Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Palos Hills, IL

Palos Hills is a city in southwestern Cook County, Illinois, a southwest suburb of Chicago, covering about 4.29 square miles.

The city was established in 1958 and is named after Palos de la Frontera, the Spanish port from which Christopher Columbus set sail for the Americas in 1492.

Palos Hills had a population of 18,530 at the 2020 census — up 6.0 percent from 17,484 in 2010 — with about 7,600 households.

Palos Hills is home to Moraine Valley Community College, founded in 1967 and the second-largest community college in Illinois, serving tens of thousands of credit and non-credit students each year.

Moraine Valley's main campus covers roughly 294 acres nestled inside the Cook County Forest Preserves, and the college takes its name from its location where the Valparaiso and Tinley glacial moraines meet to form a valley.

The city's main high school is Amos Alonzo Stagg High School, named for the legendary University of Chicago football coach who pioneered much of the modern game.

Palos Hills is one of the Chicago area's more international suburbs: about 27 percent of residents are foreign-born, and about 45 percent speak a language other than English at home (Census Bureau, 2020-2024).

About 77 percent of Palos Hills homes are owner-occupied, and the median household income is about $83,500.

Palos Hills is woven into the Palos area's Cook County Forest Preserve landscape — the same preserve system that surrounds the Moraine Valley campus — giving this dense suburb an unusually wooded, green setting.

Palos Hills' population density of about 4,364 people per square mile makes it noticeably more compact than its neighboring Palos communities, a legacy of its postwar ranch-home subdivisions.