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.
Gays is a tiny village located in the state of Illinois. With a population of 214 people and just one neighborhood, Gays is the 786th largest community in Illinois.
Occupations and Workforce
Gays is a blue-collar town, with 37.35% of people working in blue-collar occupations, while the average in America is just 27.7%. Overall, Gays is a village of production and manufacturing workers, sales and office workers, and service providers. There are especially a lot of people living in Gays who work in management occupations (13.25%), office and administrative support (12.05%), and sales jobs (8.43%).
Of important note, Gays is also a village of artists. Gays has more artists, designers and people working in media than 90% of the communities in America. This concentration of artists helps shape Gays’s character.
Setting & Lifestyle
Because of many things, Gays is a very good place for families to consider. With an enviable combination of good schools, low crime, college-educated neighbors who tend to support education because of their own experiences, and a high rate of home ownership in predominantly single-family properties, Gays really has some of the features that families look for when choosing a good community to raise children. Is Gays perfect? Of course not, and if you like frenetic nightlife, it will be far from your cup of tea. But overall this is a solid community, with many things to recommend it as a family-friendly place to live.
Gays is a small village, and as such doesn't have a public transit system that people use to get to and from their jobs every day.
Demographics
The percentage of adults in Gays with college degrees is slightly lower than the national average of 21.84% for all communities. 16.54% of adults in Gays have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Gays in 2022 was $34,485, which is middle income relative to Illinois and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $137,940 for a family of four. However, Gays contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Gays home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Gays residents report their race to be White, followed by Native American. Important ancestries of people in Gays include German, English, Italian, Irish, and Swedish.
The most common language spoken in Gays is English. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and Polish.
Notable & Unique Neighborhood Characteristics
Many things matter about a neighborhood, but the first thing most people notice is the way a neighborhood looks and its particular character. For example, one might notice whether the buildings all date from a certain time period or whether shop signs are in multiple languages. This particular neighborhood in Gays, the neighborhood, has some outstanding things about the way it looks and its way of life that are worth highlighting.
Modes of Transportation
If your dream is to be able to ride your bike to work each day, look no further than this unique neighborhood. With 9.3% of residents in the neighborhood commuting on a bicycle to and from work daily, this neighborhood has more bicycle commuters than 99.5% of all neighborhoods in the U.S., according to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis.
Car Ownership
We Americans love our cars. Not only are they a necessity for most Americans due to the shape of our neighborhoods and the distances between where we live, work, shop, and go to school, but we also fancy them. As a result, most households in America have one, two, or three cars. But NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis shows that the neighborhood has a highly unusual pattern of car ownership. 32.8% of the households in this neighborhood don't own a car at all. This is more carless households than NeighborhoodScout found in 97.5% of U.S. neighborhoods.
Occupations
Each year, fewer and fewer Americans make their living as farmers, foresters, or fishers. But the neighborhood truly stands out among U.S. neighborhoods. According to exclusive NeighborhoodScout analysis, this neighborhood has a greater proportion of farmers, foresters, or fishers than 95.5% of all American neighborhoods. This is truly a unique cultural characteristic of this neighborhood.
Real Estate
This neighborhood has wide open spaces, few people, and lots of space to stretch out. If you like locations that fit that description, you may like this neighborhood. Based on NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis, with only 32 people per square mile living here, this neighborhood is less crowded than 92.3% of America.
People
If you're looking for a great spot to raise a family, then look no further than the neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's analysis found that the combination of good quality public schools, above-average safety from crime, and a high rate of home ownership in predominantly single-family homes, help make this neighborhood among the top 11.2% of family-friendly neighborhoods across the state of Illinois. In addition, there are a high proportion of other families with school-aged children living here, making it easy for parents and their children to socialize and develop a sense of community support. In addition, families here highly value education, as is reflected by the strength of the local schools, in part due to the educational attainment of the parents here, who vote in support of the public schools.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Swiss ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 7.6% of this neighborhood's residents have Swiss ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 31.2% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak German/Yiddish at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 99.9% of the neighborhoods in America.
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 Gays are upper-middle income, making it an above average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 67.4% of the neighborhoods in America. In addition, 9.6% of the children seventeen and under living in this neighborhood are living below the federal poverty line, which is a lower rate of childhood poverty than is found in 51.7% of America's neighborhoods.
What we choose to do for a living reflects who we are. Each neighborhood has a different mix of occupations represented, and together these tell you about the neighborhood and help you understand if this neighborhood may fit your lifestyle.
In the neighborhood, 37.1% of the working population is employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is executive, management, and professional occupations, with 26.6% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (21.4%), and 11.0% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 66.5% of households. Some people also speak German/Yiddish (31.2%).
Ethnicity / Ancestry
Boston's Beacon Hill blue-blood streets, Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish enclaves, Los Angeles' Persian neighborhoods. Each has its own culture derived primarily from the ancestries and culture of the residents who call these neighborhoods home. Likewise, each neighborhood in America has its own culture – some more unique than others – based on lifestyle, occupations, the types of households – and importantly – on the ethnicities and ancestries of the people who live in the neighborhood. Understanding where people came from, who their grandparents or great-grandparents were, can help you understand how a neighborhood is today.
In the neighborhood in Gays, IL, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (27.3%). There are also a number of people of English ancestry (11.8%), and residents who report Irish roots (11.4%), and some of the residents are also of Swiss ancestry (7.6%), along with some Mexican ancestry residents (1.5%), among others.
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 under 15 minutes commuting one-way to work (40.1% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.
Here most residents (58.7%) 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 (19.1%) and 9.3% of residents also bicycle 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.
