Baltimore
put forth a hell of an effort to win high-speed Internet courtesy of Google Fiber, but last week the prize went instead to Kansas City, Kansas.
"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."
Head to
the Wall Street Journal for more.