Elmhurst Named Among Top 10 Chicago Suburbs for Families

Image via Elmhurst Park District on Facebook.

The City of Elmhurst is one of the best Chicago suburbs for families, according to a recent study by real estate blog Movoto.

Elmhurst ranks No. 6 in the Top 10 list, right between Itasca and Winfield.

Here are the key stats the blog used to rank Elmhurst:

• PlayScore: 71 out of 100
• GreatSchools.org Score: 10 out of 10
• Average commute time: 28 minutes
• Median household income: $94,956

Elmhurst is the kind of place that not only looks good on paper, with its students’ excellent test scores, one of the highest median household incomes in the area, and an unemployment rate that’s hard to beat (it’s 7.48 percent, by the way). It’s also a wonderful place to live.

You can enrich your little ones’ minds at the Elmhurst Historical Museum, the public library, the art museum, and the symphony orchestra.

There are also 22 parks, a community center, a fitness center with an indoor lap pool, tennis courts, outdoor pools, a golf course, a gymnastics center… Really, aside from a giant pool filled with candy, this place pretty much has your kids covered.

Among the 90 suburbs ranked in the study, Buffalo Grove came out on top as the No. 1 suburb for families. Brookfield received the worst score on the list.

Also on Patch:

• Elmhurst Offers Best Public Schools for Housing Dollar: Study
• Elmhurst Named Among Top 100 Safest Cities in U.S.
• Two Elmhurst Schools Named Among State’s Best Private High Schools
• Elmhurst Ranked Among Most Family Friendly Cities in Illinois
• Elmhurst Among 50 Happiest Small Places in America

Methodology

Researchers at Movoto used data from AreaVibes, GreatSchools.org, PlayScore.org and the U.S. Census to create the Top 10 list. They gathered places near Chicago with populations of 5,000 people or more.

Suburbs were researched in terms of the following family-friendly criteria:

• PlayScore
• GreatSchools.org Score
• Total crimes per 100K people
• Cost of living
• Unemployment rate
• Average commute time
• Median household income
• Median monthly housing costs

Each of the 90 places with complete data were ranked from 1 to 90 in each category. The ranks were averaged into what Movoto calls a Big Deal Score for each suburb. Lower Big Deal Scores are better, and the lowest 10 were named the best suburbs for families. See the full ranking of suburbs from Movoto.