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.
Hometown is a tiny town located in the state of West Virginia. With a population of 556 people and just one neighborhood, Hometown is the 192nd largest community in West Virginia.
Occupations and Workforce
When you are in Hometown, you'll notice that it is more blue-collar than most other communities in America. 49.00% of Hometown’s employed work in blue-collar jobs, while America averages only 27.7% that do. Overall, Hometown is a town of sales and office workers, construction workers and builders, and production and manufacturing workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Hometown who work in office and administrative support (25.00%), personal care services (16.00%), and sales jobs (10.00%).
Setting & Lifestyle
Overall, Hometown’s crime rate is one of the lowest in the nation, which makes a great place to live if safety is an important concern.
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!) Hometown 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. Hometown has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Hometown than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Hometown may be for you.
In Hometown, however, the average commute to work is quite long. On average, people spend 33.35 minutes each day getting to work, which is significantly higher than the national average.
Hometown is very much a car-oriented town. This is because the population of Hometown isn't large enough or dense enough to support an extensive public transit system. It has a lot of rural roads, and the distance between houses can be quite large, which together tends to discourage walking and bicycling to work. 100.00% of residents commute to work in their own car (and the drive is typically to a job out of town). People also tend to drive out of town for other services as well, such as shopping, doctors appointments, and more.
Hometown is a small town, and as such doesn't have a public transit system that people use to get to and from their jobs every day.
Demographics
The population of Hometown has a very low overall level of education: only 9.60% of people over 25 hold a 4-year college degree or higher.
The per capita income in Hometown in 2022 was $24,370, which is lower middle income relative to West Virginia, and low income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $97,480 for a family of four. However, Hometown contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Hometown home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Hometown residents report their race to be White. Important ancestries of people in Hometown include German, Scots-Irish, Irish, Yugoslavian, and Other West Indian.
The most common language spoken in Hometown is English. Other important languages spoken here include African languages and Arabic.
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 Hometown, the neighborhood, has some outstanding things about the way it looks and its way of life that are worth highlighting.
People
According to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis, is among the best neighborhoods for families in West Virginia. In fact, this neighborhood is more family-friendly than 97.6% of neighborhoods in the entire state of West Virginia. Its combination of top public schools, low crime rates, and owner-occupied single family homes gives this area the look and feel of a "Leave It to Beaver" episode. Many other families also live here, making it easy to socialize and develop a strong sense of community. In addition, the high number of college-educated parents influences the academic success of the local schools. Overall, you will find all of the amenities a family needs to thrive in the neighborhood.
In addition, neighborhoodScout's exclusive research revealed that 92.9% of the adult residents in the neighborhood do not have a 4-year college degree, which is a lower rate of college graduated adults than found in 95.1% of the neighborhoods in America.
Modes of Transportation
While most Americans do drive to work alone each day, the neighborhood stands out by having 89.8% of commuters doing so, which is a higher proportion of people driving alone to work than NeighborhoodScout found in 96.1% of all American neighborhoods.
Diversity
Significantly, 0.8% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak Greek at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 95.9% 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 Hometown are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 80.1% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 18.7% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 66.7% 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, 36.8% of the working population is employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is executive, management, and professional occupations, with 27.3% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (21.4%), and 14.5% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 99.6% of households.
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 Hometown, WV, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Irish (11.5%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (8.4%), and residents who report English roots (7.1%), and some of the residents are also of Swedish ancestry (2.8%), along with some Scots-Irish ancestry residents (2.8%), among others.
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 30 and 45 minutes commuting one-way to work (40.7% of working residents), which is at or a bit above the average length of a commute across all U.S. neighborhoods.
Here most residents (89.8%) 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.
