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.
Ethel is a tiny town located in the state of Mississippi. With a population of 335 people and just one neighborhood, Ethel is the 245th largest community in Mississippi.
Occupations and Workforce
When you are in Ethel, you'll notice that it is more blue-collar than most other communities in America. 49.49% of Ethel’s employed work in blue-collar jobs, while America averages only 27.7% that do. Overall, Ethel is a town of production and manufacturing workers, sales and office workers, and construction workers and builders. There are especially a lot of people living in Ethel who work in sales jobs (17.17%), office and administrative support (9.09%), and food service (6.06%).
Setting & Lifestyle
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 17.44 minutes getting to work every day.
Ethel is very much a car-oriented town. This is because the population of Ethel 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. 98.81% 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.
Ethel 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 Ethel has one of the lowest overall levels of education in the country: only 3.64% of people over 25 hold a college degree. The national average for all municipalities is 21.84%.
The per capita income in Ethel in 2022 was $18,714, which is lower middle income relative to Mississippi, and low income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $74,856 for a family of four. However, Ethel contains both very wealthy and poor people as well. Ethel also has one of the higher rates of people living in poverty in the nation, with 32.79% of its population below the federal poverty line.
Ethel is an extremely ethnically-diverse town. The people who call Ethel home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Ethel residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Ethel include English, Irish, European, African, and French.
The most common language spoken in Ethel is English. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and African languages.
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 Ethel, the neighborhood, has some outstanding things about the way it looks and its way of life that are worth highlighting.
Modes of Transportation
While most Americans do drive to work alone each day, the neighborhood stands out by having 95.1% of commuters doing so, which is a higher proportion of people driving alone to work than NeighborhoodScout found in 99.5% of all American neighborhoods.
Real Estate
Vacant homes and apartments are a significant characteristic of this neighborhood. In fact, with 43.4% of the residential real estate vacant, the neighborhood claims the distinction of having a higher vacancy rate than 98.0% of the neighborhoods in America. This can either be because much of the property is seasonally occupied, like in many vacation areas, or that much of the real estate is more permanently abandoned.
In addition, 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 12 people per square mile living here, this neighborhood is less crowded than 96.7% of America.
People
Of note, 64.3% of the children in this area live in poverty; an extraordinarily high percentage compared to other neighborhoods in the nation. In a nation where approximately one in four children grows up in poverty, this neighborhood stands out for the depth of the problem manifested here.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more African and Finnish ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 12.6% of this neighborhood's residents have African ancestry and 1.9% have Finnish 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 Ethel are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 92.1% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 64.3% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 97.7% 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, 27.6% of the working population is employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is manufacturing and laborer occupations, with 27.0% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in executive, management, and professional occupations (22.9%), and 22.4% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 99.9% of households. Some people also speak Italian (3.2%).
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 Ethel, MS, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as English (15.2%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (13.8%), and residents who report Sub-Saharan African roots (12.6%), and some of the residents are also of African ancestry (12.6%), along with some Finnish ancestry residents (1.9%), 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 15 and 30 minutes commuting one-way to work (54.7% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (95.1%) 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.
