

Photo by Shabdo Photo via LAist Feature Photos pool on Flickr

As the City of Los Angeles looks to the next 20 years of development, it has drafted a set of guidelines for downtown's continued boom. The plan, known as DTLA 2040, expects an additional 125,000 residents to move to the neighborhood by that time—joining the roughly 60,000 that already call the 5.8 square mile area home.

Downtown is by no means L.A.'s most populous neighborhood, or its densest (those twin distinctions go to Koreatown, which packs about 125,000 residents into 2.7 square miles). However, a slew of new construction will be bringing a few thousand new residential units online in the coming years.

Hunter Kerhart, an architecture photographer, has intrepidly compiled a list of units currently under construction.



List compiled by Hunter Kerhart

According to the list, by 2018 the area will see 9,798 new residential and hotel units across 31 new developments. Whether all units will house full-time residents is another story.

Some, including Better Institutions' Shane Phillips, argue that DTLA 2040's prediction is, in fact, selling downtown's growth short.

"I think downtown is different from the rest of Los Angeles, and that if you show us something truly visionary, we're ready to get behind it," Phillips writes. "Maybe I've got my head too high up in the clouds, but I really believe that."

And maybe he's right, and downtown is getting sold short. After all, Los Angeles is expected to become the densest city in America by 2025, unless, of course, that terrible NIMBY ballot measure passes.

