Stupid non-american question: Is any of these Kansas?
It’s a common pub quiz factoid that Kansas City is not in Kansas
Kansas state is the rectangle on the right; Kansas City is one of those weird things which exists in both Kansas and Missouri next to each other, one was named after the other. Technically one is a small suburb of the other (150k ppl vs 2m ppl) - but for pub trivia, it does exist by name as an incorporated city in the state of Kansas.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City,_Kansas
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City,_Missouri
The Missouri one is the bigger, more populated well known “KC” which is probably why it gets added to foreign pub trivia incorrectly (just a guess).
Additional fun fact, Kansas has in the past attempted to annex Kansas City, Missouri.
The metro area being split between MO and KS has also caused a race to the bottom for certain kinds of regulations and taxes because for many businesses the cost of moving between the two states was essentially moving from one side of State Line Rd to the other.
Such a strange metro area.
The cities also indexed their streets off of the same river, but at different places along the curving bank. As a result, traveling south in KCMO increments the street numbers, but in KCK, the numbers increment when you travel west.
For more hilarity, the cities to the south of KCK adopted the KCMO street number designations, so KCK is the odd city out.
“Left geographically”. Damn, such a mouthful. If only there were a word for that… /s
Several border cities in the Midwestern United States are this way.
From the map at https://kchistory.org/faq/why-there-kansas-city-both-kansas-and-missouri, it looks like ~90% of Kansas City is in Missouri:-) (I dunno about differential population density though)
And in the same state a good portion of the greater city area surrounding St. Louis lies in Illinois (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Louis)
The area around Chicago - TIL it is called “Chicagoland”, can anyone comment how often that is used by people in the region? - likewise extends into multiple (more than just two) states!
can anyone comment how often that is used by people in the region?
Frequently, though it’s mostly informal shorthand for “the greater Chicago metropolitan area”, you probably wouldn’t say “I live in Chicagoland” unless you were intentionally being vague.
Still probably cousins
Must really suck to be from a state so bad that the city named after it is worse than the Missouri part of it!
That’s like losing a spelling bee where the tiebreaker is how to spell your child’s name!
iirc Kansas allows abortions whereas Missouri does not? Missouri is also where Josh Harley is from. Kansas fluctuates back and forth between more conservative vs. liberal, whereas Missouri iirc is more solidly conservative.
I say this less to pick on any one place in particular, more to highlight how nuances can be pretty important to someone’s quality of life having to live in it.
KC Missouri is the fun side. KC Kansas is for the folks who want to live in a somewhat urban setting, but still be WASP-y about it.
Maybe Johnson County, like Lenexa or Overland Park are waspy, but at least when I lived in the area, KCK itself was where you went if you wanted to develop a meth problem.
Granted it has been a decade or so since I lived there.
KCK is pit while Johnson county is WASP Central. Jackson County was for cool kids. We also love meth, but are chill about it
Most of Kansas city is in Missouri. It’s more a joke to outsiders than people who actually live there.
