Burnham is a very small village located in the state of Illinois. With a population of 3,869 people and just one neighborhood, Burnham is the 394th largest community in Illinois.
Unlike some villages where white-collar or blue-collar occupations dominate the local economy, Burnham is neither predominantly one nor the other. Instead, it has a mixed workforce of both white- and blue-collar jobs. Overall, Burnham is a village of service providers, sales and office workers, and transportation and shipping workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Burnham who work in office and administrative support (16.41%), healthcare suport services (13.21%), and sales jobs (12.03%).
A relatively large number of people in Burnham telecommute to their jobs. Overall, about 12.80% 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.
In Burnham, however, the average commute to work is quite long. On average, people spend 31.53 minutes each day getting to work, which is significantly higher than the national average. One bright side is that local public transit is widely used, so it may be an option to avoid the headache of driving in the heavy traffic by leaving the car at home and taking transit.
For a small village, Burnham has a lot of people who use public transit to get to work, and those that do mostly ride the bus. This suggests that a real need for low-cost transportation in Burnham exists, and local transit is helping to meet that need.
The percentage of people in Burnham with college degrees is quite a bit lower than the national average for cities and towns of 21.84%: just 11.70% of people over 25 have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Burnham in 2022 was $26,142, 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 $104,568 for a family of four. However, Burnham contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
Burnham is an extremely ethnically-diverse village. The people who call Burnham home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Burnham residents report their race to be Black or African-American, followed by White. Burnham also has a sizeable Hispanic population (people of Hispanic origin can be of any race). People of Hispanic or Latino origin account for 28.15% of the village’s residents. Important ancestries of people in Burnham include Polish, German, English, Irish, and French.
The most common language spoken in Burnham is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Polish.
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.
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 Burnham are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 75.9% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 22.4% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 73.0% 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, 30.8% 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 clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations, with 29.6% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations (21.6%), and 18.0% 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 81.3% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Polish.
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 Burnham, IL, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Mexican (26.3%). There are also a number of people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry (8.2%), and residents who report Polish roots (3.7%), and some of the residents are also of African ancestry (2.7%), along with some German ancestry residents (2.0%), among others.
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 between 15 and 30 minutes commuting one-way to work (27.8% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (68.1%) 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 (9.6%) and 7.9% of residents also ride the bus 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.