The Kansas vs Missouri debate, why does half of KC hate the other half?

[RjRobb2]

Originally Posted by CrownVic95

I couldn't agree more. I'd love to never again see 70 degrees.

Here in the Bay Area we can count on cool for a good part of the summer, but in recent years we have these stupid hot spells on a recurring basis that last for several days and are pure torture when you are accustomed to cool comfort.

How anyone can "enjoy" 95 degree heat is beyond the limit of my imagination.

I dont see how you could never want to see more than 70. That makes it where water doesnt get that warm and makes swimming a little uncomfortable.

[northbound74]

Some people are cold natured, some are hot natured.
I get hot rather easily, so I like the cooler temps.
I can easily see how someone would prefer hot temps to cold, and vise versa. It's just how we're made. I'm just glad that there's enough diversity in temps across the country that, if it means so much to you, then you can move to wherever you want, and at least be happy with the weather.

[Songbird111]

Wow. You all have such great points and perspectives. Ultimately, I guess that's what it boils down to.....perspective. Each person's perception of "nice" and "decent" and "liveable" is based on their life's experience. Some things, I do believe, are a "given". Crime statistics, quality of medical care, quality of schools, cultural offerings, transportation system, etc. are measureable things. When compared to other cities of the same size, they will fall into a rank. I do think though that most people looking for "nice, decent, liveable"....are looking for low crime, affordable new housing, great schools, and quality medical care. I have lived in a McMansion and as I get older (I'm a whopping 45 years young!) I realize how little I truly need. It is humbling to have your husband lose his job and be out of work for 6 months and have to rely on prayer, faith and the goodness of neighbors, friends, and yes....even people you don't know to survive. Receiving money in the mail during the holidays (signed Anonymous!) just makes you speechless and puts a lump in your throat. It takes you to a completely different realm in life. We all want the same things...but our circumstance in life limits what we can and can't have....materially. Check out the trailer on youtube to "The Human Experience". How can lepers be happy? How can sick kids of Lima, Peru be so happy? It's something inside.

Having said all of that "deep" stuff.....(that has nothing to do with this thread) I look forward to my family's adventure and move to Kansas City. I will embrace everyone. (I'm not a "bleeding heart liberal"....just someone who has learned to really appreciate every second and every situation (good or bad) that I'm put in.

Looking forward to meeting all of you nice people.

[TabulaRasa]

Originally Posted by northbound74

As for plowing, I live in Independence, and the roads are taken care of just fine. With only 20 inches of snow a year, it's almost a non-issue to me. What is that? 4-5 days of inconvenience out of 365? Who cares.

Exactly. Having moved from somewhere where it actually SNOWS, and all winter long, not an occasional dusting, this is of virtually no importance to me. It just doesn't get truly nasty here in winter, even at its worst, at least not from what I've seen.

[luzianne]

Originally Posted by northbound74

Some people are cold natured, some are hot natured.
I get hot rather easily, so I like the cooler temps.
I can easily see how someone would prefer hot temps to cold, and vise versa. It's just how we're made. I'm just glad that there's enough diversity in temps across the country that, if it means so much to you, then you can move to wherever you want, and at least be happy with the weather.

Yeah, but what do you do when you are married to someone who is the opposite of you? Either I'm freezing because he's comfortable or he's sweating because I'm comfortable!

[TabulaRasa]

Keep the heat down and buy a heating pad and sleep on it...that's what the BF and I have to do!

[dsrich98]

Originally Posted by kcmo

For what it worth, this post is not directed at anybody on this forum. I am only trying to show the types of behavior that creates the friction between KS and MO. Let’s try to keep the KS vs MO stuff in this thread so we don’t ruin every thread. Yea, myself included!

I honestly think most of the friction is caused by Kansas side residents (even if it’s a tiny percent of the population). Why would I have anything against JoCo when I moved back to KC? I didn’t have anything against it at all. I actually looked forward to working in Overland Park. But I was a born and raised and proud KCMO resident and I got tired of the constant anti KCMO remarks. Make fun of MU all day long. I don’t care. But to put down where somebody lives for no reason other than to make where you live look better? Not cool. Why is there no (or much less) resentment toward other suburbs like the Northland or Lee’s Summit? I know the common rebuttal to this is “isn’t this exactly what your are dong by putting down Johnson County?. Yes it is. My point is that something caused me and countless others to have issues with Johnson County.

