The older neighborhoods of JoCo are so much better than the new garbage.
it is pretty sad what is happening to most of the hoods outside of PV, Fairway and Leawood
describe what is happening
your prototypical Joco family - 2 parents with bachelors degrees and couple of kids - will only buy a house in the SM East district or the newer neighborhoods out South or West. So in Merriam, Roeland Park and the older parts of OP, Shawnee and Lenexa home prices have fallen and there are more rental houses. A lot of the houses are at least 40 years old and are not being maintained at the typical JoCo level and it looks like the beginning of a downward spiral for those areas.
Whenever we visit the family in OP, my parents have lived in OP for 50 years. We go to the Ross Community Center in dtwn OP (nice place) I get a workout and the rest stay and hoop and such. While they're there I drive around old OP, and while some it is depressing, some of those older home/lots are cool and have so much potential for someone wanting a huge lot in an older neighborhood. There's lots in my parents neighborhood that got extended out to nearly 3/4's of acre when they did a sewer project many years ago.
I also credit the city of Overland Park for coming back in with grant money to redo older shopping centers like Cherokee Shopping Center to keep them up. Those are the kinds of things I do miss about living in OP, the relatively well maintained roads, good street lights and traffic control systems. You don't appreciate those things until you live somewhere and those things suck, or they're way behind on traffic/road improvement.