West Hollywood, CA is an independent city of 1.9 square miles and roughly 36,000 residents wedged between 📝Los Angeles, CA and Beverly Hills, best known for the Sunset Strip and as one of the most prominent LGBTQ communities in the United States.
West Hollywood incorporated on November 29, 1984, after a coalition of gay residents, Russian Jewish immigrants, and seniors organized around the imminent expiration of Los Angeles County's rent-control protections. The new city elected the first city council in the country with an openly gay majority and immediately adopted one of the strongest rent-control ordinances in the nation. The city estimates that about 40 percent of residents identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, and the 5,000 to 6,000 Russian speakers who arrived in two waves, 1978 to 1979 and 1988 to 1992, form the most concentrated Russian-speaking community outside New York.
Two east-west corridors define the city. The Sunset Strip, the 1.7-mile stretch of Sunset Boulevard inside city limits, carries the rock-club and hotel lineage of the Whisky a Go Go, the Chateau Marmont, and the Sunset Tower, along with a canyon of oversized billboards. Santa Monica Boulevard anchors the nightlife, the Troubadour, and the annual Pride celebration, while the Design District along Robertson Boulevard, Melrose Avenue, and Beverly Boulevard clusters showrooms around the Pacific Design Center.
At roughly 18,900 residents per square mile, West Hollywood is among the densest cities in California and, with a Walk Score of 89, the state's most walkable. It borders the Hollywood Hills, Hollywood, the Fairfax District, and Beverly Grove on its Los Angeles sides and Beverly Hills to the west, which makes it a compact urban core in a region built around the car.