Between 2005 and 2011, ninety percent of Los Angeles' growth was in low-car households, defined as households with fewer vehicles than working adults*. You read that right: Los Angeles, low-car. Even more incredibly, of the 20,000 households the city added over this six-year period, over 8,000 of them own zero cars. That's over forty percent.
This is amazing news for the city, and a testament to its efforts to provide more mobility options for its residents. Fewer people are dependent on expensive vehicles and gasoline to get around, which means they've got more money to spend locally. It also means a greater number of people are getting around in healthier ways, like walking, biking, and transit, and fewer cars polluting the city and adding to congestion.
With the right policies in place, we can reap even greater benefits. Right now much of the city still requires tons of parking for new apartments, often far more than developers think is necessary. And you can see why—when nearly half of the city's new residents don't even own cars, building a bunch of super-expensive parking for them doesn't make a lot of sense. Relaxing parking mandates would be nice for apartment-builders, but it'd really be nice for the people who live in them: as Michael Manville of UCLA found a while back, when you relax parking requirements you get more housing, and at lower prices. It's also good for business, as Santa Monica found recently.
Keep it up, LA!
(Hat tip to Michael Andersen at BikePortland, who showed me how to find this demographic data and whose article inspired me to write one for Los Angeles. And whose design for the above chart I blatantly stole.)
*This is a conservative estimate. The numbers exclude households with adults who aren't working and don't own cars (presumably including the elderly and retired), as well as households with one working adult and one car, even though many of these households are likely to be couples with one working parent and one stay-at-home parent. Unfortunately, the survey data didn't differentiate between these households and those with only one adult. Because of this, the actual share of growth attributable to low-car households is almost certainly greater than 90%.