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Elma, IA

This is a small community in a single neighborhood. As throughout the site, some neighborhood-level data are reserved for subscribers.





Overview


Elma is a tiny city located in the state of Iowa. With a population of 490 people and just one neighborhood, Elma is the 395th largest community in Iowa. Elma has a large stock of pre-World War II architecture, making it one of the older and more historic cities in the country.

Occupations and Workforce

Because occupations involving physical labor dominate the local economy, Elma is generally considered to be a blue-collar town. 51.58% of the Elma workforce is employed in blue-collar occupations, compared to the national average of 27.7%. Overall, Elma is a city of service providers, transportation and shipping workers, and construction workers and builders. There are especially a lot of people living in Elma who work in healthcare suport services (10.18%), food service (9.47%), and office and administrative support (7.37%).

Setting & Lifestyle

Overall, Elma’s crime rate is one of the lowest in the nation, which makes a great place to live if safety is an important concern.

The city is relatively quiet, having a combination of lower population density and few of those groups of people who have a tendency to be noisy. For example, Elma has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Elma a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.

Being a small city, Elma does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.

Demographics

The population of Elma has a very low overall level of education: only 7.30% of people over 25 hold a 4-year college degree or higher.

The per capita income in Elma in 2022 was $22,691, which is low income relative to Iowa and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $90,764 for a family of four.

The people who call Elma home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Elma residents report their race to be White. Important ancestries of people in Elma include German, Irish, Norwegian, Czech, and English.

The most common language spoken in Elma is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Polish.

Notable & Unique Neighborhood Characteristics

The way a neighborhood looks and feels when you walk or drive around it, from its setting, its buildings, and its flavor, can make all the difference. This neighborhood has some really cool things about the way it looks and feels as revealed by NeighborhoodScout's exclusive research. This might include anything from the housing stock to the types of households living here to how people get around.

Real Estate

Uncrowded roads, rural America and space to be the individual you are. If you like these characteristics, this neighborhood may fit you. With just 11 residents per square mile, is less crowded than 96.9% of all U.S. neighborhoods.

Occupations

Each year, fewer and fewer Americans make their living as farmers, foresters, or fishers. But the neighborhood truly stands out among U.S. neighborhoods. According to exclusive NeighborhoodScout analysis, this neighborhood has a greater proportion of farmers, foresters, or fishers than 96.6% of all American neighborhoods. This is truly a unique cultural characteristic of this neighborhood.

Car Ownership

We Americans love our cars. Not only are they a necessity for most Americans due to the shape of our neighborhoods and the distances between where we live, work, shop, and go to school, but we also fancy them. As a result, most households in America have one, two, or three cars. But NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis shows that the neighborhood has a highly unusual pattern of car ownership. Residents of this neighborhood must really love automobiles. NeighborhoodScout's Analysis reveals that 33.2% of the households here have four, five, or more cars. That is more cars per household than in 95.0% of the neighborhoods in the nation.

Diversity

Did you know that the neighborhood has more Swiss and Norwegian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 7.8% of this neighborhood's residents have Swiss ancestry and 10.5% have Norwegian ancestry.

is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 11.0% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak German/Yiddish at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 99.6% of the neighborhoods in America.

The Neighbors

How wealthy a neighborhood is, from very wealthy, to middle income, to low income is very formative with regard to the personality and character of a neighborhood. Equally important is the rate of people, particularly children, who live below the federal poverty line. In some wealthy gated communities, the areas immediately surrounding can have high rates of childhood poverty, which indicates other social issues. NeighborhoodScout's analysis reveals both aspects of income and poverty for this neighborhood.

The neighbors in the neighborhood in Elma are middle-income, making it a moderate income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 42.7% of the neighborhoods in America. With 12.9% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 55.9% of U.S. neighborhoods.

The old saying "you are what you eat" is true. But it is also true that you are what you do for a living. The types of occupations your neighbors have shape their character, and together as a group, their collective occupations shape the culture of a place.

In the neighborhood, 34.6% of the working population is employed in executive, management, and professional occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is manufacturing and laborer occupations, with 32.8% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (15.2%), and 12.7% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.

Languages

The languages spoken by people in this neighborhood are diverse. These are tabulated as the languages people preferentially speak when they are at home with their families. The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 83.7% of households. Other important languages spoken here include German/Yiddish and Spanish.

Ethnicity / Ancestry

Boston's Beacon Hill blue-blood streets, Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish enclaves, Los Angeles' Persian neighborhoods. Each has its own culture derived primarily from the ancestries and culture of the residents who call these neighborhoods home. Likewise, each neighborhood in America has its own culture – some more unique than others – based on lifestyle, occupations, the types of households – and importantly – on the ethnicities and ancestries of the people who live in the neighborhood. Understanding where people came from, who their grandparents or great-grandparents were, can help you understand how a neighborhood is today.

In the neighborhood in Elma, IA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (39.4%). There are also a number of people of Norwegian ancestry (10.5%), and residents who report Irish roots (8.7%), and some of the residents are also of Swiss ancestry (7.8%), along with some English ancestry residents (4.7%), among others.

Getting to Work

Even if your neighborhood is walkable, you may still have to drive to your place of work. Some neighborhoods are located where many can get to work in just a few minutes, while others are located such that most residents have a long and arduous commute. The greatest number of commuters in neighborhood spend between 15 and 30 minutes commuting one-way to work (28.2% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.

Here most residents (68.2%) drive alone in a private automobile to get to work. In addition, quite a number also carpool with coworkers, friends, or neighbors to get to work (14.5%) . In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.


Real Estate includes:
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Economics & Demographics include:
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Commute To Work
Migration & Mobility
Race & Ethnic Diversity
Employment Industries & Occupations
Income & Unemployment Rate
Higher Education Attainment
Crime includes:
Neighborhood Crime Index
Crimes Per Square Mile
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Schools include:
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