Is Kansas City right for you?

There are a few blocks — the River Market, the Crossroads, a strip of Main Street — where a person can genuinely live on foot and on the streetcar, which is free and now runs from the riverfront to UMKC. Those blocks are real, they are lovely, and they are a rounding error against the size of this metro.

Everywhere else, transit will not get you to work. Not “it is inconvenient.” It will not get you there. Every household in this city is budgeting for at least one car, and most for two, and if that sentence is a dealbreaker you should stop reading and go look at a city with a subway. It is a perfectly good reason not to move here.

What you get in exchange is the shortest commute of any major metro most people have ever lived in — 23.7 minutes on average. That is not a consolation prize. Over thirty years it is thousands of hours of your life. But it is a trade, and I will not pretend it isn't.

The metro median sale price is $350,000 against a median household income of $83,785. Hover either number and you get the source. That ratio is the entire argument for Kansas City, and it is the one thing on this site nobody has ever written to me to dispute.

A whole house. A yard. A garage. Not a one-bedroom with a view of a light well. Families who move here from Chicago or either coast tend to spend the first month quietly recalibrating what their money is.

The catch is which side of the state line you buy on, and it is a six-figure catch. Johnson County, Kansas runs $486,000; Jackson County, Missouri runs $299,000. Same metro. Same drive to the same job. The gap is mostly school districts, and whether it is worth paying is a question only your family can answer.

August is humid in a way that is difficult to describe to someone who has not stood in it. January ices over, and the ice is worse than the snow because nothing here shuts down for it. Spring brings genuine storms, and every few years hail does genuine damage to genuine roofs.

We do not publish a number for any of that, because we do not have a weather statistic we can source to our own standard, and a made-up one would be worse than none. What we can tell you is what it costs when the sky misbehaves: read the honest cons for the wind-and-hail deductible question, which is the single most under-discussed cost of owning a house in this metro.

Nobody moves away from Kansas City because of one hot August. People do move away because they discovered, in a fourth February, that they need the sun. Only you know which of those you are.

This is the shortest section on the page because it is the least arguable. There is no coast. There is no range. There is a river, there are bluffs north of it, there are lakes an hour out, and there is a great deal of sky.

People who need altitude or salt water in their weekends are not talked out of it by a low property tax rate. They move here, they last three years, and they sell — usually to me, and usually at a loss on transaction costs alone. If that is you, spend your money on a plane ticket to Denver instead, and I mean that without any sarcasm at all.

The metro unemployment rate is 3.5% against a national 4.1% — same month, same seasonal-adjustment basis, so the comparison is honest. It is a metro of 2,254,288 people, which is big enough to have an economy and small enough that the big employers are countable. Here they are, with their sources.

Read the notes. One of the largest names on this list is shrinking, and we have said so rather than quietly leaving it off. A jobs list that contains only good news is an advertisement.

Where a headcount is missing above, it is missing on purpose. Several primary sources we wanted — Ford's own plant page among them — could not be read, and the secondary sources disagree with each other by hundreds of people. A figure we cannot show you the receipt for is not worth having, so those entries carry a location and an industry and nothing else.

One thing that catches almost everybody: if your desk ends up in Kansas City, Missouri, you owe the 1% earnings tax even if you live in Kansas. It follows your desk, not your house. Ask where the office is before you ask what the salary is.

Nobody here is impressed by your address. There is no neighborhood you can buy into that will make a stranger at a party reassess you. Leawood is beautiful and it does not confer status; it confers a school district and a lawn. That is either the most restful thing you have ever heard or it is a problem, and you know which one within about four seconds of reading it.

The corollary, which is the part I actually like: nobody is going to be impressed by your restraint either. You will be judged on whether you show up, and on whether you brought something. That is the whole social contract and it takes about a year to feel it.

And the city will bill you like anywhere else. The average KC Water bill is $142.77 a month — a real, unglamorous, monthly cost that no zip code exempts you from.