How I Rate Southwest Suburb Towns (and What Each Star Actually Means)

Every town guide I write ends with a star rating across eight categories. This page defines every one of them: what is measured, where the number comes from, and what separates three stars from four. I am putting this in writing for a simple reason. Almost every town rating online tells you a place

The Best Paved Bike Trails in the Southwest Suburbs (and Which One to Ride First)

I have ridden Midewin twice over the years and none since I moved out here, but mostly because somebody told me it was flat and I believed them. They were right. What I did not know until I started actually looking is how much paved trail is sitting within twenty minutes of my house, and how much of

How to Appeal Your Property Taxes in Will County (and the 2026 Deadline You Are Working Against)

My assessment jumped about 25 percent, and my first reaction was the same one most people have, which is to assume somebody official had already checked the number and it must be right. Nobody had checked it. I appealed on comparable properties, and the valuation came down somewhere in the range of

Moving to Palos Heights, IL: Should You Buy a Home Here?

The three Palos villages are easy to blur together, and Palos Heights is the one that sits in the middle, in price, in feel, and on the map. It offers something its two neighbors do not: an actual walkable downtown, plus Lake Katherine and a close-in Metra station, wrapped around a settled, establis