Lawrence and Ames Compared

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Mr. Beat compares and contrasts Lawrence, Kansas and Ames, Iowa, both college towns located in the American Midwest. Mr. Beat is a bit familiar, you could say, with Lawrence. He has help with Ames with Xander from the channel ARTexplains.

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Music by Drew Gerber. Photos by Shannon Beat. Footage by Matt Beat, Vanessa Castillo, and Xander Toftness.

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Shannon Beat

Andrew Johnston

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Matt Pryor

Lawrence, Kansas and Ames, Iowa

Two fairly typical college towns in the American Midwest. Located just 269 miles from each other, or about a 4 hour drive. Why am I comparing them?

Well I’m from Lawrence.

And I’m Xander from the channel ARTexplains. I live in Ames.

Both: And we’re filming a collaboration!

Both Lawrence and Ames are dominated by the major universities in each city. Lawrence is the home of the University of Kansas, the largest university in Kansas, and Ames is the home of Iowa State University, the largest university in Iowa.

So yeah, overwhelmingly the largest employer in both cities are those two universities. After that, most workers in both towns work for either the city government, school district, or hospital in town.

Both Lawrence and Ames are relatively cheap places to live compared to the rest of the country, although Ames is 3 percent more expensive than Lawrence.

Both are consistently ranked on various lists of the top college towns to raise a family or retire. I don’t know, though, aren’t those lists fairly arbitrary? Yeah, I think those lists are pretty much meaningless.

Both are about the exact same distance from major urban centers. Lawrence is short drive west from Kansas City, and Ames is a short drive north from Des Moines.

Both cities have similar, continental climates, although Lawrence gets more precipitation than Ames, and since Ames is further north it gets colder and gets more snowfall than Lawrence.

Both cities are on the prairie, in areas where lots of agriculture is going on. Farmers represent. Wheat tends to be more common around Lawrence, and not to sound corny, but corn is all around us in Ames.

Both cities were founded during the Civil War Era. Kansas in 1854, and Ames in 1864. Now, Lawrence had a much more chaotic first few years compared to Ames. It started with the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a law which said the people living in Kansas and Nebraska territories could vote on whether they wanted slavery to be legal or not when they voted for statehood. This idea of popular sovereignty to determine whether or not Kansas would be a slave state or not caused a flood of Americans to migrate there. Many of the first settlers of Lawrence were Free Staters, or those who wanted Kansas to be a free state. However, due to developing a reputation as a Free Stater hotbed, Lawrence became a huge target for pro-slavery bushwhackers, who raided the town multiple times, most famously during the Lawrence Massacre, aka Quantrill’s Raid. The violence in Lawrence and around the state was so bad it became known as Bleeding Kansas.

Uh, yeah, Ames was pretty quiet and chill in its early years. It was pretty much just a railroad crossing.

Lawrence has a lot more people living there than Ames. Lawrence recently crossed the 100,000 mark, while Ames has around 67,000 people.

Ames has lower taxes than Lawrence. We just pay a 7% sales tax rate and we don’t pay taxes on groceries like you silly Kansans.

Yeah we pay taxes on groceries and over a 9% sales tax. But property taxes are a little lower in Lawrence so there’s that.

Ames has more residents with bachelor’s degrees and a higher graduation rate than Lawrence. Ames also has a lower unemployment rate currently than Lawrence.

Are you sure about that, Xander? It’s pretty low here. It’s 3.3%.

Yeah, it’s 2.1% in Ames.

Ames has significantly better air quality than Lawrence.

Lawrence has less poverty than Ames.