An interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed in many of the cities where I lived is the “coptown” - a neighborhood that is very, very popular as a place of residence for police officers, almost to the exclusion of other neighborhoods. A few examples of coptowns:
Cleveland: Kamm’s Korners. It’s the most suburban-feeling, whitest neighborhood in the Cleveland city limits. It’s also very, very Irish.
Denver. Marston (see #15 on this map). It’s almost an appendage to the city, on the far, far southwest side of the city. Very 1970s-1980s suburban in feel, and also very white, even compared to newer subdivisions in the city limits closer to the airport.
Austin: I’m not completely familiar with the area yet, but supposedly the local coptown is Harris Ranch, an isolated 1990s-style PUD at the far western edge of the city. It’s considered one of the “best bang for the buck” neighborhoods within the Austin city limits.
So, where are the Coptowns in your city? What about other concentrations of people that might work in a certain profession?
When I started as a police officer more than 10 years ago a couple of guys lived out to the west of the state. They were kidded about how long their commute was. Now I live out in Hunterdon County and probably half the department does too. It is the most affluent county in the country but housing is actually a lot cheaper than where I work. It is rural and you can get a lot more for your money. Property taxes are relatively low too. They are still high enough to give anyone from out of state a stroke but they are a lot less than where I work and grew up. Very little crime also. My commute is over 40 miles each way.
ETA: not exactly what the OP was asking for but I don’t work in a city. The population is around 60,000 but it is completely suburban.
In the airline biz, most major cities have the “pilot ghetto”, where the pilots may not be a majority of the residents, but the majority of the pilots who live in the area live there.
Peachtree City in Atlanta, Thousand Oaks in LA, and Lake Saint Louis in St. Louis are examples I know of, and there are plenty of others.
The causes?
People who all have very similar wages, know they have similar wages, and have time at work to really get to know each other and talk about hwhere they live.
Organizations where almost all workers have 30-year careers, not 2-year jobs.
An organizational tendency to hire in waves, so a bunch of newbies are all looking to settle at the same time, just when some particular suburb is being built.
Workers with weird schedules, where having friends who are also off on Tuesday to go golfing or fishing is important.
An organizational culture which includes loyalty to the company, organized sports or clubs, or at least a strong sense of camaradarie amongst the workers. Being a unionized shop also fosters this. As does a worker group with a large proportion of military veterans.
An organizational culture where people are not in competition with each other.
All of these things are the polar opposite of the cube-dwelling megacorp worker or the retail worker. Or workers in industries with a lot of temps: construction, IT, etc.
So it’s not surprising cop towns & pilot ghettos seem strange if you’re from the other side of the work experience.
I’d say Lennoxville, Québec (now actually part of Sherbrooke) is a teacher and student town, and an anglophone teacher town at that! It is home to an English-language elementary school, regional public high school, private high school, Cégep (Champlain) and University (Bishop’s), and has an official population of somewhere around 5000 people, of which half are likely students.
The Denver Police Department ended their residency rule 10 years ago. Prior to that, they had to live in the city, which is why a lot of cops live in the blue ghetto.
In Torrance, California, there is an area known as the Contractors’ Ghetto. Seems like every resident is a building contractor or a sub-contractor or otherwise involved in the construction business.
For those in the LA area, the Ghetto is east of Hawthorne, south of 190th and north of Del Amo.
Actually, in the Cleveland area, Westpark is also a Coptown. My boss’s husband was a cop, and when they lived there, she said it was usual for houses not to even go on the market…the older retiring cops let it be known to the other cops that their house was for sale, and they changed hands from one cop to the next.
Ocoee, Florida, outside of Orlando is much the same way. It’s absolutely packed with middle-class and upper-middle-class residents who work in the building trades. I called Nextel cell phones “Ocoee passports” - go anyplace in the town, and it seems like more than half of all adults have one dangling off of their belt. It was also impossible to go anywhere in Ocoee without hearing a barrage of Nextel chirps, including the movies. Nobody minded the interruptions – “BEEP blah graw jack and bore blaah graa grade inspection blah arrgh rough-in for plumbing BEEP” – because everybody else in the theater was packing a Nextel, too.
Forgot about Westpark, which is right around the corner from Kamm’s Corners.