redline and other various MTA rail projects, and long before motor cars became ubiquitous. Look up the history of the Miracle Mile and the tire shops and car lots to gain an understanding of LA's transition to the the automobile in the 1930s. It was a vibrant city long before cars and traffic took over. Charlie Chaplin even had an airfield in Hollywood in the 1920s around what is now Wilshire and Fairfax!
silexia 10d ago
Nothing built lately due to massive overregulation.

342 points by rustywasm 11d ago

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.]

drivers99 11d ago
Didn't realize you could zoom in until I saw this. It looks really cool when you zoom in and it replaces the boxes with actual building shapes.
axionbraid 10d ago
[flagged]

enjoyyourlife 11d ago

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

rustywasm 11d ago
Good idea! Let me work on that...
suncemoje 11d ago
Agree, I personally also think dark mode never goes well with a map-based app...
- slg 11d ago
  Especially with this sort of map regarding this specific city. For example, Beverly Hills is a separate municipality contained entirely within the borders of Los Angeles. It appears here like an empty black space no different from the ocean, lakes, mountains, and parks also scattered around the city. The styling of this map makes it impossible to tell if an area is truly undeveloped and if so, why. Throw in the way there appears to be arbitrary selection criteria for some buildings outside city limits that make them appear as lone buildings in undeveloped space, and I think it adds up to potentially give people a wrong picture of the area.
  - rustywasm 11d ago
    Yes, good point. The LA City data was rich, but the other communities have data in other places. I will see what I can do.
    - slg 11d ago
      Great, I'm sure getting more data for a complete picture of the area is a huge undertaking, but simply switching to the light map that shows the geography more clearly is a big improvement.

losteric 11d ago

[flagged]

oijkuij 11d ago
If you want to encourage folks to continue their efforts and really "build something", I think you'd want to ask your questions in a way that shows genuine interest and support, rather than ridiculing and questioning the level of effort involved. I agree, I'd love to learn where the dada was sourced! I'm also curious why it appears to come in waves, as opposed to each building going up independently (as I would have expected it to in reality). Cool idea! I can see my house from here haha.
- rustywasm 11d ago
  The waves are partly real and partly me. LA genuinely built in bursts. The 1920s and the postwar decade each account for over 230,000 buildings still standing, and the 1930s and 1970s onward are much thinner, so even a perfect per-year animation would surge and pause. But really it's for performance -- I group buildings into 5-year bins and fade each bin in over its span, rather than popping each building at its exact year. A per-year filter on a million polygons re-tessellates every visible tile, which was too slow to animate, whereas fading pre-built layers is reasonably fast. Glad you found your house!
dvt 11d ago
> What cool problems did you (not the robot) solve? Building products has nothing to do with technical problems, just the end result. This is in contrast with things like writing a library or coming up with a new algorithm, or doing research, or even writing a technical blog post, etc. > or is it just pretty? People have been sharing "just pretty" things on HN for decades. It might be interesting, thought-provoking, discussion-worthy, or whatever. Even if this wasn't vibe-coded, it wouldn't be some monumental technical achievement. Your point is absolutely moot.
rustywasm 11d ago
This started as a data puzzle. There is a lot of public data but it's hosted by for-profit companies and the data models don't seem to be coherent (probably lots of good reasons for the data models being the way they are, so no criticism, and it's wonderful they are public.) So for LA City, they use Socrata (owned by Tyler Technologies -- NYSE: TYL) to host and publish open data. LA City also uses Esri's ArcGIS for geo-based data. So behind the scenes there is my code that builds a parquet database of * MyLA311 service requests * Permits * Construction Enforcement * Crime * Parcels Id with Polygons * Lidar So that part was a typical data-munging exercise, and it was fun & interesting to me to learn how public entities try and deal with IT budget cuts and service the community, etc. (For example, 311 requests for homeless issues are transferred to another department, so they all look they are closed immediately, but I never could find the agency data that ultimately resolved that type of request.) So I have a pile of data that is organized in a way that makes sense to me, but I could not build an interface that I liked. So I asked Claude to create a fly-over visualization to see what it could do with this data, and it blew my mind. I'm a life-long coder and I'm old, so it's an interesting experience to see how good these models and coding harnesses are, and how quickly they are improving. As to what makes this HN worthy? I enjoyed playing with the interface, and there might be more people than just me who love LA (warts and all) and its history and architecture. So it's interesting and I'm not asking for anything in return, so for me that satisfies the "HN Show" criteria. The deeper question for me right now is what does hacking mean when the coding is done by these systems? It's a different kind of hacking, and its makes things possible that impossible before, but it's a million miles away from 6502 assembly.

