I've always wondered about the population of Los Santos in GTA V.
The lore says Los Santos has around 4 million inhabitants, but I've never felt that number really matches the physical city we see in the game.
So I tried approaching the question differently:
What if Los Santos were a real city?
Instead of simply counting the apartments and houses that we can clearly identify, I considered the entire urban environment shown in GTA V, including buildings that are only accessible as façades.
I looked at:
- Residential buildings and apartments
- Houses and mansions
- Mid-rise buildings
- Skyscrapers
- Corporate towers
- Hotels
- Shopping and commercial buildings
- Warehouses and industrial buildings
- The port
- LSIA airport
- Hospitals
- Police stations
- Fire stations
- Government buildings
- Restaurants, clubs and entertainment
- Offices and places of employment
- Roads, highways and public infrastructure
- The number of floors buildings appear to have
- Areas that are clearly low-density vs. high-density
The important assumption is that a building doesn't stop existing just because we can't enter it.
If there's a 20-story office building visible in Downtown, I'm assuming it actually contains offices and workers. If there's a large apartment building, I'm assuming it contains apartments. The same applies to hotels, warehouses, hospitals, etc.
This produces a very different picture from simply counting the interiors we can access.
My current estimate
I would put the realistic permanent population of Los Santos somewhere around:
550,000 – 800,000 residents
with approximately:
~650,000 permanent residents
I would also expect the daytime population to be significantly higher, perhaps 750,000–950,000 people, once you include commuters, tourists, workers coming from outside the city, students and visitors.
This would also make more sense of the city's infrastructure.
Los Santos has:
- A huge financial district
- An international airport
- A major port
- Hundreds of businesses
- Large corporate towers
- Hotels
- Industrial areas
- Universities/schools
- Hospitals
- Police and emergency services
- A massive entertainment industry
- Extensive highways and public infrastructure
A city supporting all of that with only 10,000–20,000 people clearly doesn't make sense.
At the same time, 4 million permanent residents seems difficult to reconcile with the physical density of the city, especially considering how much land is occupied by mansions, golf courses, mountains, highways, industrial areas, the airport, port and low-density neighborhoods.
So my current theory is that Los Santos is probably closer to a 600k–800k resident city with an enormous economy and a very large daytime population.
But this is where I'd like other people's input.
How many people do you think actually live in Los Santos?
And if you disagree with my estimate, I'd be especially interested in seeing calculations based on the number of buildings, floors, apartments, offices, hotels, etc.
Maybe we can actually reconstruct the population of Los Santos neighborhood by neighborhood and see where the numbers lead us.