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.
Elaine is a tiny city located in the state of Arkansas. With a population of 456 people and just one neighborhood, Elaine is the 235th largest community in Arkansas.
Occupations and Workforce
When you are in Elaine, you'll notice that it is more blue-collar than most other communities in America. 43.88% of Elaine’s employed work in blue-collar jobs, while America averages only 27.7% that do. Overall, Elaine is a city of service providers, transportation and shipping workers, and sales and office workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Elaine who work in law enforcement and fire fighting (11.22%), farm management occupations (10.71%), and sales jobs (10.20%).
Another important characteristic of Elaine is that a lot of people work in agricultural jobs, especially compared to most other communities in America, and there are quite a number of farms in town.
Setting & Lifestyle
It is a fairly quiet city 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!) Elaine 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. Elaine has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Elaine than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Elaine may be for you.
Elaine is a small city, 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 Elaine has one of the lowest overall levels of education in the country: only 3.62% of people over 25 hold a college degree. The national average for all municipalities is 21.84%.
The per capita income in Elaine in 2022 was $26,687, which is upper middle income relative to Arkansas, and lower middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $106,748 for a family of four. However, Elaine contains both very wealthy and poor people as well. Elaine also has one of the higher rates of people living in poverty in the nation, with 32.17% of its population below the federal poverty line.
Elaine is a very ethnically-diverse city. The people who call Elaine home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Elaine residents report their race to be Black or African-American, followed by White. Important ancestries of people in Elaine include Irish, German, English, Dutch, and Yugoslavian.
The most common language spoken in Elaine is English. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and Spanish.
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.
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 98.7% of all American neighborhoods. This is truly a unique cultural characteristic of this neighborhood.
Real Estate
This neighborhood has wide open spaces, few people, and lots of space to stretch out. If you like locations that fit that description, you may like this neighborhood. Based on NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis, with only 4 people per square mile living here, this neighborhood is less crowded than 98.5% of America.
People
If you are planning to retire in Arkansas, this neighborhood should be on your must-see list. For many reasons, may be considered a retiree's dream neighborhood. According to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis and metrics, it's peaceful and quiet, has above average safety from crime compared to other neighborhoods in Arkansas, while also offering a diverse range of housing options. This, along with the vibrant mix of very educated seniors and other age groups who choose to live here, makes the neighborhood more retiree-friendly than 97.0% of neighborhoods in AR. If a Arkansas retirement is in your future, this neighborhood should be one of the places you visit.
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. 19.3% of the households in this neighborhood don't own a car at all. This is more carless households than NeighborhoodScout found in 95.0% of U.S. neighborhoods.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more African and Sub-Saharan African ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 16.4% of this neighborhood's residents have African ancestry and 16.4% have Sub-Saharan African 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 Elaine are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 90.4% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 39.8% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 88.9% 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, 27.9% of the working population is employed in manufacturing and laborer 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 25.1% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in executive, management, and professional occupations (24.2%), and 14.0% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 99.3% 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 Elaine, AR, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Sub-Saharan African (16.4%). There are also a number of people of African ancestry (16.4%), and residents who report English roots (5.8%), and some of the residents are also of German ancestry (4.4%), along with some Irish ancestry residents (4.4%), 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 under 15 minutes commuting one-way to work (52.0% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.
Here most residents (76.4%) 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 (16.4%) and 5.7% of residents also hop out the door and walk to work for their daily commute. 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.
