Ridge Farm is a tiny village located in the state of Illinois. With a population of 763 people and just one neighborhood, Ridge Farm is the 709th largest community in Illinois. Much of the housing stock in Ridge Farm was built prior to World War II, making it one of the older and more historic villages in the country.
Ridge Farm is a blue-collar town, with 41.53% of people working in blue-collar occupations, while the average in America is just 27.7%. Overall, Ridge Farm is a village of transportation and shipping workers, service providers, and professionals. There are especially a lot of people living in Ridge Farm who work in management occupations (9.90%), healthcare (7.67%), and maintenance occupations (6.39%).
A relatively large number of people in Ridge Farm telecommute to their jobs. Overall, about 10.86% 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.
It is a fairly quiet village because there are relatively few of those groups of people who have a tendency to be noisy. (Children, for example, often can't help themselves from being noisy, and being parents ourselves, we know!) Ridge Farm has relatively few families with children living at home, and is quieter because of it. Renters and college students, for their own reasons, can also be noisy. Ridge Farm has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Ridge Farm than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Ridge Farm may be for you.
One downside of living in Ridge Farm is that it can take a long time to commute to work. In Ridge Farm, the average commute to work is 33.11 minutes, which is quite a bit higher than the national average.
Being a small village, Ridge Farm does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
In terms of college education, Ridge Farm ranks among the least educated cities in the nation, as only 5.67% of people over 25 have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Ridge Farm in 2022 was $23,885, which is low income relative to Illinois and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $95,540 for a family of four. However, Ridge Farm contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
Ridge Farm is a somewhat ethnically-diverse village. The people who call Ridge Farm home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Ridge Farm residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Ridge Farm also has a sizeable Hispanic population (people of Hispanic origin can be of any race). People of Hispanic or Latino origin account for 10.36% of the village’s residents. Important ancestries of people in Ridge Farm include Irish, German, Italian, English, and Scots-Irish.
The most common language spoken in Ridge Farm is English. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and Spanish.
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.
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 33 people per square mile living here, this neighborhood is less crowded than 92.2% of 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 Ridge Farm are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 71.8% of U.S. neighborhoods. In addition, 3.2% 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 70.6% of America's neighborhoods.
A neighborhood is far different if it is dominated by enlisted military personnel rather than people who earn their living by farming. It is also different if most of the neighbors are clerical support or managers. What is wonderful is the sheer diversity of neighborhoods, allowing you to find the type that fits your lifestyle and aspirations.
In the neighborhood, 38.0% of the working population is employed in executive, management, and professional occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is manufacturing and laborer occupations, with 34.8% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (13.1%), and 11.9% in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants.
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 98.4% of households.
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 Ridge Farm, IL, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (13.8%). There are also a number of people of English ancestry (12.8%), and residents who report Irish roots (11.4%), and some of the residents are also of Mexican ancestry (3.9%), along with some Italian ancestry residents (2.2%), 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 neighborhood spend between 30 and 45 minutes commuting one-way to work (29.7% of working residents), which is at or a bit above the average length of a commute across all U.S. neighborhoods.
Here most residents (82.7%) 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 (7.6%) . In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.