There are few things that JoCo could learn to do to really help fix this problem so you don’t get looked down on when you tell people from MO you are from JoCo Samantha

First. There are many MO suburban areas that compare very well with JoCo suburbs and these areas have good schools. People don’t have to leave MO and go to KS for good schools. Every time somebody takes a jab at “schools in MO”, they are not just putting down the KCMOSD, but all the good districts as well, which there are many. I really think people in JoCo need to spend a little more time in the MO suburbs and understand that there are very upscale areas in the MO suburbs and the not so upscale areas are not so bad. Not everybody can live in a 250k home.

Second. Don’t put down areas you know nothing about. Independence, Raytown etc are talked down by JoCo residents all the time. Raytown is a comfortable, modest middle class suburb that is full of nice areas and is very comparable to much of northern JoCo. Independence has its share of problems, but the city also has a lot of nice middle class and upper class areas as well as a historic and charming downtown area. It doesn’t deserve the “meth” image it gets and KCTV5 (JoCo’s favorite station) needs to stop going out there and doing BS stories on pit bulls and what not. Channel 5 was sued by the Indep police for trying to manufacture a police brutality story be putting a hidden camera on a person and trying to get a cop to hit them. They are also amazingly live in Indep when a pit-bull is lose in streets. Why don’t they do stories like this in KCK or Shawnee or Merriam? Because that is their audience. KCTV5 is generally hated on the MO side as they are known as the “shock” station and are known on the MO side for catering to JoCo with KCMO crime news etc.

Third. Learn more about the urban core of KCMO. There is so much more to KCMO than Brookside and the Plaza. Tens of thousands of people live in urban areas of KCMO that could easily afford to live in Leawood but choose to live in urban areas of the city. Every time people put down the city as a crime infested hole, they are putting down the people that live in some of the nicest and most interesting areas of the metro. What happens at 39th and Troost at 2AM has very little impact on the vast majority of the 475,000 residents of the city.

Forth. Try to cooperate more with MO side cities and counties. KCMO and Jackson County are not perfect. They are far more complicated, urban, older and diverse places than an a 50 year old suburban county/city. They will have some inefficiencies and from time to time, even corruptness. That seems to come with the territory of larger more urban and more populated counties/cities. That does not mean you should ignore them and act like they don’t exist or everything about them is corrupt when it comes to regional needs. One of the main reasons this metro still does not have any sort of regional transit is due to the fact that the MO side has been trying to involve the KS side and the KS side simply will not cooperate and delays any progress. The MO side has finally said ********* KS, we will go at it alone. It’s about time. Same deal with a cultural district. Nearly every major city has some form of regional culture tax except KC. A culture district would help fund the Zoo, museums, stadiums, theaters etc. 95% of these attractions are in urban KCMO and JoCo can’t fathom the idea of sending KS taxes to KCMO. That’s all they see. They don’t see these as regional attractions till they want to use them. I think this is a huge cause of the friction in KC. They only way JoCo will even consider a culture tax is if they county get back what they put into it. Kind of defeats the purpose.

Lastly. Stop taking companies from KCMO. 30-40 years of luring companies across state line has been devastating. KCMO has at least a few times asked JoCo cities to stop feeding off of KCMO for economic development. They simply don’t want JoCo to use incentives to relocate a company from one part of the metro to another. Bring companies into JoCo form Denver or Dallas, not KCMO. JoCo has refused to agree to any sort of truce. A couple of years ago, JoCo leaders actually called a press conference to say they were all about metro corporation. The very next day it was announced the Overland Park was taking Quintiles from KCMO and they will be given major tax breaks to do so. KCMO does not go after metro companies. They entertained Applebee’s and put a proposal together to bring them to the P&L district and OP went nuts. Just the idea of getting a taste of their own medicine was enough to create major problems. I have spoken personally with people like Wayne Cauthen and Kay Barnes and off the record they don’t have to many good things to say about JoCo. Again friction.

Most of the roads in MO are fine especially considering that there is four times the roads and ten times the bridges on the MO side. People still say that the roads in MO are crap, when they are not.

Things like the KU/MU rivalry are just rivalries. But they can get nasty and bring out much of the above.

Generally if people would just lay off the comments, it would do wonders. You can’t read a KC Star article online without people (even admitting to be from JoCo) throwing punches at anything MO. “JoCo is where the money is”, Jackson County is all ghetto” etc.

Like I said, these are many of the reasons I have seen over a couple of decades of living in KC. Take it for what it’s worth. You can totally blow it off.

Or you can open your eyes and try to understand why there is so much resentment and try to do your part to correct the situation.

