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St. Louis and Kansas City just feel different. I would say St. Louis feels like a little big city and Kansas City feels like a big little town, if that makes sense. I think St. Louis having Metrolink and a denser urban vernacular make it feel larger, but Kansas City has an appeal that is overall more palpable to mainstream Americans. As far as amenities, I think St. Louis has better legacy amenities (museums, neighborhoods, larger transit system), but both are pretty much comparable in things like shopping, dining, quality of life offerings. There will always be things that St. Louis has that are simply unattainable for Kansas City, because they are cities of different eras, but Kansas City is not hampered down with legacy issues to the extent St. Louis is, which matters in a 21st century economy.
They both feel about the same size. Kansaa City feels more vibrant in the core.
What do you consider as the core of the two cities? Just downtown? Downtown Midtown CWE and some may add Clayton to that in St. Louis? Many here refer to the area as the Central Corridor in St Louis.
Throw in Tower Grove, The Grove, The Hill, Soulard, The Loop, and many other areas that throws off your comparison.
What do you consider as the core of the two cities? Just downtown? Downtown Midtown CWE and some may add Clayton to that in St. Louis? Many here refer to the area as the Central Corridor in St Louis.
I disagree.
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Throw in Tower Grove, The Grove, The Hill, Soulard, The Loop, and many other areas that throws off your comparison.
I don't consider many of those areas downtown. It is cheating to add Clayton, as it is it's own area. Downtown to downtown, Kansas City wins.
I don't consider many of those areas downtown. It is cheating to add Clayton, as it is it's own area. Downtown to downtown, Kansas City wins.
Ok. What are your boundaries for core? Give me some idea. I don't really care what city you prefer or what DT you think is better. I just want to know about your core boundaries? DT to DT KC wins. Yes.
Is The Plaza part of your core? I just wanna know. You use the term alot and it can mean different things depending upon where you live.
Is The CWE or Cortex part of the core in St Louis. Or are you not familiar enough to say?
STL because it WAS the larger city. It's a shell of its former self but still has the old bones there. At one point in time STL competed with Chicago for preeminence. It was 800,000 in population when KC was 475,000. KC grew up as a frontier town.
One thing I can guarantee though - KC will regain its peak population well before STL does. It's only about 25k shy of that whereas STL is about 540,000 shy of it. Now granted, KC has expanded its city limits but regardless, KC is the healthier city IMO.
STL because it WAS the larger city. It's a shell of its former self but still has the old bones there. At one point in time STL competed with Chicago for preeminence. It was 800,000 in population when KC was 475,000. KC grew up as a frontier town.
One thing I can guarantee though - KC will regain its peak population well before STL does. It's only about 25k shy of that whereas STL is about 540,000 shy of it. Now granted, KC has expanded its city limits but regardless, KC is the healthier city IMO.
You are right. I think 800k within 60 sq miles would be a little too much for our city. 500k would be good but that is it. If St Louis would annex an additional 100 sq. miles west it would be a lot healthier than KC.
You are right. I think 800k within 60 sq miles would be a little too much for our city. 500k would be good but that is it. If St Louis would annex an additional 100 sq. miles west it would be a lot healthier than KC.
2 ways that could go.
Either St. Louis improves with all that extra real estate, or St. Louis drags the new part down to it's level.
Big city politics being what they are, I'd lean towards the latter. The former would just make the city itself look better on paper.
KC is doing a a litle bit better city to city and metro to metro, so St. Louis annexing an already existing infrastructure and economy likely wouldn't move the meter much anyway.
Someday when Lawrence quits refusing to be a part of the KC MSA, that will change things.
Lawrence is not in the MSA even though rural counties much further away are in the MSA. Those counties only lower the MSA density, they add little to the regional population.
It's not a matter of "Lawrence" (or more accurately Douglas County) "refusing" to be part of the MSA. It's a matter of how the Census Bureau determines whether a county is connected to a metropolitan area or not.
