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Well trust me. Nobody cares about Kansas City MO or KS period outside of the area, but I see that you live in SF. I work in San Jose often and have heard the topic of "is San Jose a suburb of San Francisco" more than once and people do seem to care locally. So the same may be true for locals regarding KC.
Why did Samantha "give up". This is a forum. So if you don't agree with others you just leave? I guess it's an option, although you won't find too many forums where everyone has the same thoughts. So maybe she gave up on the entire idea of the internet?
I don't live in San Francisco, but in the metro for a total of 27 years. Never once have I heard of anyone caring whether San Jose is a suburb of SF. Most certainly not caring in the sense that some regulars here are so threatened by the notion that KCMO just may not be the center of the universe for a lot of folks in Overland Park, Shawnee, or Lenexa and never will be.
A question as to whether San Jose is a suburb would almost always be in the context of attempting a geographical reference point. Some people have no idea where they are with respect to each other on a map.
There is a long history on this forum that you were not here for. Samantha is just one of many who tried to introduce some balance here and was mercilessly attacked by an eccentric few who do not today and never have represented a mainstream view of the KC metro. She got to a point where she'd had enough. I, on the other hand, keep trying as I have for over 7 years. I'm either a lot more foolish or I just have more time on my hands since I'm semi-retired.
I now live in a city where many of those who live in its suburbs for decades subscribed to the view that if a neutron bomb were to be dropped on Philadelphia City Hall, wiping out all the 1.5 million inhabitants of the city/county but leaving everything else in place, the region would get along just fine.
Then, in 2005 or thereabouts, an economist then with the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia (he is now a principal at an economic consulting firm; yes, I know this person) published a paper that showed that wasn't the case - the economies of metropolitan central cities and their surrounding regions were inextricably linked; the better off the core city was, the better off the region was as well.
Most of the political leaders in Philadelphia's collar counties, including the one that is home to the region's biggest edge city, have come around to this view, and their constituents have more or less fallen into line as well.
Northeast Johnson County, with very few exceptions (Merriam and Roeland Park being the two best known), developed as bedroom communities for people who commuted to jobs in Kansas City, Mo. Those latter two cities were more closely tied to Kansas City, Kan., as are parts of Shawnee and Mission.
Overland Park, the largest of the JoCo commuter suburbs, has, like King of Prussia here, morphed into a regional center in its own right and is home to Greater Kansas City's principal edge city. But that doesn't mean that were the Jackson County portion of KCMo to disappear tomorrow, life in OP would continue as though nothing happened.
The two Kansas Cities are actually two halves of one core city: the smaller one is more industrial, more working-class and more multiethnic. Had the state line not existed, they'd be one municipality, a fact driven home nowhere more than in the West Bottoms both cities share. I have been known to refer to KCK as "a little bit of the Rust Belt on the prairie" because of its character, which has in many ways determined its trajectory since World War II. They are both linchpins in the regional economy, though, albeit for different reasons.
We Kansas City Missourians who live well away from the area, however, do chafe whenever someone who's unfamiliar with the area assumes we're all Kansans. I make a point of identifying my native city according to local usage, which omits the state name when speaking of the city in Missouri, and find myself correcting people often enough when I do so. (Often with an arch reply: "If I were from Kansas City, Kansas, I would have said so.")
And the Kansas City diaspora is larger than many of you know: I've run into expats just about everywhere I travel in the Northeast. All of us love the place to death, even if we may never live there again.
^Very well written, and exactly right for the most part.
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
Northeast Johnson County, with very few exceptions (Merriam and Roeland Park being the two best known), developed as bedroom communities for people who commuted to jobs in Kansas City, Mo. Those latter two cities were more closely tied to Kansas City, Kan., as are parts of Shawnee and Mission.
In what sense were the northern JoCo suburbs more closely tied to KCK than KCMO? Can you provide evidence of this? My understanding is that the NE JoCo suburbs were birthed before KCK was even developed to its southern edge. Which would mean that they were spillover from KCMO's southern development, not KCK's.
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Originally Posted by MarketStEl
We Kansas City Missourians who live well away from the area, however, do chafe whenever someone who's unfamiliar with the area assumes we're all Kansans. I make a point of identifying my native city according to local usage, which omits the state name when speaking of the city in Missouri, and find myself correcting people often enough when I do so. (Often with an arch reply: "If I were from Kansas City, Kansas, I would have said so.")
