A hat tip to Chicagoist’s blatant rewrite of this Pioneer Press article for alerting us to Niles having been named the best place to raise kids in Illinois.
Runner-up honors in Bloomberg Business Week’s 2010 selections went to Bensenville, which Forbes recently singled out as one of America’s 10 fastest dying towns.
Niles is one of those easily-overlooked places – unless you’re driving along Touhy Ave and spot its landmark Leaning Tower. One index of its attractiveness as a place to live is that many of its citizens don’t want to leave, resulting in the north suburbs’ highest percentage – 25.4% – of 65+ residents.
If you scan all 51 slides in the Business Week series, as I did, and check the demographics of several dozen of Bloomberg’s selections, you might join me in thinking a more apt headline would be the “Best places to raise non-Hispanic white kids.” With a very few exceptions, America’s glorious diversity is sadly unrepresented in the series.
Yep, all my clients having kids and leaving the city for the burbs head straight to Bensenville. I could have saved Business Week the expensive study.
What’s not to like about the industrial parks, commercial jets landing next door and the highways? Oh, and the bulldozed houses and political controversy? Sold!
Is there a difference in prices in town based on school district? Or was it Park Ridge which had two districts (based on recollections of a co-worker who moved from one to the other and I can’t remember which house had this issue – the one in Niles or Park Ridge).