Why are Johnson County people unfriendly (Springfield, Lee's Summit: transfer, good schools, college)
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People would rather live amongst people that share the same values as them. It's no different than where one shops, goes to church, go for entertainment, or choose to live.
There's certainly a degree of provincialism that afflicts the entire metro but it's particularly acute and concentrated in Johnson County, even on a regional level. Big fish small pond effect.
I have been living in Johnson County (KC metro- Kansas side) for the last 2 1/2 years and I already want to move again, this time out of state! The locals do not accept people from different states. I grew up in Colorado (as well as west coast) and these people are so closed minded it drives me crazy! My family and I feel like outsiders, especially because we are not religious, we eat super healthy, we travel a lot, and the mother in law lives with us! The day we first moved into our house in Olathe, our neighbors talked to us, just once, just to get information about us. As soon as they heard we moved from out of state they all put a big red X on us and never said hello again! What is wrong with these people! To top it off the crime has gotten so bad in the KC metro area we don't even want to stick out this year! We want to move back to our west coast roots, who actually have personalities and understand us. Why do people have to be so closed minded, personality less to people who have not grown up here. It's so rude!
Am I the only one that thinks this way about Johnson County?
I agree. Latino populations of size are fairly common in so-called flyover country. The ag- ag processing-industrial occupations common to the heartland have traditionally been a significant source of employment among Latino populations. I'm not sure where the myth that the Midwest has low Hispanic populations came from, but it isn't accurate.
Especially not in areas related to agriculture! People come off as uninformed when they act like there aren't pockets of diversity in the Midwest. Who do they think the sugar beet factories, beef-chicken packing plants, dairies, feed yard, and large farms employ? I know quite a few people of Caucasian descent who choose to be unemployed and complain about not finding a job or a lack of job opportunities, yet refuse to even think about applying for any of those jobs. I don't know where a lot of the Hispanics in JoCo and WyCo work, but JoCo, north of 95th and especially north of 75th, is getting pretty diverse, and WyCo has been diverse for ages.
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Originally Posted by CrownVic95
Ahhh, but beating up on JoCo is the KC forum's favorite sport and it's been a while since we've seen a new one of these. Given the enormous pent-up demand, you can just imagine how many emotional prostrations were prevented herein by providing a release outlet just in time.
It had been far too long since we've had a thread like this one .
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Originally Posted by TabulaRasa
And this is the case whether you live in affluent suburbia or some tiny rural community in the hinterlands. Older adults with established lifestyles and routines and circles of acquaintances make new friends more slowly than their young adult counterparts. I guarantee that newcomers my same age to my rural midwestern hometown would likely say that it seems insular and unfriendly. It's not a "JoCo" thing.
I think, in general, too, that it's much like the popular [fill in the blank with city name] is the worst city for being single!!! claim, which essentially every city has had made about it...by people who are not having success dating and want to be successful dating. When stuff doesn't, anecdotally, happen to be panning out for you the way you think it should, it's easy to overgeneralize and misattribute.
Shhh! It's too easy to use logic and reason. Just jump on the bandwagon and bash JoCo while ignoring every other bit of suburbia to ever exist anywhere.
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Originally Posted by James Bond 007
All you have to do is a quick search for the word "unfriendly" in thread titles and you'll see what I mean:
And so on, and so forth. No, there is nothing wrong with the people from all these cities. There is more likely something wrong with some people's expectations of the people around them.
Same reply as above.
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Originally Posted by shorman
I live in one of the suburbs of Wichita though, which in hindsight was a mistake. I think we may be the only non white couple in the neighborhood. A few weeks after we bought the house and moved in, the neighbor put up about a dozen Trump signs, could be coincidence or something else is going on.
I think you just ended up with crappy neighbors. Andover, Haysville, Valley Center, Derby, and Goddard average around a 5% of residents reporting their race as Hispanic or Latino, Park City nearly 9%, which had all grown a decent amount since 2000, but I guess you could live in Eastborough, Garden Plain, Cheney, Mulvane, or just legitimately have crappy neighbors, which can be found in any part of any city. I hope you can find somewhere to live where people are more receptive to outsiders, but I think you just got caught in between a rock and a hard place in your specific neighborhood between the antisocial and selfish tenancies of modern culture and bad neighbors. I can't comment on the Tump sign thing. There wasn't a lot of pro trump stuff sitting out here in Hays pre-election, but it has found a home post election... It's amazing how many confederate flags have showed up in what was a "free state" as well.
Last edited by empires228; 09-30-2017 at 11:31 AM..
I have been living in Johnson County (KC metro- Kansas side) for the last 2 1/2 years and I already want to move again, this time out of state! The locals do not accept people from different states. I grew up in Colorado (as well as west coast) and these people are so closed minded it drives me crazy! My family and I feel like outsiders, especially because we are not religious, we eat super healthy, we travel a lot, and the mother in law lives with us! The day we first moved into our house in Olathe, our neighbors talked to us, just once, just to get information about us. As soon as they heard we moved from out of state they all put a big red X on us and never said hello again! What is wrong with these people! To top it off the crime has gotten so bad in the KC metro area we don't even want to stick out this year! We want to move back to our west coast roots, who actually have personalities and understand us. Why do people have to be so closed minded, personality less to people who have not grown up here. It's so rude!
