Quick, describe the area around Kansas City International Airport.</p><p>Office parks, farm pastures and maybe that bull statue along the interstate, right?</p><p>Right -- and some of the top-rated neighborhoods in Kansas City, too.</p><p>Of course, they aren&#8217;t your typical urban neighborhoods with arching trees, criss-crossing streets and loads of legacy. Instead, they&#8217;re mini-mansions without trees. They&#8217;re estates on acres of land. They&#8217;re new subdivisions across the street from old barns.</p><p>It&#8217;s a little bit country, a little bit city, a little bit suburb.</p><p>"You&#8217;re in the big city, yet it&#8217;s like you&#8217;re in a small town," said Larry Faitz, who moved there six years ago.</p><p>KCI&#8217;s blend helped give it the best quality of life on Kansas City&#8217;s northern outskirts.</p><p>The Star&#8217;s series on neighborhoods is profiling the top-performing cluster in each section, one section each day. Today&#8217;s section is the Outer Northland, roughly north of Northwest 68th Street in Platte County and Northeast Pleasant Valley Road in Clay County.</p><p>The top performer in the Outer Northland was the KCI cluster, a large expanse basically west of U.S. 169 and north of Missouri 152.</p><p>But don&#8217;t feel badly if all this is news to you.</p><p>"If you don&#8217;t pay attention or just drive to the airport, you don&#8217;t see all the dirt moving," said Pete Fullerton, executive director of the Platte County Economic Development Council. "For a lot of natives in this metropolitan area, there&#8217;s still a surprise of, &#8216;Wow, you wear shoes up there?&#8217; "</p><p>Indeed, after the airport opened in the early 1970s, city leaders waited for a growth boom around it. And waited. And waited. Only in the last decade has the area finally taken off, thanks to the new Missouri 152 and increased interest in being close to the airport.</p><p>In some ways now, KCI neighborhoods are becoming Kansas City&#8217;s version of southern Johnson County -- mostly white and affluent with good schools, upscale housing, low crime, plenty of open space, a recognized office corridor and an ever-expanding choice of retail centers.</p><p>But it&#8217;s not Johnson County yet. KCI is still a new opportunity. It&#8217;s the mostly blank canvas of an Impressionist painting, with different painters taking turns applying dots of color to create a clear picture.</p><p>Some of those painters want it to resemble the Kansas suburbs. Other painters want it to look more citylike, with some urban densities.</p><p>For now, though, KCI&#8217;s hybrid of country-city-suburban life is serving Kansas City quite well. Well enough to attract families such as the Lockharts.</p><p>Shirley Lockhart and her husband started raising their children in a post-World War II house with tiny bedrooms, and on a block with no other young kids. So they traded that for the Bristol Park subdivision, where their new home has an open floor plan, the development has two pools and their street has "kids like you wouldn&#8217;t believe," Lockhart said.</p><p>It&#8217;s also a place where the three Lockhart kids can grow up not only reading about farm animals but seeing them, too -- cows, calves, horses, even peacocks out a bedroom window.</p><p>"This is a cul-de-sac that backs right up to a historic farm," Lockhart said.</p><p>Outer Northland</p><p>The Outer Northland is divided into six neighborhood clusters: KCI, Zona Rosa and the North Line Creek Valley on the Platte side, and Metro North-Gashland, Nashua-Northern North Oak and the Shoal Creek Valley on the Clay side.</p><p>They include some of the Northland&#8217;s most notable landmarks, such as the airport, Hodge Park and the neo-traditional Zona Rosa shopping district.