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Which of these twin cities do you think in your opinion have a better relationship economically, culturally, socially and also work together better in attracting jobs/companies? Kansas City, MO/KS or Minneapolis/St. Paul MN?
MSP by a landslide and I'm a pretty big supporter of KC (it's my freaking username!)
There is no "twin cities" KC. Outside of their name, KCMO and KCK have very little in common. KCK is basically a suburb of KCMO. You can't say that about St Paul.
Kansas City, Kansas, isn't an "overgrown suburb" — it's had its own industrial base for many decades, built largely around the Santa Fe and Union Pacific rail yards and the Fairfax Industrial District. That industry plus KU's medical school supported some 160,000 residents.
But the 'Dotte is clearly not the equal to or a peer of Kansas City, Mo., whereas St. Paul is a peer of Minneapolis. (Both cities have about the same number of residents. One has the state Capitol and the other the state university.)
And on the metropolitan cooperation front, the Greater Kansas City area has nothing even remotely like the Metropolitan Council of the Twin Cities. Sheesh, the Mid-America Regional Council has a hard time getting everyone to sing from the same page in the songbook, and it doesn't have a dedicated stream of revenue to spend on transportation and other civic improvement projects like the Met Council does.
There's no contest here at all — Minneapolis/St. Paul takes the prize here.
Kansas City, hands down. KCM is one of my favorite metros, one of the most underrated, IMO. MSP use to be one of my favorites too. But the elephant in the room of rioting, violence, political hostility and extremism, and the idiotic idea of defunding their police, the areas QOL has and will continue to nose dive. More expensive than KCM as well, and the gap will continue to widen.
Kansas City, hands down. KCM is one of my favorite metros, one of the most underrated, IMO. MSP use to be one of my favorites too. But the elephant in the room of rioting, violence, political hostility and extremism, and the idiotic idea of defunding their police, the areas QOL has and will continue to nose dive. More expensive than KCM as well, and the gap will continue to widen.
KC needs to get its economy together.
Many of its largest employers are either teetering on the brink of bankruptcy or are being merged out of existence.
Kansas City, hands down. KCM is one of my favorite metros, one of the most underrated, IMO. MSP use to be one of my favorites too. But the elephant in the room of rioting, violence, political hostility and extremism, and the idiotic idea of defunding their police, the areas QOL has and will continue to nose dive. More expensive than KCM as well, and the gap will continue to widen.
Minneapolis will have a police department. Just not the one it has now. The city council is still trying to figure out what that new department should look like, and until it does, the current one continues to patrol the streets.
If they play their cards right, they could wind up with a department as good as the county-run one that replaced the city police department in Camden, N.J. Since the new department took over, crime has plunged in New Jersey's poorest city, largely because the new department's commanders told the officers that Job 1 was getting to know the people they were supposed to protect.
Edited to add: That aside, I pretty much agree with your points about QOL (though I'm not sure the Twin Cities' will "nose dive") and COL, but I thought the yardstick we were using here was level of interconnectedness / cooperation / partnership between the core cities.
And here we get to one of KC's Achilles' heels: It does pretty badly on those metrics.
KCK isn't a peer core city with KCMo the way St. Paul is with Minneapolis, Fort Worth is with Dallas or even Oakland is with San Francisco; KCK may have its own employment base, but it doesn't look, feel or act as a junior partner to the bigger city next door the way Oakland does wrt its bigger neighbor across the Bay.
And on regional cooperation, KC comes up way short, and one of the reasons why is the state line. How long did it take for that "job creation" "border war" to finally end?
Last edited by MarketStEl; 08-18-2020 at 07:55 AM..
Many of its largest employers are either teetering on the brink of bankruptcy or are being merged out of existence.
Minneapolis has some problems, as well. Just Google it, and read for yourself. Companies thinking of leaving, downtown businesses wanting to flee the downtown area....it's all there. The desirability of Minneapolis has faded, and I it will experience changes, that it didn't dream would happen, six months ago.
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