This is a small community in a single neighborhood.
As throughout the site, some neighborhood-level data are reserved for subscribers.
What do we mean by a neighborhood?
NeighborhoodScout® uses the official government designation for neighborhoods - the census tract.
Census tracts are small, relatively permanent subdivisions of a county that are defined by the U.S. Census Bureau in conjunction with local authorities all across the country to define real neighborhoods that are bounded to contain areas with homogeneous population characteristics (including economic status, lifestyle, and living conditions). Census tracts usually have 4,000 persons, but can range between 1,500 and 8,000 persons. This is the most fine-grained area for which detailed information is made available from the government, to protect the individual privacy of each of us. Because census tracts are based on population, they vary in size depending on the density of settlement. In urban areas, they are small, and in rural areas they can cover an entire small town or even a few small towns in very rural areas.
Since census tracts are subdivisions of a county, we did a spatial overlay of the census tracts onto city and town boundaries using a geographic information system to properly assign each census tract to its appropriate city or town. Then we named each census tract to the local colloquially recognized neighborhood name for that spot (e.g., Boston, MA (Dorchester). If there was not a name available, we named the census tract by the largest street intersection in the census tract (e.g., Worcester, MA (Lincoln St/Plantation St)
Why we don't use Zip Codes as neighborhoods
Zip codes were developed by the Postal Service for the purpose of delivering mail, but were never intended to define coherent neighborhoods. In addition, Zip Codes can have as many as 10 distinctly different census tracts contained within them. When distinct census tracts are blended together in a single Zip Code, the data reflects their average conditions and often gives a false sense of the area. The result is that potentially great matching neighborhoods can be missed, and erroneous matches can also be produced and delivered to you.
Using census tracts makes great matches possible, and helps people find the areas that are best for them and their families. Because we are committed to providing the highest possible quality and finding the neighborhoods that best meet your criteria, we use census tracts. And, as always, we show you the actual street map of the neighborhood so you know exactly where your best matching neighborhood is located.
What is a Condition Alert?
A condition alert is a condition in the neighborhood that triggers an alert. NeighborhoodScout contains condition alerts to highlight conditions that are extreme, whether good or bad. This helps answer crucial questions about the state of the neighborhood being evaluated, such as:
What are the risks of violent crime here?
Is the risk of home break-ins or other property crimes increasing?
Does real estate here hold its value?
Are the trends in local vacancies or unemployment concerning?
...and dozens more.
Information at a glance that you need to know to invest, appraise or finance a property.
Emerson is a somewhat small borough located in the state of New Jersey. With a population of 7,251 people and just one neighborhood, Emerson is the 256th largest community in New Jersey.
Housing costs in Emerson are among some of the highest in the nation, although real estate prices here don't compare to real estate prices in the most expensive communities in New Jersey.
Occupations and Workforce
Emerson is a decidedly white-collar borough, with fully 92.95% of the workforce employed in white-collar jobs, well above the national average. Overall, Emerson is a borough of professionals, managers, and sales and office workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Emerson who work in management occupations (16.80%), office and administrative support (12.49%), and business and financial occupations (11.68%).
Also of interest is that Emerson has more people living here who work in computers and math than 95% of the places in the US.
One interesting thing about the economy is that relatively large numbers of people worked from their home: 16.05% of the workforce. While this number may seem small overall, as a fraction of the total workforce this is high compared to the rest of the county. These workers are often telecommuters who work in knowledge-based, white-collar professions. For example, Silicon Valley has large numbers of people who telecommute. Other at-home workers may be self-employed people who operate small businesses out of their homes.
Setting & Lifestyle
Because of many things, Emerson is a very good place for families to consider. With an enviable combination of good schools, low crime, college-educated neighbors who tend to support education because of their own experiences, and a high rate of home ownership in predominantly single-family properties, Emerson really has some of the features that families look for when choosing a good community to raise children. Is Emerson perfect? Of course not, and if you like frenetic nightlife, it will be far from your cup of tea. But overall this is a solid community, with many things to recommend it as a family-friendly place to live.
Even though Emerson is a smaller borough, it has many people who hop on public transportation – mostly the train for their daily commute to work. Typically, these people are commuting to good jobs in the surrounding cities.
