Los Angeles Neighborhoods

If you live in or have visited the Los Angeles area, you may know that Los Angeles is a big place, and sometimes people like to specify neighborhoods in Los Angeles where they live, work, or play. Did you know that if you have an address, you can look up the neighborhood in which it resides? The LA Times Neighborhood Boundaries website allows you to either search for an address or zoom/pan to a location. Mousing over the location reveals the neighborhood for that location.

You may have also noticed that sometimes there are areas adjacent to Los Angeles neighborhoods that are actually cities. For example, Hollywood is a neighborhood in Los Angeles, but West Hollywood is an incorporated city within Los Angeles, immediately west of Hollywood as the city name implies. Similarly Beverly Hills is a city entirely contained within the city of Los Angeles, but immediately east of Beverly Hills is the neighborhood of Beverly Grove which does not have a city designation.

The difference between a neighborhood and a city is that a city is an incorporated municipality. That means a city is legally created under state law, has its own local government, can pass its own laws, and has its own official United States Postal Service (USPS) city name. That being said, USPS does generally recognize neighborhoods as aliases for the official city names. For example, I used to live in the Hollywood neighborhood. Although the proper USPS city designation is Los Angeles, mail that was sent to me using “Hollywood” as the city name would still reach my mailbox—probably aided by the use of the proper zip code.