This is a small community in a single neighborhood.
As throughout the site, some neighborhood-level data are reserved for subscribers.
What do we mean by a neighborhood?
NeighborhoodScout® uses the official government designation for neighborhoods - the census tract.
Census tracts are small, relatively permanent subdivisions of a county that are defined by the U.S. Census Bureau in conjunction with local authorities all across the country to define real neighborhoods that are bounded to contain areas with homogeneous population characteristics (including economic status, lifestyle, and living conditions). Census tracts usually have 4,000 persons, but can range between 1,500 and 8,000 persons. This is the most fine-grained area for which detailed information is made available from the government, to protect the individual privacy of each of us. Because census tracts are based on population, they vary in size depending on the density of settlement. In urban areas, they are small, and in rural areas they can cover an entire small town or even a few small towns in very rural areas.
Since census tracts are subdivisions of a county, we did a spatial overlay of the census tracts onto city and town boundaries using a geographic information system to properly assign each census tract to its appropriate city or town. Then we named each census tract to the local colloquially recognized neighborhood name for that spot (e.g., Boston, MA (Dorchester). If there was not a name available, we named the census tract by the largest street intersection in the census tract (e.g., Worcester, MA (Lincoln St/Plantation St)
Why we don't use Zip Codes as neighborhoods
Zip codes were developed by the Postal Service for the purpose of delivering mail, but were never intended to define coherent neighborhoods. In addition, Zip Codes can have as many as 10 distinctly different census tracts contained within them. When distinct census tracts are blended together in a single Zip Code, the data reflects their average conditions and often gives a false sense of the area. The result is that potentially great matching neighborhoods can be missed, and erroneous matches can also be produced and delivered to you.
Using census tracts makes great matches possible, and helps people find the areas that are best for them and their families. Because we are committed to providing the highest possible quality and finding the neighborhoods that best meet your criteria, we use census tracts. And, as always, we show you the actual street map of the neighborhood so you know exactly where your best matching neighborhood is located.
What is a Condition Alert?
A condition alert is a condition in the neighborhood that triggers an alert. NeighborhoodScout contains condition alerts to highlight conditions that are extreme, whether good or bad. This helps answer crucial questions about the state of the neighborhood being evaluated, such as:
What are the risks of violent crime here?
Is the risk of home break-ins or other property crimes increasing?
Does real estate here hold its value?
Are the trends in local vacancies or unemployment concerning?
...and dozens more.
Information at a glance that you need to know to invest, appraise or finance a property.
Highwood is a somewhat small city located in the state of Illinois. With a population of 5,304 people and just one neighborhood, Highwood is the 337th largest community in Illinois.
Highwood home prices are not only among the most expensive in Illinois, but Highwood real estate also consistently ranks among the most expensive in America.
Occupations and Workforce
Highwood is a decidedly white-collar city, with fully 85.45% of the workforce employed in white-collar jobs, well above the national average. Overall, Highwood is a city of professionals, service providers, and sales and office workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Highwood who work in teaching (11.47%), sales jobs (11.14%), and food service (9.97%).
Of important note, Highwood is also a city of artists. Highwood has more artists, designers and people working in media than 90% of the communities in America. This concentration of artists helps shape Highwood’s character.
A relatively large number of people in Highwood telecommute to their jobs. Overall, about 12.26% of the workforce works from home. While this may seem like a small number, as a fraction of the total workforce it ranks among the highest in the country. These workers are often telecommuters who work in knowledge-based, white-collar professions. For example, Silicon Valley has large numbers of people who telecommute. Other at-home workers may be self-employed people who operate small businesses out of their homes.
Setting & Lifestyle
The overall crime rate in Highwood is one of the lowest in the US. This makes it one of the safer places to live in the country in terms of crime.
Even though Highwood is a smaller city, it has many people who hop on public transportation – mostly the train for their daily commute to work. Typically, these people are commuting to good jobs in the surrounding cities.
Demographics
The education level of Highwood citizens is very high relative to the national average among all cities (21.84%): 39.61% of adults in Highwood have a bachelor's degree or even advanced degree.
The per capita income in Highwood in 2022 was $46,257, which is wealthy relative to Illinois and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $185,028 for a family of four. However, Highwood contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
Highwood is an extremely ethnically-diverse city. The people who call Highwood home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Highwood residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Highwood also has a sizeable Hispanic population (people of Hispanic origin can be of any race). People of Hispanic or Latino origin account for 38.66% of the city’s residents. Important ancestries of people in Highwood include German, Italian, Irish, Polish, and English.
