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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

It's giving you the city of Los Angeles there. If you do "greater L.A. area" it gives two numbers, the L.A. Metro area at 4,850 square miles and the wider metro region at 33,954 square miles.

I don't know enough about either region to make a useful comparison, but I think the area for L.A. has to include more than just the city of L.A. proper.

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The figure for the wider metro region probably includes a ton of undeveloped land in the LA mountains all the way out to Palmdale/Lancaster, which will skew things quite a bit since those areas are very low density.

I would definitely include neighboring cities in the LA basin when discussing LA as a whole though. The cities in the SGV, south bay, and gateway cities are very much a part of LA even if they're not within city limits.

I've only lived in Los Angeles for ~6 months, but my understanding of what people accept as the "greater LA area" goes as far east as Covina, includes Santa Monica, down to Long Beach, and up to Santa Clarita. These are all rough estimations, depending on personal preference (which I've exposed here, I suppose), but it gives you a sense of what one might consider in trying to figure out where LA ends, and where the rest of Southern CA begins.

If you include down to Irvine, then what you're describing is the "studio zone" or "thirty mile zone" (TMZ), where standard studio rates apply to film production as set by unions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_zone

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