I like this, and I can relate to it. Although it's not really fair to Kansas City Kansans. When out and about, they will also say "I'm from Kansas City" without designating the state. The interesting wrinkle in this geographic problem is that, yes, people on the Missouri side don't want to be automatically associated with Kansas, but people in Wyandotte and Johnson counties don't necessarily want to, either. Not because they're ashamed of their state necessarily, but because people from other regions make certain assumptions about you if you say you're from Kansas. And virtually no one living in the KC metro area will fit those assumptions, mainly because they're living in a metro area, and not on a farm.
^Very well written, and exactly right for the most part.
In what sense were the northern JoCo suburbs more closely tied to KCK than KCMO? Can you provide evidence of this? My understanding is that the NE JoCo suburbs were birthed before KCK was even developed to its southern edge. Which would mean that they were spillover from KCMO's southern development, not KCK's.
I like this, and I can relate to it. Although it's not really fair to Kansas City Kansans. When out and about, they will also say "I'm from Kansas City" without designating the state. The interesting wrinkle in this geographic problem is that, yes, people on the Missouri side don't want to be automatically associated with Kansas, but people in Wyandotte and Johnson counties don't necessarily want to, either. Not because they're ashamed of their state necessarily, but because people from other regions make certain assumptions about you if you say you're from Kansas. And virtually no one living in the KC metro area will fit those assumptions, mainly because they're living in a metro area, and not on a farm.
What a narrow, self absorbed view. As if you know what other people want to be associated with and not associated with. For your information, when I am away from Kansas City and someone asks where I'm from I tell them I live in a suburb of Kansas City on the Kansas side. If they ask further, which they often do because surprisingly they are often familiar with the Kansas City area, then I tell them exactly where I live. Otherwise I just tell them a suburb of Kansas City on the Kansas side. I don't feel I need to specify. But if pressed I would rather say I'm from Johnson County than Kansas City Missouri.
If you want to get technical, Missouri has just as much farmland, if not more, than Kansas. It's not about that. No one outside of the Kansas City area even cares about Kansas or Missouri and to them they are both the same. To people outside of Kansas City who are unfamiliar with Kansas City, our whole area is flyover country, nothing anyone anywhere else in the country cares about. If anything, they have a lesser opinion of KCMO because they hear about the crime there on the national news. Just like if someone from the north side of Chicago told someone they were from Chicago, people would immediately associate that with a high crime area although the north side is affluent and low crime.
So it's kind of humorous that you think people care or that they place Missouri above Kansas. They don't.
So I was watching housing hunters or some show like that last night and they were doing an episode in OP. They kept saying that OP was a suburb of KCK. Not that it matters as many people outside of KC group the entire KS side as "KCK". But it sounded so weird and odd as you just never hear that, or at least I don't. It's like when you hear KCK called Kansas City, without the K or Kansas. It just sounds weird as I have never called KCK simply "Kansas City" and have never heard others do it, but you will see or hear it in national media, shows like cops etc.
I would even consider Shawnee a suburb of KCMO rather than KCK and possibly even places like Bonner Springs, I don't know, it gets more gray there because I tend to think KCK functions more like a suburb than a secondary city in most cases.
Anyway. Just a thought.
I would think that most people who do not live in the area would not know this esoteric information about the Kansas Cities. Being foreign to the area, I understand what you are saying because I had occasion to work in the area.
I think that most people would assume that KCK and KCMO are one and the same city (from the posts I read, some of the locals even seem to think this is so) straddling a state border and not two different cities - each on their own side.
I would also say that describing Overland Park as a suburb of KCK is a good way to describe it to people who are not local, or who are not familiar with the town in the first place. From this description, you know that it is a suburb of one of the Kansas cities, and you also know that it is in the state of Kansas.
If they said it was as suburb of Kansas City, MO, it would be logical for non-locals to look for it on the Missouri side of the city.
^Very well written, and exactly right for the most part.
Thanks.
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In what sense were the northern JoCo suburbs more closely tied to KCK than KCMO? Can you provide evidence of this? My understanding is that the NE JoCo suburbs were birthed before KCK was even developed to its southern edge. Which would mean that they were spillover from KCMO's southern development, not KCK's.
My evidence is more impressionistic than data-driven, but it consists to a large extent of the construction of the 18th Street Expressway in the case of Roeland Park and the development along Merriam Lane, which was the main route into that city prior to the construction of the Turkey Creek Expressway in the early to mid-1960s, in Merriam's case.