Am I the only one that thinks this way about Johnson County?
Bye. Take your crying ass back to the west coast. Tell them how everyone is a big old meanie in the Midwest!
Johnson County IS the most diverse part of the KC metro and of Kansas. All regions, races, nationalities, transplants and language are concentrated there. People that reside there also value family, faith and country. Makes a great place to live and cherish.
I don't know what this "kcmo" you claim to "love" is, but it's certainly neither the one I grew up in nor the one that actually exists today.
FTR, for those here who haven't encountered posts from me yet (I think that tally is one on this thread): Born and raised in 64130. Attended schools in 64110, then 64112. About half my classmates in the latter school lived in 66208, just across the street from the school. One of three black students in a class of 53 boys in said school. Three other black students at that school lived within three blocks of my East Side (Oak Park) home.
And yes, my old home neighborhood has gone downhill since I left Kansas City. But the statement above is very much detached from reality in one key respect, which I'll get to in a minute. See also below.
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Originally Posted by GraniteStater
There is a strong influence, and Hispanic/Latino populations in KC are likely 2nd in percentage terms after Chicago in the "Midwest." Wyandotte county remains the most diverse county in the metro area.
We have a winner.
Kansas City, Kansas, has long been more multiethnic than Kansas City, Mo. It had the larger Hispanic population and all of the Eastern European ethnic groups when I was growing up. I don't know what has happened to the folks on Strawberry Hill since then, and KCMo now edges out Wyandotte County in Hispanic population, but it does remain the most racially diverse of the metro area counties.
Right now, according to the latest Census estimates, the city of Kansas City, Mo., however, is slightly more diverse than Wyandotte County, which is now all but synonymous with Kansas City, Kan., thanks to the Unified Government. (Fewer whites, more blacks, slightly more Hispanics, fewer Asians and Native Americans.)
As for Johnson County? 87.3% white, 4.9% black, same percentage Asian, 0.4% Native American, 7.5% Hispanic or Latino.
cut(I'm making an assumption about lovekcmo, but given that poster's general statements, I think it's an accurate one.)
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Originally Posted by kcmo
If I had a dollar for every time somebody from there told me that JoCo was the richest county in the country, I would be rich.
It wasn't even the wealthiest county in the country when I was a lad, but it was in the top 25 back then. It's no longer even close to that rarefied club, IIRC.
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Originally Posted by dallasgoldrush
On a national scale Johnson County is not significant at all, because it's attached to a metro that's treading water and steadily declining in "tier".
(emphasis added) Here's the "nut graf," as they say in my line of work.
Kansas City was one of the nation's 25 largest metropolitan areas when I was a kid. It's fallen out of the top 30 now, and I believe Oklahoma City - which I tend to look down my nose at - has passed it on that ranking.
(Edited to add a bit of historical trivia: If you still have paper checks, take a look at the fractional number in the top right corner of your check. if your bank is based in Kansas City, Mo., the first number in the hyphenated numerator should be "18." That was the city's rank among U.S. cities in population in 1914, when the Federal Reserve System assigned numbers to banks for routing checks based on their location. The 20 largest cities' banks got routing numbers that were based on these cities' population in part. I don't know what these numbers are used for now, for routing is now handled via that nine-digit American Bankers Association routing number at the bottom left of your check.)
Yet I get the impression that many Kansas Citians still view themselves as residents of a top-25 city (or metro). Wake up, folks, we're traveling in the right-hand lane of the freeway, not the left one.
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Originally Posted by dallasgoldrush
My impression is a portion of Johnson County residents have a purely antagonistic attitude towards "Kansas City, Missouri", and believe they could stand on their own without the existence of KC, MO or any other central city (I'd love to be wrong about this).
This is not unique to Kansas City.
Suburban Detroit residents, I understand, also harbor this attitude, and given how Detroit imploded after the riots in 1967, they have some rational basis for their beliefs. But a study by a Philly Fed economist in the 1990s showed that metropolitan economies are definitely intertwined: suburbs of strong cities are better off economically than suburbs of weak ones are. (That Philly Fed economist is now a senior partner at a private economic consulting firm here in Philadelphia. I'm acquainted with both him and his architect wife.)
And to give some grudging acknowledgment of a point lovekcmo overstates, Kansas City, Mo. would be in much worse shape were it an "Eastern" city instead of a "Western" one. The city's annexation of all that corn and soybeans in Platte, Clay, and eastern and southern Jackson counties after World War II enabled it to capture a good chunk of its postwar suburban growth, and that growth offset the gradual depopulation of the old pre-World War II city up until 1970, when the city's population nudged above 500,000 by a few thousand. In hindsight, however, the riots of 1968 had the same effect on the built-up part of Kansas City that those of 1967 had on Detroit, something that didn't reveal itself until the 1980 Census figures showed the city having fewer residents than it did in 1950. Whole sections of what I knew as the heart of black Kansas City completely depopulated during this time, and much of that area remains prairie now: the 1900 block of Highland Avenue in the Jazz District has the feel of a Potemkin village for that reason.
