When Brett Spangler moved from Manhattan to Kansas City two years ago, he didn’t care much on which side of the state line he landed.

So he landed in Missouri.

“I was three blocks east of the (Kansas) state line, so I felt like I was still living in Kansas,” said Spangler, a Scott City native who works for a landscape architecture firm. “At the time, it really didn’t matter to me, Missouri or Kansas.”

During the late 1990s, more than 100,000 people moved from one side of the Missouri-Kansas border to the other, according to new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“That’s a lot of people,” said Luke Middleton, an analyst with Kansas University’s Policy Research Institute. “That’s the population of Lawrence.”

Missouri had a slight edge over Kansas in attracting defectors. More than 58,000 Kansans moved to the Show-Me State between 1995 and 2000, according to the Census, but just 53,000 Missourians made the reverse trip.

Middleton said Missouri’s edge didn’t necessarily mean that state was more attractive than Kansas. Instead, it reflects a high degree of mobility between the two states.

“There’s a heck of a lot of back-and-forth mobility between the two, and the difference is a small part of the total movement,” Middleton said. “Who knows — the difference might shift to Kansas the next five years.”

Steve Kelly, deputy secretary of the Kansas Department of Commerce and Housing, agreed.

U.S. Census Bureau – KansasU.S. Census Bureau – Missouri

“I don’t know that it’s anything … that I have a great deal of concern about,” he said. “It’s certainly something to watch.”

The Census Bureau suggested the trend was the same in states across the nation.

“For most states, the largest migrations inflows and outflows … were with the same state, often an adjacent or nearby neighbor,” Marc J. Perry, a bureau analyst, wrote in the report.

Perry said the reason, in most cases, was jobs. It’s no different in Kansas and Missouri.

“My guess is (it’s) jobs in Kansas City,” Middleton said. “I don’t know if there’s more jobs on the Missouri side than the Kansas side — it could be on the border, it could be a crapshoot as to which side they move to.”

Overall, 276,000 people moved to Kansas during the late 1990s, but 284,000 people left for another state.

But Middleton said the greater number of Kansas expatriates “isn’t a big chunk of the Kansas population.”

And he pointed out that the state, despite losing the movers, actually gained populations during the 1990s, growing due to births and immigration from other countries.

“You can make a case that people want to raise their children in Kansas,” Middleton said. “It’s a good place to have a baby.”

But it may not necessarily be a good place to be a young adult. When Spangler moved again a year ago, he deliberately went a little farther into the Missouri side of Kansas City, near Union Station.

“The Missouri side has more to offer, as far as unique places,” he said. “The reason I moved closer to downtown was because of the great urban pockets around — the restaurant scene, the bar scene. The Kansas side seemed a little bland.”