So, for the past week, The Kansas City Star has presented the city’s best places to live in different sections of town. Now we can reveal the best of the best, the No. 1 cluster of neighborhoods overall.
It features charming architecture, home-grown shops and a sense of serenity. If you haven’t guessed it already, here’s a hint: It starts with a B.
No, not Brookside.
Kansas City’s top-ranked place: Briarcliff.
It’s that mixture of the older Briarcliff neighborhood and newer Briarcliff West development, all south of Vivion Road and west of North Oak Trafficway in the Northland.
Yes, North beat South. That’s one of the final surprises in The Star’s ratings of the city’s best neighborhoods. Kansas City’s Northland, long the brunt of jokes and burdened with an inferiority complex, can today pump its collective fist, thump its chest, and like in any big upset, paint No. 1 on its forehead.
"It’s a new world," said John Dillingham, a long-standing Northland civic leader. "It’s nice to see the Northland getting its due."
Of course, it’s heresy to urbanites.
"I would not choose to live there," said Kite Singleton, a well-known urban core architect and advocate. "I much prefer the urbanity and charm of Brookside."
In some regards, No. 1 Briarcliff and No. 2 Brookside are a lot alike. Both are mixtures of million-dollar mansions and middle-class bungalows. Both were planned, in part, by celebrated real estate developers. Both remain clean and stable and well-kept. And both have their own quaint retail shopping villages.
Yet what set Briarcliff apart in The Star’s analysis were also things Michelle Wagoner discovered when she and her husband looked there after deciding to move out of Brookside this year: Briarcliff, as the analysis confirms, is fresher, cheaper, roomier and calmer.
It’s safer, and it has more restaurants, shopping options and park land, when measured on a per-person basis. You get more house for the money, and the homes don’t break down as much. Plus, it’s hilly and filled with ribbons of green space as well as views of the downtown skyline.
In a nutshell, it’s a combination of plush and lush suburbia close to the middle of the city.
In fact, when The Star compared clusters of neighborhoods in 34 quality-of-life measures, Briarcliff finished in the city’s top 10 in half of them, more than any other neighborhood cluster by far.
"We had no idea until we looked up here," said Wagoner, a self-described Brookside-lover who moved as she and her husband were about to become empty nesters. "We were surprisingly thrilled. I didn’t know we’d like it so much."
Throughout this series on city neighborhoods, The Star ranked clusters of neighborhoods within each geographic section of the city. The purpose was to compare neighborhood clusters against their peers and not one part of town against another. Neighborhood leaders repeatedly told us they preferred it that way. So we are not providing citywide rankings -- except for the very top spots.
Still, there were other notable surprises besides Briarcliff in how neighborhood clusters ended up overall:
Downtown
A decade ago, downtown wasn’t much more than a mix of office towers and vacant buildings. Today, it’s obviously rebounding. But who could have predicted its overall citywide ranking would be right below Brookside?
Yes, downtown can really be considered a neighborhood now. Once upon a time, Quality Hill and Crown Center were oases of new development. But this decade alone, the corridor from the Missouri River to 31st Street has added more than 3,150 housing units, good for more than 5,000 additional residents, scattered from Columbus Park to Union Hill.
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