Briarcliff: Look north to find the best

"When you see more people and start recognizing your neighbors out on the streets, it feels like a neighborhood," said Brian Pitts, founder of the two-year-old Downtown Neighborhood Association.

Downtown’s character -- the charm of ornamental buildings, the glow of nightlife, the proximity to culture -- outweighed its drawbacks, such as a high rate of property crimes like vandalism. Contrary to popular perception, downtown even had plenty of retail services.

While suburbanites and tourists often consider the Country Club Plaza to be Kansas City’s "real" downtown, the actual downtown ranked ahead of it as a place to live.

Davidson and Big Shoal Valley

What are these? Where are these? Few city dwellers outside the Inner Northland probably know.

But they’re part of the Northland’s coming-out party in The Star’s ratings of neighborhood clusters.

If neighborhood clusters all across the city had been ranked against each other, Northland places such as Davidson and Big Shoal would have cracked the Top 10.

Davidson is home to the Northland Fountain and subdivisions like Davidson and Golden Oaks between Gladstone and the interstates. Big Shoal is just to the east, with subdivisions like Carriage Hill Estates and Ravenwood-Summerset that wrap around the southeast corner of Gladstone, and it’s home to Penguin Park with the giant statues of a penguin and a kangaroo on Vivion Road.

Davidson topped the Country Club Plaza overall. And Big Shoal generally outperformed the clusters of Roanoke, Hyde Park and the rest of midtown.

For years, the Northland has endured its share of slights. Like the time a southern city councilman referred to the Northland as "Montana," as in sparsely populated and rural-minded. And the period when newer Northland subdivisions couldn’t get telephone service, cutting them off from the world. Then there are the jokes about rednecks and rubes and gun racks.

"There’s always been a little ‘us versus them,’ a little inferiority complex," said Mike Burke, a longtime Northland political leader.

Now The Star’s quality-of-life measures establish a little superiority, or at least bragging rights.

They’re close-in, clean, safe, demographically diverse and offer a wide range of housing, from small ranches to parklike estates. That’s not necessarily exciting or fashionable, but it’s valuable in terms of quality of life.

"That’s very encouraging," said James Rice, executive director of Northland Neighborhoods Inc., an umbrella organization for the entire north side. "While we know we have some issues, especially some housing conditions under par, it’s good to know the inner neighborhoods have sustained themselves over a 50-year period."

Red Bridge

This is Brookside’s much younger sibling. Legendary residential developer, the J.C. Nichols Co., planned Red Bridge with a similar template -- upscale homes surrounding a quaint, car-oriented shopping center.

Except Red Bridge wouldn’t have cracked the Top 10 if all neighborhood clusters across the city had been ranked against each other.

For sure, this group of subdivisions south of Interstate 435, including Verona Hills, Glen Arbor and Bridlespur, has a lot going for it -- low violent crime, high homeownership rate and residents who landscape and keep up their upscale Tudors and colonials.

But this decade, it has one of the city’s worst rates of retail losses, and the second-lowest housing appreciation of any part of the city.