I would like to hear thoughts on this from both sides and ideas of how we can fix this. In all of the above, I didn’t call JoCo snobby or bland or freeloading or any other of the stereotypes it gets. I’m trying to offer constructive criticism and show people that may not see it how the county is sometimes viewed by people outside of the county. This may not even be just the MO side vs JoCo. I have heard many of the same comments from people from WyCo, Douglas and outstate Kansas.

So is this something we can truly debate or this just going to start a flame war?

This must be just a natural human thing. I live in Omaha and we always do that to Council Bluffs residents right across the river. ANd they do it right back to us.

[Cairo_East]

It's because of our connections. Kansas City is an incredible anomaly. No other metropolitan area has a downtown located within steps of another state. This is not a small thing: there are certainly several urban areas that are located at the edge of a state boundary, but these are usually bounded by a river (Portland, St Louis, New York), a controlled border like San Diego, or both (Detroit, El Paso). In the 19th century, rivers tended to attract people for their constant supply of water and their potential for trade, but they also separated people, making constant interaction difficult. Missouri and Iowa were largely settled by the time the first railroad bridge crossed the Mississippi River.

Even now, most metropolitan areas that border a state have fewer than a dozen bridge connections as it requires coordination between both states and a huge expense.

In Kansas City the metropolitan connection is primarily through land. A vast number of connections have been made between Kansas and Missouri, offering residents and business an innumerable number of options on where they live, shop, work, and play. I cross the state line at last twice a day during the work week.

Here's a comparison. (side note: apologies for the color choice, it looks like one of those nuclear bomb damage maps from the 1960s) The only metro that I can think of with a close state neighbor that isn't restricted by a river or international boundary is Chicago. Still, you need to go 14 miles from the center of Chicago before you get to Indiana:




...and now Kansas City at the same scale and downtown location. Major arterial connections across state lines are highlighted in blue. Local street connections across state lines are in black. There are dozens of connections before you get to the 14 mile marker:




Although it leads to greater amounts of cooperation, it also leads a greater amount of competition. Since the competition is at a state level, it's easier to remember than if it was only local. For example: people may not know which suburb has the lowest property tax rates, but everyone knows that gas is cheaper in Missouri than in Kansas. It can actually benefit a metro area to restrict the number of connections. For example: Portland, Oregon has no sales tax, while cross-river neighbor Vancouver, Washington has no property tax. An extensive cross-river transportation system would drops tax receipts in both cities. Washington residents will shop less in Portland if it's a pain to cross a traffic-jammed bridge twice or more-which keeps revenues at home.

The state line also lead to some quirky neighborhoods at the state line due to uncoordinated zoning. The historic, walkable West Plaza neighborhood (Missouri) is located across the street from the immense KU Medical Center (Kansas). One of the largest engineering firms in the country (Missouri) is headquartered across the street from 1960s ranch homes (Kansas). This fosters a mental disconnect between neighbors.

Finally, there is the historic context. Here is a text from 1855, five years prior to Kansas statehood:

"With the exception of a portion of its northeastern boundary, there is no mountain, lake, or river, or any other natural feature to separate (Kansas) from Missouri, on the north, east, or south. This is a circumstance of great importance, in estimating future influences to be given and received. The Ohio River, flowing between free and slave States, is sufficient to hold them apart. Were it not for the river, these States could not be held asunder. They would soon be knit together by a thousand interlacing ties...Nothing will separate Kansas from Missouri but a mere boundary line, invisible to the eye,and offering no obstruction to passage." - Charles Boynton, "A Journey through Kansas, with sketches of Nebraska." 1855.

The next five years would see the border become a flashpoint in the national struggle over the nature of freedom and slavery. The Missouri-Kansas Border War was the immediate precursor to the American Civil War. By 1865, the paths between Jackson County and Douglas County (via Johnson County) would be pockmarked with graves and burned farmsteads. Although the region could be an international model on how former rivals cooperate and become one unified region, there is still an element of the past that continues on in the minds of many.

Just a theory.

[adonijah]

I kind of had the best of both worlds IMO. Ever since I started working at age 15 (I'm 35 now) 5 out of the 7 jobs I held in the region were in Kansas, but I lived in Missouri.

I now live in Arizona (lovin' it). As far as the "border war" stuff goes, most of it is all in good fun and is centered around MU & KU Basketball teams.

Now down here in the Southwest...that's a REAL Border War.

[Cymballine]

I was raised in Wichita but spent a good portion of my childhood and young adulthood in Kansas City. The most I can speak for is a friendly animosity between the two sides of the city. The Missouri side has far more going on (i.e. the Plaza, Westport, downtown, etc.), while the Kansas side is largely suburban. I by and large prefer the Missouri side, but I've always had a real soft spot for Overland Park.