South Chicago Heights is a very small village located in the state of Illinois. With a population of 3,835 people and just one neighborhood, South Chicago Heights is the 396th largest community in Illinois.
South Chicago Heights is a blue-collar town, with 40.26% of people working in blue-collar occupations, while the average in America is just 27.7%. Overall, South Chicago Heights is a village of sales and office workers, service providers, and construction workers and builders. There are especially a lot of people living in South Chicago Heights who work in office and administrative support (16.09%), food service (10.41%), and sales jobs (10.02%).
Also of interest is that South Chicago Heights has more people living here who work in computers and math than 95% of the places in the US.
For a small village, South Chicago Heights has a lot of people who use public transit to get to work, and those that do mostly ride taxis. This suggests that a real need for low-cost transportation in South Chicago Heights exists, and local transit is helping to meet that need.
In terms of college education, the citizens of South Chicago Heights rank slightly lower than the national average. 15.47% of adults 25 and older in South Chicago Heights have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree, while 21.84% of adults have a 4-year degree or higher in the average American community.
The per capita income in South Chicago Heights in 2022 was $27,442, which is low income relative to Illinois, and lower middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $109,768 for a family of four. However, South Chicago Heights contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
South Chicago Heights is an extremely ethnically-diverse village. The people who call South Chicago Heights home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of South Chicago Heights residents report their race to be Black or African-American, followed by White. South Chicago Heights also has a sizeable Hispanic population (people of Hispanic origin can be of any race). People of Hispanic or Latino origin account for 32.94% of the village’s residents. Important ancestries of people in South Chicago Heights include Italian, German, Irish, Czech, and Polish.
In addition, South Chicago Heights has a lot of people living here who were born outside of the US (15.56%).
The most common language spoken in South Chicago Heights is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Italian.
When you see a neighborhood for the first time, the most important thing is often the way it looks, like its homes and its setting. Some places look the same, but they only reveal their true character after living in them for a while because they contain a unique mix of occupational or cultural groups. This neighborhood is very unique in some important ways, according to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive exploration and analysis.
Our research shows that more people carpool to work here in the (25.7%) than in 97.3% of the neighborhoods in America.
Significantly, 6.9% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak Italian at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 95.9% of the neighborhoods in America.
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 South Chicago Heights are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 75.2% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 28.8% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 80.5% 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, 40.3% of the working population is employed in manufacturing and laborer 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 26.9% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (18.5%), and 14.3% in executive, management, and professional occupations.
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 67.5% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Italian.
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 South Chicago Heights, IL, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Mexican (27.3%). There are also a number of people of Italian ancestry (11.7%), and residents who report German roots (7.0%), and some of the residents are also of Irish ancestry (6.1%), along with some Sub-Saharan African ancestry residents (3.3%), among others. In addition, 15.6% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country.
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 (32.9% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.
Here most residents (63.6%) 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 (25.7%) and 5.1% 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.