In north suburban Skokie, a cluster of low-slung strip malls along Dempster Street is a microcosm of the town’s changing population.
A grocery store selling Cameroonian and Nigerian produce, opened a year and a half ago, stands across the street from a Chinese restaurant serving a regional street food speciality.
“We have a diverse culture here,” said Mado Mbasso, owner of Mado’s African Market, a small grocery store that caters to a growing West African diaspora in the northwest suburbs. “There are Chinese people. My next door [neighbor], I think they are Jewish, the other ones are Europeans.”
The town’s diversity is partially why Vincent Yang, owner of Monkey King Jianbing, brought his business to Skokie. “There are lots of people from different countries here in Skokie who can try jianbing, which is famous in China but relatively new in America,” Yang said in Mandarin.
Just a parking lot away sits an old-school kosher diner that has been run by the same family for the past 50 years. Skokie is a “melting pot,” said Adam Freed, the new owner of the longtime kosher eatery, Ken’s Diner & Grill.
A generation ago, the suburb was more than 90% white. The latest census figures show the racial and ethnic breakdown of the village’s roughly 66,000 residents is now 48% white, 25% Asian, 11% Latino and 10% Black.
Skokie is one of more than thirty Chicago-area suburbs that have shifted from majority-white communities to majority non-white ones in the past two decades, according to a WBEZ analysis of demographic data for nearly 300 suburbs in Cook County and the five collar counties from 2005 to 2024.
The figures come from the latest release of the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey five-year estimates, which include the most updated data for communities with less than 20,000 residents.
Suburban communities across the country have been diversifying for decades, but in recent years, the number of Chicago-area suburbs whose demographics have flipped has accelerated.
Between 2015 and 2024, 18 suburbs flipped from majority-white to majority non-white, up from 12 during the prior 10-year period spanning 2005 through 2014.
Many suburbs today are no longer the white, middle-class enclaves of the mid-20th century, said Willow Lung, an associate professor of urban studies and planning and director of the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network at the University of Maryland.
Demographic changes began after laws and practices prohibiting racial and ethnic integration in the suburbs were dismantled, like redlining and restrictions on selling homes to nonwhite residents. More recently, increased job opportunities in the suburbs and a growing cost of living in the cities have also pushed residents further out.
“Suburbs have not only become more racially diverse, they’ve also become more economically diverse, and they have become much more the centers of new immigration,” Lung said.
The median incomes of Chicago-area suburbs range from about $30,000 to more than $250,000, and about 19% of suburban residents in Cook and surrounding counties were born outside of the United States, according to WBEZ’s analysis.
The suburbs are also where the region’s nonwhite population is growing the most compared to the city of Chicago.
In the last 20 years, gains in the suburban Latino population far outpaced any increases in the city. The number of Black residents in the suburbs grew while Chicago’s Black population continued to decline. Meanwhile, the Asian population grew slightly faster in Chicago than the suburbs.
Overall, an increase of more than 600,000 nonwhite suburban residents over the last two decades completely offset the region’s loss of white suburban residents.
“I could count on my hands and toes the number of Black students”
“Here in the suburbs we’re covering multiple municipalities”
In the southwest suburbs, many places have seen significant increases in their Latino populations in the last two decades.
“The availability of the job market is, I think, what primarily has driven that growth,” said Joliet Township Supervisor Cesar Guerrero, who was born and raised in Joliet and lives on the town’s east side, a predominantly Mexican-American neighborhood.
Joliet is one of the largest suburbs to have seen its demographics flip from majority-white to majority-nonwhite. It’s now 44% white, 34% Latino and 16% Black.
The warehousing and logistics industries in southwest suburbs like Joliet, Romeoville and Bolingbrook have boomed in recent years because of their locations next to multiple interstates.
“If you were to ask residents of Joliet, either they themselves or somebody immediately related to them has or is working in a warehouse,” said Guerrero.
While many suburbs have diversified at a rapid clip, the social services infrastructure needed to meet new residents’ needs has yet to catch up in some places, said José Eduardo Vera, the executive director of the Southwest Suburban Immigrant Project based in Bolingbrook.
Vera said local government services often aren’t translated into the languages some residents speak, which makes it hard for many immigrants to get help with accessing municipal services or healthcare in their communities. His nonprofit organization has been trying to fill some of those gaps, but it’s been challenging with limited resources, he said.
During last fall’s enhanced immigration enforcement, a rapid response volunteer program that the nonprofit helped convene was stretched thin trying to cover all of Will County and parts of DuPage County.
“In the city, for example, I know there’s many [rapid response] groups that are neighborhood-based. Here in the suburbs, we’re covering multiple municipalities,” Vera said.
As a result, some changes are piecemeal. Over the past year, Vera’s group has advocated for local governments to pass ordinances prohibiting federal immigration enforcement from taking place on city property.
“It is difficult because we are facing different municipalities and many different folks [and] local villages that may or may not want to take action,” Vera said.
Last November, the Skokie Village Board took action by banning federal immigration agents from using village-owned property for immigration enforcement operations without a valid criminal warrant.
Along with residents mobilizing rapid response teams and volunteering to help with school drop-offs and pick-ups, Skokie Mayor Ann Tennes says it’s not surprising that people in Skokie have “risen to the occasion to help and protect their neighbors.”
In 1977, Skokie officials tried to stop neo-Nazis from marching through the suburb which, at the time, was estimated to be home to about 7,000 Holocaust survivors. Skokie’s resistance ultimately led to a legal battle over free speech that went up to the U.S. Supreme Court. In the end the group ended up marching in downtown Chicago where thousands showed up to counter-protest the march.
“Skokie has, through the decades, been challenged by outside groups,” Tennes said, but “Skokie has a history that when one of us is challenged or threatened, all of us come together.”
