AJoD wrote:
I moved here from Chicago about 8 months ago. I've got two kids, third due in August, and we are in NE Johnson County. We moved entirely to be close to family, and I was fortunate to keep my same job, and I'm now working at home.
I'm still trying to maintain a positive attitude about KC, and I figure I gotta give myself about 5 years to warm up to a place, but man, I don't recall who posted about there not being much day-to-day difference. Wow, I don't find that to be true at all. Granted, working at home is a big personal change, but still...
First, the cost of living issue is really about housing. We sold a nice but modest 2 BR condo in Albany Park (heavy immigrant, "on the rise" neighborhood, we were also quite close to very trendy Lincoln Square) and for just a bit more purchased a 4 BR home with a big yard in Mission. Huge difference in the amount of house for your money.
Moving anywhere takes a year or so to acclimate. Some of the changes you have made are going to make you take a little longer maybe. You moved from a fairly urban area to a fairly suburban area. You won't find the same things in those areas.
But. My mortgage payment is not any lower, and home ownership has a lot of additional costs, some financial, many in time. Even the hour or two it takes to mow my lawn is an hour or two more than before. That's not taking into account cleaning gutters, fixing leaky roofs, spraying for bugs, maintaining the deck, trimming trees, landscaping, etc., etc. I spend my "free" time a lot differently than I used to.
If you owned your home before and you spent "just a bit more"-you can't expect your mortgage to be cheaper, but I'll bet you will find both taxes and insurance cheaper on your new place. Did you buy a "fixer upper?" Sounds like you are spending a lot of time on that kind of thing. Of course if you owned before, you were spending some time on it too.
And house-for-the-money aside, I don't really see the cost of living as cheaper. Restaurants on average are cheaper, but they're also much worse (BBQ excepted) and a much worse value for the money. Your $100 per person value is much better in Chicago. And on the low end, you can find all sorts of great restaurants where you can eat a meal for 5 bucks or less. Here, you've got people standing in line for a 1/2 hour for free Chipotle.
I think you are comparing neighborhood places to 'burb places. And for sure you will find less expensive places to eat in many neighborhoods than you will in the burbs if you look for independents.
Groceries, too. The chains here are much better and somewhat cheaper than in Chicago, but I never shopped at the chains there. Here, I don't have much choice. The farmer's markets here are more expensive for the really good stuff and with much, much less to offer.
I think groceries here are awful. We are controlled by the big guys who only buy from AWG for the most part and so you can't always get some of even the more basic items-selection is poor. The prices are a bit more too IMHO or at least they were when we moved here from STL in 1998.
The independents seem to have a lot of "old" stuff a lot of the time as you say and the quality is sometimes not top notch for the prices.
Give the farmer's markets here a chance. This was a VERY bad winter for them. Things will be slim and cost more this year and I'll bet they will in Chicago too if they had the late freezes we did. Our City Market is top notch especially if you stay away from the perimeter. Just not as big, I'm sure.
Good cheese costs sometimes twice as much per pound here, there's only a handful of options, and turnover is so low your quality is markedly worse. Wine is going to cost you anywhere from $2-5 more for the same bottle.
All I can say is watch for sales. I've never noticed that, but you probably are correct. Especially if you are buying in an upscale area like the Plaza.
But it's not just food. I'm lucky I work at home, so we didn't have to buy a second car. If we did, that price would have far surpassed the $75 pre-tax I payed for a monthly CTA pass that gave me access to the whole city. There are about 4 bars within a pretty easy walk of my house (more other places, but that's actually pretty good for JoCo I think). If I go to Harry's in the City Market, I'm driving 20 minutes, a cab would probably be $40 if I could get it easily, and if I drive I'm facing the prospect of sobriety checkpoints on weekends. Choose your location carefully if you like to visit bars.
Take a DD if you want to go to bars outside of walking distance. It's more fun with a group anyway. And the prime reason for taking a DD should be not driving when you have been drinking rather than fear of the sobriety checks. We live in the Northland, find the sobriety checks often. The biggest trouble we have is keeping the drunks in the back seat quiet while we go through. I am a primo DD.
It costs me $118 for a round-trip plane ticket from MCI to Midway. It costs $100 round-trip for the KCI Shuttle to take me from my home to the airport. Gas is cheaper here, but we use a hell of a lot more gas.
Most of that is because of where you live, but there has to be a less expensive way to get to the airport. I'll come and get you and take you back for $100. But keep in mind that the ticket FROM Midway to MCI costs the same so the plane ticket price is a wash. And if you are talking trips for your work, do you get reimbursed? My husband flies every week. We chose our place in the Northland because of that. We are 12 miles door to door from the gates. I can make a round trip on about a gallon of gas.