Demographics
Do you have a 4-year college degree or graduate degree? If so, you may feel right at home in Emerson. 55.21% of adults here have a 4-year degree or graduate degree, whereas the national average for all cities and towns is just 21.84%.
The per capita income in Emerson in 2022 was $68,008, which is upper middle income relative to New Jersey, and wealthy relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $272,032 for a family of four.
Emerson is a very ethnically-diverse borough. The people who call Emerson home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Emerson residents report their race to be White, followed by Asian. Important ancestries of people in Emerson include Italian, Irish, Polish, German, and English.
Foreign born people are also an important part of Emerson's cultural character, accounting for 15.72% of the borough’s population.
The most common language spoken in Emerson is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Chinese.
Notable & Unique Neighborhood Characteristics
Many things matter about a neighborhood, but the first thing most people notice is the way a neighborhood looks and its particular character. For example, one might notice whether the buildings all date from a certain time period or whether shop signs are in multiple languages. This particular neighborhood in Emerson, the neighborhood, has some outstanding things about the way it looks and its way of life that are worth highlighting.
Real Estate
This neighborhood has the distinction of having one of the lowest real estate vacancy rates of any neighborhood in America. With just 0.0% of the real estate vacant, this indicates an exceptionally strong demand for real estate in the neighborhood, and/or an issue with creating enough supply for the demand. This could have the effect of increasing real estate prices, increasing supply to meet demand, or both.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Italian and Greek ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 37.8% of this neighborhood's residents have Italian ancestry and 2.7% have Greek ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 1.1% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak Urdu, which is the national language of Pakistan, at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 97.5% of the neighborhoods in America.
The Neighbors
There are two complementary measures for understanding the income of a neighborhood's residents: the average and the extremes. While a neighborhood may be relatively wealthy overall, it is equally important to understand the rate of people - particularly children - who are living at or below the federal poverty line, which is extremely low income. Some neighborhoods with a lower average income may actually have a lower childhood poverty rate than another with a higher average income, and this helps us understand the conditions and character of a neighborhood.
The neighbors in the neighborhood in Emerson are wealthy, making it among the 15% highest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 93.5% of the neighborhoods in America. In addition, 3.2% of the children seventeen and under living in this neighborhood are living below the federal poverty line, which is a lower rate of childhood poverty than is found in 70.3% of America's neighborhoods.
What we choose to do for a living reflects who we are. Each neighborhood has a different mix of occupations represented, and together these tell you about the neighborhood and help you understand if this neighborhood may fit your lifestyle.
In the neighborhood, 59.1% of the working population is employed in executive, management, and professional occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants, with 20.8% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (13.0%), and 6.3% in manufacturing and laborer occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 77.8% of households. Some people also speak Spanish (4.6%).
Ethnicity / Ancestry
Culture is shared learned behavior. We learn it from our parents, their parents, our houses of worship, and much of our culture – our learned behavior – comes from our ancestors. That is why ancestry and ethnicity can be so interesting and important to understand: places with concentrations of people of one or more ancestries often express those shared learned behaviors and this gives each neighborhood its own culture. Even different neighborhoods in the same city can have drastically different cultures.
In the neighborhood in Emerson, NJ, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Italian (37.8%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (20.0%), and residents who report Asian roots (11.4%), and some of the residents are also of Polish ancestry (9.5%), along with some German ancestry residents (7.6%), among others. In addition, 15.7% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country.
Getting to Work
How you get to work – car, bus, train or other means – and how much of your day it takes to do so is a large quality of life and financial issue. Especially with gasoline prices rising and expected to continue doing so, the length and means of one's commute can be a financial burden. Some neighborhoods are physically located so that many residents have to drive in their own car, others are set up so many walk to work, or can take a train, bus, or bike. The greatest number of commuters in neighborhood spend between 15 and 30 minutes commuting one-way to work (35.8% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (68.5%) drive alone in a private automobile to get to work. In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.
SCOUT’s patented match algorithm identifies the most similar neighborhoods to a subject location, and quantifies the similarity to the subject location. This allows analysts to identify the most similar neighborhoods in a local market area for appraisals, investments, and research.
The algorithm uses 273 neighborhood conditions, identifies the dominant dimensions underlying the conditions and calculates the similarity. This captures the true culture and character of locations, economic conditions, and trends.
The closer to 100% means the locations are nearly identical. 80% is a very good, but not excellent match, and so forth.