That hinges on commuting patterns. If more than a certain percentage of county residents commute to jobs in one of the counties of a metropolitan area, it is then included within that metropolitan area. If the percentage is below that threshold, it isn't (I forget what the threshold is).
What Douglas County and Leavenworth County, which was also not part of the Kansas City MSA for years even though the KCATA provided bus service to it, have in common is a large employer that keeps most of the county's residents employed there. In Leavenworth's case, it's Fort Leavenworth and the Federal penitentiary (with the VA hospital complex and Kansas state penitentiary in next-door Lansing as contributors); in Douglas', it's the University of Kansas.
Leavenworth County eventually got added to the Kansas City MSA because enough people who didn't work at one of its large employers moved into it but kept their jobs outside the county. Douglas County will only be added to the Kansas City MSA when the same thing happens there.
Similarly, those still mostly-rural counties like Linn in Kansas are part of the Kansas City MSA because enough of their residents commute to jobs within it.
Since we're on the subject of MSA populations, though, I'm surprised that the gap between metropolitan Kansas City and metropolitan St. Louis isn't larger. When I was growing up in Kansas City in the 1960s, Metro St. Louis was about twice the size of Greater Kansas City. Now the difference appears to be a mere half-million or so - a little more than the population of the City of Kansas City, Mo., itself. My guess is that the spreading-out of the Kansas City metro (which was composed of only five counties in 1960 and seven in 1970) accounts for some of that difference, but I also think that the Greater KC economy has been growing faster than that of Metro St. Louis since the 1970s.
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Originally Posted by Pine to Vine
Back in the mid-1980s, I made the move to Kansas City for a job, and lived there a bit over a year. It was my first time living away from the upper east coast, and the city felt noticeably different to me than those I knew back East - wider boulevards, a prevalence of arts and crafts homes and Spanish architecture, numbered streets that stretch out into the countryside and a sense of broken urbanity, with hubs located downtown, in Crown Center and the Plaza. [...] I took a trip back to KC with my husband about 10 years ago when we were living in Houston and it has only gotten better since I left - much better. Lots of new development down by the river, more activity in the once-dormant downtown, and an amazing restoration of Union Station. My only negative observation is the Plaza features very few local stores any more - like everywhere else, they have been replaced by Sunglass Hut, lullulemon, Restoration Hardware and Urban Outfitters. I've been following KC in the last few years and see more going on in the new Power Light District and perhaps the jazz district is beginning to fulfill some of its promise. I can imagine St Louis has not stood still however, and has been improving itself as well.
After all this rambling, here's my bottom line:
- Even though I haven't been to either city in over 10 years, I still believe St Louis probably feels larger and more urban. Kansas City is laid out in such a way that it will always feel bit more spacious. That's not a bad thing in and of itself. It's just my view on the thread topic.
- Although it's not the topic of the thread, if i were given the choice of living in SL or KC, I'd choose KC. I think I'd always be comparing SL to other cities back east, and it would fall short. OTOH, there's a charm about KC that I don't find in SL and at this point in life, it simply offers more appeal. Not to mention the BBQ.
Like most others who post regularly to the Philadelphia forum, Pine to Vine (the southern and northern boundaries of Center City Philadelphia's ZIP codes, btw) knows that I love my adopted hometown but still wear my forever one on my sleeve as well.
I voted St. Louis on this question because yes, it is the bigger and older of the two metropolises, and even though it's had the less impressive downtown skyline for as long as I can remember - when I was young, the state's tallest skyscraper was the Kansas City Power & Light Building in downtown KC - the whole of the city and the metro simply felt denser and busier and more urban. Clayton, which is actually the county seat of suburban St. Louis County (it and the City of St. Louis are totally separate entities), is probably the best example of the difference: there is nothing like Clayton in the communities surrounding Kansas City. Both Independence (the former Jackson County seat) and Olathe (the Johnson County seat) look and feel like small rural courthouse towns that the suburbs overran. Clayton looks and feels like a small city.
