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.
Mechanicsville - Stanwood is a very small town located in the state of Iowa. With a population of 3,577 people and just one neighborhood, Mechanicsville - Stanwood is the 137th largest community in Iowa. Mechanicsville - Stanwood has an unusually large stock of pre-World War II architecture, making it one of the older and more historic towns.
Occupations and Workforce
Unlike some towns, Mechanicsville - Stanwood isn’t mainly white- or blue-collar. Instead, the most prevalent occupations for people in Mechanicsville - Stanwood are a mix of both white- and blue-collar jobs. Overall, Mechanicsville - Stanwood is a town of sales and office workers, managers, and professionals. There are especially a lot of people living in Mechanicsville - Stanwood who work in office and administrative support (12.56%), management occupations (12.51%), and sales jobs (7.85%).
Also of interest is that Mechanicsville - Stanwood has more people living here who work in computers and math than 95% of the places in the US.
A relatively large number of people in Mechanicsville - Stanwood telecommute to their jobs. Overall, about 12.15% of the workforce works from home. While this may seem like a small number, as a fraction of the total workforce it ranks among the highest in the country. 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, Mechanicsville - Stanwood 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, Mechanicsville - Stanwood really has some of the features that families look for when choosing a good community to raise children. Is Mechanicsville - Stanwood 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.
One downside of living in Mechanicsville - Stanwood is that it can take a long time to commute to work. In Mechanicsville - Stanwood, the average commute to work is 30.40 minutes, which is quite a bit higher than the national average.
As is often the case in a small town, Mechanicsville - Stanwood doesn't have a public transportation system that people use for their commute.
Demographics
In terms of college education, Mechanicsville - Stanwood is nearly on par with the US average for all cities of 21.84%: 17.44% of adults 25 and older in Mechanicsville - Stanwood have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Mechanicsville - Stanwood in 2022 was $37,509, which is upper middle income relative to Iowa and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $150,036 for a family of four. However, Mechanicsville - Stanwood contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Mechanicsville - Stanwood home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Mechanicsville - Stanwood residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Mechanicsville - Stanwood include German, Irish, Czech, English, and Norwegian.
The most common language spoken in Mechanicsville - Stanwood is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Polish.
Notable & Unique Neighborhood Characteristics
When you see a neighborhood for the first time, the most important thing is often the way it looks, like its homes and its setting. Some places look the same, but they only reveal their true character after living in them for a while because they contain a unique mix of occupational or cultural groups. This neighborhood is very unique in some important ways, according to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive exploration and analysis.
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 22 residents per square mile, is less crowded than 94.2% of all U.S. neighborhoods.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more German and Belgian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 48.1% of this neighborhood's residents have German ancestry and 1.0% have Belgian 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 Mechanicsville - Stanwood are middle-income, making it a moderate income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 54.0% of the neighborhoods in America. In addition, 4.6% 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 65.9% of America'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, 33.0% 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 29.9% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (19.0%), and 16.3% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 99.2% of households. Some people also speak Italian (2.3%).
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 Mechanicsville - Stanwood, IA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (48.1%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (14.5%), and residents who report English roots (5.9%), and some of the residents are also of Norwegian ancestry (3.0%), along with some French ancestry residents (2.2%), 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 30 and 45 minutes commuting one-way to work (33.7% of working residents), which is at or a bit above the average length of a commute across all U.S. neighborhoods.
Here most residents (81.4%) 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.