tcdent 11d ago

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.

computomatic 11d ago
Interesting idea. Is there a practical way to obtain those permit records at scale?
- tcdent 11d ago
  I had an LLM reverse engineer the API protocol of LADBS and extract the content I wanted. Wether that scales from one property to many (rate limits for one) I don't know, but I didn't encounter anything in the thousands I extracted.

ZeWaka 11d ago

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

sgt 11d ago
This is one of those 'hey, I can vibe code this in a weekend' projects. Just look at how the AI decided to the entire map in dark mode, making it nearly impossible to tell the ocean and the land apart.
rustywasm 11d ago
Yes, great point. What was torn down, burned, destroyed, etc. along the way isn't here. This is the surviving city, not the city as it was.

djmips 11d ago

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-los-angeles-tallest-buildings https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/artbound/a-brief-history-of-l...

rustywasm 11d ago
Thank you! Great link! And here is one that is just fun to watch because of Huell Howser -- Tallest Building | Visiting with Huell Howser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ziEDhCPjOQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ziEDhCPjOQ
tomjakubowski 11d ago
Wikipedia has a nice visualization of the history of LA's tallest buildings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_Los_Angeles#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tallest_buildings_in_L...

entelechy0 11d ago

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deleted 11d ago

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ericzawo 11d ago

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.

asdff 11d ago
The density at least means you don't have to really run across town for much and can stay within a certain radius for most all your needs and wants. I mean look at the density of costcos alone. Many other metros might have 1 or 2 for the entire area. Then again a lot of other metros you basically can drive end to end in 25 miles.
- oblio 11d ago
  I'm confused. LA doesn't strike me as dense. How dense can you get with huge areas of single family homes?
  - asdff 11d ago
    8200/sqmi on average. Even the single family home areas punch above their weight compared to the rest of the country because lots are mostly only 50ft wide and most all build-able land is put to some sort of use already.
  - ianburrell 11d ago
    LA is the densest major urban area in the country. The MSA isn't dense cause it includes all of Los Angeles County which is half desert and mountains. But the built up area beats Chicago and New York cause it has consistent, medium suburban density, 7400 people per sq mi. The others have dense city, New York City is 29,000 people per sq mi, but the far suburbs drop off.
    - deleted 11d ago
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rustywasm 11d ago

ck2 11d ago

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_edit2.jpg 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 11d ago

They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot.

lotsofpulp 11d ago
Is there an alternative if 13 million people want to live somewhere?
- toyg 11d ago
  Somewhat sadly, the reason a lot of the ancestors of those 13 millions moved there was that they wanted an unpaved paradise. Unfortunately, humans do not know restraint.
mag7269 11d ago
Paradise? LA was a big giant horrible underdeveloped wasteland in Spanish/Mexican times which, at the time in 1849, had 1,600 residents. Most of them had a largely pastoral life and life was brutal there. LA under US rule is the prime example of what industrialized people can do to a place that lacked nearly everything of what it is at this moment: a world-class city. Objectively, if it had stayed under Mexican rule, it’d resemble Yuma at best or Tecate at worst. I should know, my family lineage goes back to that era to both sides of the border.
- thisismyopinion 11d ago
  Funny. It's concrete hell.
- toyg 11d ago
  One's "underdeveloped wasteland" is someone else's untouched paradise. Particularly someone like Joni Mitchell.
- Hnrobert42 11d ago
  Was it that a big, giant, horrible wasteland because it was undeveloped? That is, was there something bad about it other than being undeveloped? Personally, I love living in the city AND land in its natural state. Also, GP was quoting a song lyric.

epistasis 11d ago

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.