I've said on more than a few occasions that St. Louis is the last great city of the East and Kansas City the first great city of the West. Thanks for confirming my observation here, Pine to Vine.
And since you mentioned the Q: I tend to bristle when, as the real-estate site Movoto once did, people talk about "barbecue" and "Missouri" in the same sentence and mention St. Louis rather than Kansas City. I think the confusion arises from "St. Louis-style ribs" - a term that refers not to how the ribs are prepared but how they're trimmed before barbecuing. Most Kansas City Q joints also serve "St. Louis-style ribs" therefore because most pork spareribs are trimmed that way.
Yes, St. Louis has Q joints, but it's Kansas City that has the barbecue pedigree and history.
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Originally Posted by PhakeNews
Driven through both several times.
St Louis is definitely bigger.
Being a west coast guy myself, Kansas City is definitely more for me. KC posters probably would hate me, but I would live in Johnson County, KS
I won't hold it against you. Most of my classmates in high school had addresses ending in 662xx.
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Originally Posted by goat314
St. Louis and Kansas City just feel different. I would say St. Louis feels like a little big city and Kansas City feels like a big little town, if that makes sense. I think St. Louis having Metrolink and a denser urban vernacular make it feel larger, but Kansas City has an appeal that is overall more palpable to mainstream Americans. As far as amenities, I think St. Louis has better legacy amenities (museums, neighborhoods, larger transit system), but both are pretty much comparable in things like shopping, dining, quality of life offerings. There will always be things that St. Louis has that are simply unattainable for Kansas City, because they are cities of different eras, but Kansas City is not hampered down with legacy issues to the extent St. Louis is, which matters in a 21st century economy.
You haven't been through certain parts of Kansas City yet, then.
Had Kansas City not annexed what became most of its Missouri-side suburbs, its population would probably have peaked in 1950 like St. Louis' did, and it would probably have a population of about 200,000 now. A huge swath of the city's old historic black community has completely emptied out, much like St. Louis' northwest side.
There's a sidebar to the 2015 Next City feature I wrote on the Power & Light District that asks, "What change will come to my Kansas City?" And my Kansas City is not the same place everyone (including me) gushes about, because the side of the city east of Troost Avenue (a north-south thoroughfare 11 blocks east of Main Street that just about neatly divides the city in two racially, with the blacks living east of it and the whites west of it) has fared pretty badly in the years since I left it.
In that article is a photo of the downtown Kansas City skyline viewed from the southeast. In the foreground are green fields punctuated by trees, with a solitary stone building among the greenery. As the caption notes, I wouldn't have been able to take that picture when I was a kid, for I would have been standing in someone's living room.
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Originally Posted by mjtinmemphis
You are right. I think 800k within 60 sq miles would be a little too much for our city. 500k would be good but that is it. If St Louis would annex an additional 100 sq. miles west it would be a lot healthier than KC.
I hear repeated talk about "undoing the Great Divorce" - the 1871 separation of St. Louis City from St. Louis County.
But I don't know if anything's actually happened on that front.
I'm not sure St. Louis would be "a lot healthier" than KC were that to happen, though. St. Louis' metropolitan economy seems to me to exhibit the same low-growth pattern that typifies the cities of the Rust Belt. (Philadelphia's also falls into this category, though a second one seems to be emerging through cracks in the surface.) KC's seems to me more dynamic.
I've lived in both as an adult and am not from either one. I live in KC now but my in laws live in St Louis so I visit several times a year.
15 years ago, I'd have said they were comparable cities in terms of vibrancy, growth, economy, etc. St Louis is bigger and more urban but KC is newer and superior from a layout perspective. KC has come a long ways in the last 10-15 years though and I'd say it is a superior city and metro to St Louis. St Louis has a lot going for it too and is starting to improve in a lot of areas.
Clayton and the west county highway farty corridor have really hurt the city imo. KC has some of that with the business parks in JoCo KS and the MO side burbs.
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