This is a small community in a single neighborhood.
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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.
Mertztown is a tiny town located in the state of Pennsylvania. With a population of 600 people and just one neighborhood, Mertztown is the 945th largest community in Pennsylvania.
Occupations and Workforce
Because occupations involving physical labor dominate the local economy, Mertztown is generally considered to be a blue-collar town. 35.52% of the Mertztown workforce is employed in blue-collar occupations, compared to the national average of 27.7%. Overall, Mertztown is a town of service providers, professionals, and production and manufacturing workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Mertztown who work in food service (21.49%), healthcare (12.24%), and maintenance occupations (9.55%).
Setting & Lifestyle
It is a fairly quiet town because there are relatively few of those groups of people who have a tendency to be noisy. (Children, for example, often can't help themselves from being noisy, and being parents ourselves, we know!) Mertztown has relatively few families with children living at home, and is quieter because of it. Renters and college students, for their own reasons, can also be noisy. Mertztown has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Mertztown than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Mertztown may be for you.
Residents of the town have the good fortune of having one of the shortest daily commutes compared to the rest of the country. On average, they spend only 17.40 minutes getting to work every day.
Being a small town, Mertztown does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
Demographics
The percentage of adults in Mertztown who are college-educated is close to the national average for all communities of 21.84%: 17.97% of the adults in Mertztown have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Mertztown in 2022 was $35,207, which is middle income relative to Pennsylvania and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $140,828 for a family of four. However, Mertztown contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
Mertztown is a somewhat ethnically-diverse town. The people who call Mertztown home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Mertztown residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Mertztown include German, Pennsylvania German, Irish, Lithuanian, and English.
The most common language spoken in Mertztown 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.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Romanian and German ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 2.5% of this neighborhood's residents have Romanian ancestry and 34.8% have German ancestry.
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 Mertztown are upper-middle income, making it an above average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 60.6% of the neighborhoods in America. With 10.7% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 51.6% 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, 36.9% 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 35.7% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (20.3%), and 7.0% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 95.1% of households. Some people also speak Polish (3.0%).
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 Mertztown, PA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (34.8%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (10.1%), and residents who report Italian roots (5.8%), and some of the residents are also of English ancestry (4.4%), along with some South American ancestry residents (2.6%), 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 (42.8% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (81.7%) 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.
