American Idol Parent and Hometown Demographics

It is amazing how easy it is to discover facts about people on the Internet, and the same can be said of the three remaining contestants on American Idol. Since two of them are minors and the third is a college student, the easiest people to target is not them, but their parents. I had thought the parents would try to hide themselves on sites like spokeo.com, but it appears none of them have. Using that site and a similar one like peoplefinders.com (and also Zillow.com) you can find out some interesting comparisons between the three families. I think Spokeo is the worst offender and I have already personally removed myself from that site. But I found all three sets of parents on that site:

• Harry J and Patricia J (Miller) Reinhart of Wheeling, IL
• Jerry E and Kristy T Suddeth of Rossville, GA
• Michael C and Judith C McCreery of Garner, NC

All three sets of parents were easily found on-line and I found some interesting numerical facts about them. The first thing is their ages. Since Lauren is 16, Scotty is 17 and Haley is 20, you would think all their parents would be about the same ages, but that is not true. The Suddeth couple are only in their late 30's, the McCreery pair are in their mid 40's and Haley's folks are in their 50's.

Since you can also find their home address using Spokeo you can also find out how much their homes are worth and you see quite a difference there as well, but much of that lies in the different prices of real estate in suburban Chicago versus suburban Raleigh versus suburban Chatanooga. I will just say that the McCreery home is the most expensive, followed by the Reinhart home, and then the Suddeth home, but that could probably be guessed following income and home value demographics. Another nice site for grabbing city demographics is city-data.com where I could find the following:

Rossville, GA: Median household income: $30K, Median home value: $89K
Garner, NC: Median household income: $57K, Median home value: $167K
Wheeling, IL: Median household income: $56K, Median home value: $233K

So whereas the McCreery and Reinhart families seem to live in similarly very middle class neighborhoods, the Suddeth family definitely lives in a much lower income environment. If you search for their homes on Zillow you can even see the satellite views of all three homes. That really makes you feel like a stalker! The racial makeup of the 3 areas is also very different:

Rossville, GA: 95% White, 2% Hispanic
Garner, NC: 58% White, 32% Black, 7% Hispanic, 1% Asian
Wheeling, IL: 57% White, 30% Hispanic, 9% Asian, 3%Black

Wheeling and Garner have am amazingly similar 60% Caucasian population, but Wheeling is 30% Hispanic where Garner is 30% African-American. Rossville is much less diverse with almost everyone there being Caucasian. I always find it interesting to look up some of these demographics to better understand where these different contestants were raised.