kfarr 11d ago
And don’t forget prop 13, there’s negative incentive for property to change hands and develop.
- syspec 11d ago
  Do you own your home? Here in Ca? You know that property tax is 1.4ish % and goes up by 2% a year, pretty much no matter what? On a 1.5M house, that's starting at 17K a year and each year it goes up 2%, so it compounds. That's 17k a year Just to stay in your own home. People who don't pay property taxes here in ca, act like prop 13 means zero property taxes
  - dbmikus 11d ago
    That is close to the average rate of inflation, though. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me.
  - codemac 11d ago
    They go up much more than 2% in literally every other state, California is the cheapest place to own property for >10 years. You can argue against property taxes entirely, but Prop 13 definitely means that families, businesses, and all property owners work very hard to never sell, never reassess, and never change their tax rate.
  - stouset 11d ago
    While I think the goal of Prop 13 is laudable, a few reforms would cut some of the biggest downsides: it should be be for primary residences, where the named owner is the primary resident. This would eliminate the tax break for commercial property, prevent it from being abused for second homes, and avoid the property trust shenanigans that have allowed some properties to change hands without a reset in the taxes paid.

neilv 11d ago

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 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.

rustywasm 11d ago
Did not think of that - yes that is a really interesting idea. Totally different way with interacting with data. I'm going to ponder that...

kristopolous 11d ago

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:The_Palms_1893.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palms,_Los_Angeles#/media/File... it's basically this data: https://portal.assessor.lacounty.gov/ https://portal.assessor.lacounty.gov/ through this portal https://data.lacity.org/ https://data.lacity.org/

rustywasm 11d ago
Exactly this -- This is more like the construction date of buildings that have survived. Everything demolished, burned, or replaced is invisible. Probably should put that front and center.
blululu 10d ago
Yes. The description is quite misleading. The fact that it is simply an overlay of the current map is also misleading. Looking at the west side, it completely skips the canals period of Venice. Marina Del Rey evolved considerably into its current form. Ballona creek was only dammed in the 30s. Etc.
3RTB297 10d ago
Also noticeable as the first buildings show up - each one isolated and miles from anyone else? Generally not how human habitation clusters up, even if it was all farms to start.
- kristopolous 10d ago
  this is the best resource I know of https://mil.library.ucsb.edu/ap_indexes/FrameFinder/ https://mil.library.ucsb.edu/ap_indexes/FrameFinder/ It genuinely is much more sporadic then you think. 1 or 2 houses, then empty blocks with streets there, then 1 more, then some building ... For a modern version, look up california city - modest suburban homes respectably maintained with cars in the driveway surrounded by endless nothing. I have to presume there's some people that look at this and say "wow, this is perfect".

valiant-comma 11d ago

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

kevo1ution 11d ago

SF version would be quite boring

CorvusCrypto 11d ago

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.

esseph 11d ago
LA county has about the same population as Sweden.

wathef 11d ago

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-and-back-again-the-rebirth-of-l-a-s-public-transit https://www.pbssocal.org/shows/lost-la/from-rail-to-roads-an... [2] - https://www.lapl.org/research-guides/maps/maps-los-angeles https://www.lapl.org/research-guides/maps/maps-los-angeles

rustywasm 11d ago
My mom (who is 97) has a vivid memory of seeing FDR in 1935 -- the whole extended family took the the Red Car from Compton to downtown to see his motorcade. She remembered the electric trams worked really well, especially for folks without much money.
- davidw 11d ago
  > worked really well, especially for folks without much money That's probably part of the reason they got rid of them. You still see that argument used against transit: "it will bring _____ to our part of town".
  - khazhoux 11d ago
    The trams went away because of cars and buses, not because of racism.
    - cobbzilla 11d ago
      It can be both. Highways didn’t get built for poor folks, but did get built right through many of their neighborhoods.
  - bean469 10d ago
    The main reason as far as I'm aware was due to intense lobbying from car companies. It makes absolute sense from the perspective of Ford, etc. to have alternative modes of transport be removed from the streets

andai 11d ago

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.

rustywasm 11d ago
Yep, that was my misconfiguration of the CloudFlare cache. Hopefully fixed now.

deleted 11d ago

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hughw 11d ago

Now do Austin?

mark242 11d ago

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

rustywasm 10d ago
Just added LA County. I spot checked a few places I know, seems to be pretty accurate.

tjwebbnorfolk 11d ago

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

quaddoggy 11d ago

Is this actually representing homeless encampments?

