Alton, IL (Forest Homes)

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 Forest Homes neighborhood in Alton are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 87.9% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 59.6% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 96.7% 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 Forest Homes neighborhood, 35.2% of the working population is employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is manufacturing and laborer occupations, with 32.7% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (20.5%), and 11.6% in executive, management, and professional occupations.

Languages

The most common language spoken in the Forest Homes neighborhood is English, spoken by 97.8% of households.

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 Forest Homes neighborhood in Alton, IL, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (26.4%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (24.0%), and residents who report English roots (13.4%), and some of the residents are also of Italian ancestry (5.8%), along with some French ancestry residents (1.8%), among others.

Even if your neighborhood is walkable, you may still have to drive to your place of work. Some neighborhoods are located where many can get to work in just a few minutes, while others are located such that most residents have a long and arduous commute. The greatest number of commuters in Forest Homes neighborhood spend between 15 and 30 minutes commuting one-way to work (46.5% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.

Here most residents (87.5%) 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 (8.3%) . In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.