Category: Uncategorized

The American Community Survey (2006-2008) has included a new table that identifies the mean household income of the highest 5% of households for communities with more than 20,000 residents. The statistics have some interesting patterns when compared to the mean household incomes of ALL households in a given place (The top 50 places on that [...]

Ferreting out election returns at the local level is fraught with difficulty as very few states publish the results on the web and the geography of precincts and boxes often is different from municipal boundaries. The five states that are in the table below consisted of three states that publish on the web (Minnesota, Wisconsin, [...]

The United States Census Bureau has recently announced a wealth of statistics on jurisdictions with over 20,000 people in the most recent American Community Survey.  Compiled from data over a three year period (2005-2007), Darien, Connecticut easily came in as the wealthiest town in America. Of course, the devil is in the definitions and the [...]

Central Cities Dominate the top of the Higley 1000
When one looks at the list of the 1,000 wealthiest neighborhoods in the United States, the information is so fine grained, that the larger picture can be lost. In order to give my readers a bit of perspective I have totaled up the the number of [...]

West Suburban Chicago
View Larger Map of Higley1000 neighborhoods in West Suburban Chicago
The West Suburban cluster of neighborhoods is centered on Oak Brook and Hinsdale. They are the odd couple of Chicago’s suburbs. Hinsdale (the Felix Unger of the two) is older, gracious and stately. Hinsdale’s lovely tree lined streets have been the site of [...]

As I have mentioned in my posting on wealthy urban neighborhoods, one cannot really compare entire city neighborhoods to homogenous single family suburban neighborhoods. The 69 suburban Chicago neighborhoods in the Higley 1000 have an average of of 624 households. The 11 contiguous central Chicago neighborhoods spotlighted in this essay have an average of 7,740 [...]

The Barrington Area
View Larger Map Higley 1000 Neighborhoods in the Barrington area
One could almost consider the Barrington Area as an annex to the North Shore. New upscale development was blocked to the north along the lakefront by downscale North Chicago and Waukegan, therefore it moved west. The Barrington area (as I have defined it) stretches [...]

Garden City
View Larger Map of Higley 1000 Neighborhoods in Garden City
In the late 1860s, Alexander T. Stewart, a wealthy New York merchant, won a bidding war with another local businessman and purchased the plains of the future Garden City for $55 an acre, a whopping sum at the time. Stewart was one of the early [...]

In many respects, Liberty Park is a typical gated community that one can find in any American metro area worth its salt. It may be a bit hokier than most with a replica of the Statue of Liberty near the entrance of the planned community, but it complements the regional Boy Scout headquarters that squats [...]