Foreign born people are also an important part of Highwood's cultural character, accounting for 22.88% of the city’s population.
The most common language spoken in Highwood is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Italian.
Notable & Unique Neighborhood Characteristics
The way a neighborhood looks and feels when you walk or drive around it, from its setting, its buildings, and its flavor, can make all the difference. This neighborhood has some really cool things about the way it looks and feels as revealed by NeighborhoodScout's exclusive research. This might include anything from the housing stock to the types of households living here to how people get around.
People
One of the really interesting characteristics about the neighborhood is that, according to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive research, it is an excellent choice in which to reside for college students. Due to its popularity among college students who already choose to live here, its walkability, and its above average safety from crime, the neighborhood is ideal for prospective or already-enrolled college students. Between semesters and during school breaks, you'll notice that the excitement here fluctuates with the college seasons. Despite the excitement however, parents of college-age children can rest easy knowing that this neighborhood has an above average safety rating. For each of these reasons, the neighborhood is rated among the top 0.7% of college-friendly places to live in the state of Illinois.
Occupations
With 2.5% of employed workers living in the neighborhood active in the military, this neighborhood has the distinction of having a higher proportion of people in the military than 97.1% of American neighborhoods. This is a major shaper of the neighborhood's culture and character.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Romanian and Russian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 2.1% of this neighborhood's residents have Romanian ancestry and 3.8% have Russian ancestry.
The Neighbors
There are two complementary measures for understanding the income of a neighborhood's residents: the average and the extremes. While a neighborhood may be relatively wealthy overall, it is equally important to understand the rate of people - particularly children - who are living at or below the federal poverty line, which is extremely low income. Some neighborhoods with a lower average income may actually have a lower childhood poverty rate than another with a higher average income, and this helps us understand the conditions and character of a neighborhood.
The neighbors in the neighborhood in Highwood are upper-middle income, making it an above average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 75.8% of the neighborhoods in America. With 17.5% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 64.6% of U.S. neighborhoods.
The old saying "you are what you eat" is true. But it is also true that you are what you do for a living. The types of occupations your neighbors have shape their character, and together as a group, their collective occupations shape the culture of a place.
In the neighborhood, 46.4% of the working population is employed in executive, management, and professional occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants, with 28.1% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations (14.2%), and 11.3% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The languages spoken by people in this neighborhood are diverse. These are tabulated as the languages people preferentially speak when they are at home with their families. The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 60.7% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Italian.
Ethnicity / Ancestry
Culture is shared learned behavior. We learn it from our parents, their parents, our houses of worship, and much of our culture – our learned behavior – comes from our ancestors. That is why ancestry and ethnicity can be so interesting and important to understand: places with concentrations of people of one or more ancestries often express those shared learned behaviors and this gives each neighborhood its own culture. Even different neighborhoods in the same city can have drastically different cultures.
In the neighborhood in Highwood, IL, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Mexican (35.3%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (17.5%), and residents who report Irish roots (11.1%), and some of the residents are also of Italian ancestry (9.8%), along with some Polish ancestry residents (8.3%), among others. In addition, 22.3% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country.
Getting to Work
How you get to work – car, bus, train or other means – and how much of your day it takes to do so is a large quality of life and financial issue. Especially with gasoline prices rising and expected to continue doing so, the length and means of one's commute can be a financial burden. Some neighborhoods are physically located so that many residents have to drive in their own car, others are set up so many walk to work, or can take a train, bus, or bike. The greatest number of commuters in neighborhood spend between 15 and 30 minutes commuting one-way to work (53.6% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (65.0%) drive alone in a private automobile to get to work. In addition, quite a number also carpool with coworkers, friends, or neighbors to get to work (12.8%) and 6.8% of residents also take the train for their daily commute. In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.
SCOUT’s patented match algorithm identifies the most similar neighborhoods to a subject location, and quantifies the similarity to the subject location. This allows analysts to identify the most similar neighborhoods in a local market area for appraisals, investments, and research.
The algorithm uses 273 neighborhood conditions, identifies the dominant dimensions underlying the conditions and calculates the similarity. This captures the true culture and character of locations, economic conditions, and trends.
The closer to 100% means the locations are nearly identical. 80% is a very good, but not excellent match, and so forth.
