New Lift for Kansas Town

Technology companies tend to target markets teeming with highly educated professionals. But this week, Google Inc. turned that tradition on its head. After a yearlong search for a place to build a super-fast Internet network, Google eschewed places like Los Angeles, Chicago and Seattle in favor of blue-collar Kansas City, Kansas.

Google is planning to launch the service in a city where only one in eight residents over the age of 25 had a bachelor's degree, and one in four failed to graduate from high school, according to U.S. census data. In 2008, the median household income in KCK, as the city is known, was $39,000, well below the Kansas average of $50,000.

The unlikely nature of Google's choice was perhaps most deeply appreciated across the state line in three-times-larger Kansas City, Mo., home of art museums, professional sports teams and high-tech companies. Until recently, "Kansas City, Kan., was disparaged as the armpit of the metro area—if not all of Kansas," said a Thursday column in the Kansas City Star, based in Kansas City, Mo. Yet the Google decision represents the latest in a series of comebacks for a city that 15 years ago was on the brink of disaster. The closing of steel plants and meatpacking factories reduced KCK's population to below 150,000 from a 1970 high of 168,000. Its public finances, meanwhile, were so strained that residents voted in 1997 to merge the city and county governments, largely to cut costs. Meanwhile, the rest of metropolitan Kansas City was largely thriving, thanks in part to high-tech companies like Sprint, based in a prosperous suburb called Overland Park. Then the leadership of KCK began offering tax incentives for businesses and entertainment companies to develop the city's western acreage, and the balance of power in metropolitan Kansas City, home to about two million people, started to shift. A racetrack featuring Nascar competitions opened, followed by a shopping center, hotels and amusement parks. Suddenly, 10 million visitors annually, many from several states away, began pouring into KCK.