I haven't had a chance to explore all KC's cultural attractions yet or wander all the neighborhoods, and I'm sure there is some good value. But if you want to see a first-class Shakespeare performance or good independent theater, my sense is that it's going to cost you a plane ticket and hotel stay on top of the cost of the show. (I will say the Nelson-Atkins is first class, even before the addition.)
You are comparing a world class city with all it's cultural amenities with a middle tier city. Apples and oranges. KC has great amenities for the size of city we are and getting more all the time.
Most music acts I'm interested in (or have thought about being interested in) passed through Chicago, often regularly. Not so here.
KC gets their share too. But Chicago is bigger.
In Chicago, there is tons of FREE stuff to do. For example, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra summer series at Grant Park. My point is, you can be very entertained there for very little money. I think there's lots of free stuff here too, but let's just say the Mission Arts and Eats Festival doesn't really stack up to the Chicago Folk & Roots Festival (okay, I think they request a $5 donation).
There is free stuff here to do, but I'm not the one to tell you about it. I'll leave that to some of the others. As far as the two festivals mentioned-Apples and oranges again.
I don't mean to just sit here and bag on Kansas City, but it drives me nuts when people talk about how cheap it is to live here. Very few people would buy the same size living space here they had in Chicago (or Minneapolis or wherever) and chalk up the savings to cheaper cost of living. Lower cost of living means a bigger house and more land for the same amount of money.
Lower cost to me means apples and apples. Square foot to square foot. Taxes to taxes. Insurance to insurance. Groceries to groceries. Yes, if a bigger house for the same money is what you want, that is fine, but you have to compare it fairly and count your expenditure accordingly.
Oh, and schools. If you live in the city in Chicago, you may want to send your kids to private school (though not as much as KCMO), and that's quite a bit more, I think.
You have to be choosy about your school districts here of course, but schools are good in many places here, even some in the KCMO district. I'm betting also, the private educations are cheaper here than Chicago.
The other dominant feature that was really surprising to me upon investigating the move is how freaking balkanized this metro area is. The state line and Mason Dixon line splits here have quite a lingering legacy, far as I can tell. It seems like the area has so much potential, it has such rich history, and there's some momentum toward progress. But I'm absolutely shocked at the sort of inertia and conflict politically, and especially culturally, mostly between KCMO and Johnson County, but even with the Missouri burbs and KCK to a lesser extent.
I'll get roundly flamed for this, but I think you will find that the most conflict is from KCMO folk "telling" you what JOCO folk are saying about them. You can see this stuff all over these boards.
I don't know if I quite realized that most people here in JoCo don't want bars within walking distance of their home. Or any retail business establishment.
Many of us are that way. We want our home to be peaceful and quiet and calm. We want the amenities around our homes to be parks and lakes and libraries, schools, etc.
That may be changing a little, but the anti-JoCo faction is still going to spew "too cool for school" nonsense to the west. It's petty and aggravating.
I doubt it is changing, and I hope it is not except I think the anti JOCO folk need to calm down and pay attention to what is really happening rather than what they perceive to be happening. Yep, there are many of us who choose to live in other places than the city. They need to get over it. It's a fact of life.
On the plus side, people seem to really like it here. My neighbors are quite nice, and it's nice to have neighbors with whom you can be neighborly. A few years down the road, maybe "a slower pace of life" will be an advantage. And best of all, my kids are much more accessible to their grandparents. There are a lot less people, less traffic, and it's less busy--That appeals to many people, and I can't criticize that. Compared to other similar-sized cities, I can't really offer any insight. I have no reason to think KC is much worse, but I sure look forward to my regular trips back to Chicago.
We have the nicest neighbors I can ever hope to have. We do tons of things in our neighborhood and don't find a whole lot of reason to go elsewhere for entertainment daily.
OTOH-I hope you always enjoy your trips "home" to Chicago. I LOVE Chicago too. But I could never live there. Waaaaay too many people and too much hustle and bustle for me.
JMHO, I wonder if you might not have liked it better if you moved to a place closer in to the city more like what you were used to in Chicago.
) Rather, it seems to me there's a huge separation between "people with kids" and "people without kids"...there are a lot of activities for "people with kids", but man, most of them are so over-the-top kid-oriented they're painful for adults. Shortly after we moved they had ads on TV with a little girl begging for soccer fields like a starving child begging for a bowl of rice. It was disgusting. Have you seen all the summer camps they advertise around here? On the other side, adults in Westport or at First Fridays in the Crossroads (gross generalization) seem somewhat less tolerant of families. Libraries, parks, and parks district programming here for kids has--surprisingly--proven to be a major step down.)