The sentiment has declined as the central city's fortunes have recovered, but you can still find enough suburban Philadelphia residents who believe that if a bomb were dropped on Broad and Market tomorrow, life would continue unchanged. (Philadelphia City Hall sits astride what would otherwise be the intersection of Broad and Market streets, the city's two principal axes.)
modcut- inflammatory and not needed.
Last edited by GraniteStater; 10-01-2017 at 05:11 PM..
I also moved here from the west coast but do not find people to be any different than anywhere else. My neighbors are just fine.
These kinds of threads are so ridiculous.
It seems like it's everywhere.
My brother lived for a time in Northern Virginia suburbs of DC. He thinks it's hell on earth and moved out a year ago or so partially because of a military re-assingment, partially as the result of a divorce. Outside of Arlington the Northern VA suburbs seems pretty car-centric - and not incredibly pedestrial friendly. I am in the process of relocating to the DC area and our main office is in Northern Virginia suburbs. I don't know what KCMO is talking about, I really don't see any difference between Northern Virginia suburbs and KC suburbs. Maybe newer buildings and "fake" developments. But suprisingly lacking in some key things that JOCO has: bike trails and dedicated side-roads with proper markings so I didn't have to drive to work.
KCMO may have a thing against JOCO, but I don't get it...it's really a pretty nice place to live. I don't understand how you can say that the DC burbs are miles ahead of the JOCO...they are just all burbs. DC burbs might have some newer buildings but how does that actually add to quality of life?
I wasn't sure that I would like it when I first moved to JOCO but I found a groove for a while...and went nearly the entire summer without using my car because I could bike so easily to our Leawood office. That doesn't exist in some of these NOVA suburbs where there are sometimes no sidewalks! Luckily I can work from home/work from my apartment.
Johnson County is pretty cool, honestly...some people are not gonna be so great, but that's anywhere. It's a midwest suburban area that's very urbanized in a certain way. That is a plus you're not gonna get in such a large area anywhere in the metro..Olathe and OP have a lot of new restaurants and businesses that can be found only in more modern places. You won't see as much of that in North KC, Gladstone, Independence, Raytown, Blue Springs or Lee's Summit.
But just like the other kc suburbs it's gonna still have a lot of that family-oriented feel and many in the midwest are religious but definitely not all. Probably better off for transplants to live closer to the city itself, midtown area, westport. just naming a few...north of the river has a lot to offer too but it's often overlooked. Always seemed a bit less crowded up there too.
I agree that people who claim that "people in such-and-such" area are mean are the type of people who will find fault with everything no matter where they live.
My brother lived for a time in Northern Virginia suburbs of DC. He thinks it's hell on earth and moved out a year ago or so partially because of a military re-assingment, partially as the result of a divorce. Outside of Arlington the Northern VA suburbs seems pretty car-centric - and not incredibly pedestrial friendly. I am in the process of relocating to the DC area and our main office is in Northern Virginia suburbs. I don't know what KCMO is talking about, I really don't see any difference between Northern Virginia suburbs and KC suburbs. Maybe newer buildings and "fake" developments. But suprisingly lacking in some key things that JOCO has: bike trails and dedicated side-roads with proper markings so I didn't have to drive to work.
KCMO may have a thing against JOCO, but I don't get it...it's really a pretty nice place to live. I don't understand how you can say that the DC burbs are miles ahead of the JOCO...they are just all burbs. DC burbs might have some newer buildings but how does that actually add to quality of life?
I wasn't sure that I would like it when I first moved to JOCO but I found a groove for a while...and went nearly the entire summer without using my car because I could bike so easily to our Leawood office. That doesn't exist in some of these NOVA suburbs where there are sometimes no sidewalks! Luckily I can work from home/work from my apartment.
There is a HUGE difference between JoCo and NOVA. You may be thinking of the far flung parts of the area such as Loundon County which is more like JoCo both in built environment and culture, although still different. Even those areas are faster paced, and have much more dense development than JoCo does, especially areas along the Silver Metro line. Also the 95 corridor from Springfield on south is probably at least somewhat like JoCo, but still just much busier and more built up.
As you get closer to the beltway, Tyson's Corner, Alexandria all the way to the DC line including areas like Pentagon City and Rosslyn, there is absolutely no comparison between NOVA and JoCo. Even outer areas like Tyons. Just walk through Tysons Mall and then walk through Oak Park Mall. It's a completely different demographic. Much much more diverse (literally every person you look at will likely be from a different part of the world) and more affluent and yes, more sophisticated.
I'm not saying it's better. I'm saying it's different. Other than some of the office parks looking the same, they are very different and nothing in Kansas is or will ever even remotely resemble NOVO inside the beltway.
Having said that, the further out sprawly parts of NoVa are hell. I agree with that. Even Tysons is pretty much hell on earth because it's so freaking congested all the time. Traffic is horrendous there and commute times into DC are just nuts. As far as built environment that area is more like suburban Atlanta or Houston with 12 lane freeways and skyscrapers (with a more international vibe/culture). It's one reason I chose the Maryland suburbs. It's more "east coast" than the newer parts of NoVa.
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