HardCodedBias 11d ago

Well done! What an illustration of the amazing spirit of the founders, followed by the glacial movement as we allowed NIMBYs to take control through more and more laws. Brilliant.

gregjw 11d ago

What is that huge gap near Venice?

mark242 11d ago
To the north is Santa Monica, its own city.

socalgal2 11d ago

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

fsckboy 11d ago

the Wilshire Corridor view is completely wrong, it should be the stretch of tall buildings a bit above Century City in the Century City view.

incanus77 11d ago

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-buildings-live-with-runtime-styling-453fe7e39ae6 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.

sevennull 11d ago

Funny, I built the same thing 9 months ago for Denver, CO - nothing too interesting other than 1 subdivision that exploded in growth over 1-2 years in the 70s. A lot of the older areas around Denver built up pretty quickly.

burningChrome 11d ago

Just started reading Shawn Levy's book, "The Castle on Sunset: Life, Death, Love, Art, and Scandal at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont" which relates the history of the hotel, but I found the history of Hollywood and LA fascinating. Its a huge part of the story of the hotel and development of the areas surrounding the hotel.

theycallmeritik 10d ago

it's amazing

rustywasm 10d ago

I added LA County data, and checked it against where I group up and where my mother and father grew up. Seems reasonably accurate so far.

globular-toast 10d ago

Like mould growing in a Petri dish.

andretti1977 10d ago

As an Italian I am always amazed when I remember that cities like LA or San Francisco are just 200yo. Here in Italy (but it’s the same for quite any city in Europe) every city can trace its roots back at least two thousand years.

sshussain270 10d ago

Very cool, what ddi you build this with?

thomasfl 10d ago

This shows not only how highly inefficient the land use is in LA, it also shows when it started happening. Towns that were planned before cars were introduced, have a much more efficient use of land. I.e. less space used for roads, but more greenery and the same amount of people and businesses. Barcelona and Paris was planned and built around 70 years before cars become commonplace. The city of the future is built around peoples quality of life and what is good for the economy, except the car industry. US car industry is slowly dying anyway, so the US should start making the country just as attractive to live in as Europe. Disclaimer: I am the founder of the architectural uprising in Norway.

shevy-java 10d ago

That takes too long!

SachaSOL 10d ago

It's impressing to see how people's expansion so fast

21asdffdsa12 10d ago

Could one- theoretically- after the Big One - rezone a ton of flattened land to mixed use - and have europe style appartment blocks? https://maps.lacity.org/lahub/rest/services/Geotechnical_and_Hydrological_Information/MapServer https://maps.lacity.org/lahub/rest/services/Geotechnical_and... https://public.gis.lacounty.gov/public/rest/services/LACounty_Dynamic/Hazards/MapServer/9 https://public.gis.lacounty.gov/public/rest/services/LACount...

physhster 10d ago

Seems to be blocking users outside of the US, FWIW...

bishopcapintel 10d ago

Most of West Los Angeles was actually wetlands that were dredged to create areas suitable for development. This was a relatively little-known fact that I learned by attending the USC Library Archive Days, usually held in October. Most of what is now Culver City, all the way to the coast was essentially filled with water until it was dredged. We tend to think of LA as some sort of arid desert, yet, at least for the Westside, it was anything but dry land. Also of note, LA actually had a fully functioning subway system up until the late 1920s/early 1930s, very similar to London and NYC, although not quite as large obviously. You can find photos of people standing on the crowded platforms during the Roaring 20s waiting to take the subway into and out of DTLA in the archives. There were also the Red Cars that ran until the late 1950s I believe. They took passengers as far as OC to the south, and out into the SFV to the northeast. So public transportation was abundant in LA even before the Redline and other various MTA rail projects, and long before motor cars became ubiquitous. Look up the history of the Miracle Mile and the tire shops and car lots to gain an understanding of LA's transition to the the automobile in the 1930s. It was a vibrant city long before cars and traffic took over. Charlie Chaplin even had an airfield in Hollywood in the 1920s around what is now Wilshire and Fairfax!

silexia 10d ago

Nothing built lately due to massive overregulation.