Roeland Park's main shopping center was situated right at the end of the 18th Street Expressway; though I do think it predated its completion by five years, it was clearly built with that road in its sights. What I don't know for sure is: How much of the traffic on that road got off in, say, Argentine, where the tollbooths were located before the road became free, or continued north towards Fairfax via State Route 58 (18th Street in KCK), rather than swung onto the Muncie Expressway to head for KCMo?
In the case of Merriam, it looked to me growing up that many of the buildings in the northern end of the Johnson County community were about the same age as those on the Wyandotte County side of the line; Merriam Lane was a seamless stretch of road, much like the streets that cross from the Country Club District into Mission Hills and Prairie Village.
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I like this, and I can relate to it. Although it's not really fair to Kansas City Kansans. When out and about, they will also say "I'm from Kansas City" without designating the state. The interesting wrinkle in this geographic problem is that, yes, people on the Missouri side don't want to be automatically associated with Kansas, but people in Wyandotte and Johnson counties don't necessarily want to, either. Not because they're ashamed of their state necessarily, but because people from other regions make certain assumptions about you if you say you're from Kansas. And virtually no one living in the KC metro area will fit those assumptions, mainly because they're living in a metro area, and not on a farm.
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Originally Posted by luzianne
What a narrow, self absorbed view. As if you know what other people want to be associated with and not associated with. For your information, when I am away from Kansas City and someone asks where I'm from I tell them I live in a suburb of Kansas City on the Kansas side. If they ask further, which they often do because surprisingly they are often familiar with the Kansas City area, then I tell them exactly where I live. Otherwise I just tell them a suburb of Kansas City on the Kansas side. I don't feel I need to specify. But if pressed I would rather say I'm from Johnson County than Kansas City Missouri.
If you want to get technical, Missouri has just as much farmland, if not more, than Kansas. It's not about that. No one outside of the Kansas City area even cares about Kansas or Missouri and to them they are both the same. To people outside of Kansas City who are unfamiliar with Kansas City, our whole area is flyover country, nothing anyone anywhere else in the country cares about. If anything, they have a lesser opinion of KCMO because they hear about the crime there on the national news. Just like if someone from the north side of Chicago told someone they were from Chicago, people would immediately associate that with a high crime area although the north side is affluent and low crime.
So it's kind of humorous that you think people care or that they place Missouri above Kansas. They don't.
It's true that there's lots of farmland and agriculture in Missouri - and it's also true that there's both heavy and extractive industry in Kansas. (In the case of heavy industry, Wichita probably is better known for it outside the state thanks to its role as a hub for the general aviation industry.) Yet the image of Kansas in the popular imagination is more thoroughgoingly rural (think "Wizard of Oz") than Missouri's is (think the Robert Altman film "Kansas City," an homage to the director's hometown in its Jazz Age heyday). That IMO does influence even the way Kansans describe the Kansas City area when outside it.
I hear more about crime in Chicago than I do crime in Kansas City on the TV news on those rare occasions when I watch it. Online, the difference is even starker: I'd have to go to KC-specific media sites to find news about crime there, while I've definitely seen stories about violent crime spiraling out of control in Chicago in a number of places.
I would think that most people who do not live in the area would not know this esoteric information about the Kansas Cities. Being foreign to the area, I understand what you are saying because I had occasion to work in the area.
I think that most people would assume that KCK and KCMO are one and the same city (from the posts I read, some of the locals even seem to think this is so) straddling a state border and not two different cities - each on their own side.
I would also say that describing Overland Park as a suburb of KCK is a good way to describe it to people who are not local, or who are not familiar with the town in the first place. From this description, you know that it is a suburb of one of the Kansas cities, and you also know that it is in the state of Kansas.
If they said it was as suburb of Kansas City, MO, it would be logical for non-locals to look for it on the Missouri side of the city.
I'd say that calling Overland Park a suburb of KCK makes about as much sense as calling Cherry Hill, N.J., a suburb of Camden, even though both communities are in Camden County and one must pass through Camden to get from Cherry Hill to Philadelphia.
I see my mission as an educational one, to inform the uninformed up this way about the relationships among the cities that together form the Kansas City (Mo.-Kan.) metropolitan area. By and large, I manage to achieve my goal.
I'd say that calling Overland Park a suburb of KCK makes about as much sense as calling Cherry Hill, N.J., a suburb of Camden, even though both communities are in Camden County and one must pass through Camden to get from Cherry Hill to Philadelphia.
I see my mission as an educational one, to inform the uninformed up this way about the relationships among the cities that together form the Kansas City (Mo.-Kan.) metropolitan area. By and large, I manage to achieve my goal.
This.
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