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.
Seltzer is a tiny town located in the state of Pennsylvania. With a population of 318 people and just one neighborhood, Seltzer is the 1051st largest community in Pennsylvania. Seltzer has an unusually large stock of pre-World War II architecture, making it one of the older and more historic towns.
Occupations and Workforce
Because occupations involving physical labor dominate the local economy, Seltzer is generally considered to be a blue-collar town. 35.29% of the Seltzer workforce is employed in blue-collar occupations, compared to the national average of 27.7%. Overall, Seltzer is a town of sales and office workers, construction workers and builders, and managers. There are especially a lot of people living in Seltzer who work in sales jobs (37.50%), management occupations (21.32%), and healthcare suport services (5.88%).
Setting & Lifestyle
Because of many things, Seltzer 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, Seltzer really has some of the features that families look for when choosing a good community to raise children. Is Seltzer 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.
The town is relatively quiet, having a combination of lower population density and few of those groups of people who have a tendency to be noisy. For example, Seltzer has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Seltzer a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.
One downside of living in Seltzer is that it can take a long time to commute to work. In Seltzer, the average commute to work is 35.51 minutes, which is quite a bit higher than the national average.
Seltzer is a small town, and as is often the case with smaller towns, the population isn't large or dense enough to support much in the way of a public transportation system. In fact, there are many rural roads around Seltzer, which makes walking or biking to and from work a bit difficult. This makes for a very car-oriented town: 100.00% of residents commute to work by private automobile, and people often drive out of town for work, shopping, and other activities.
Seltzer 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
In terms of college education, the citizens of Seltzer rank slightly lower than the national average. 16.07% of adults 25 and older in Seltzer have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree, while 21.84% of adults have a 4-year degree or higher in the average American community.
The per capita income in Seltzer in 2022 was $29,169, which is lower middle income relative to Pennsylvania and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $116,676 for a family of four. However, Seltzer contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Seltzer home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Seltzer residents report their race to be White. Important ancestries of people in Seltzer include German, Irish, Polish, Lithuanian, and Italian.
The most common language spoken in Seltzer is English. Other important languages spoken here include German/Yiddish and Italian.
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.
Modes of Transportation
While most Americans do drive to work alone each day, the neighborhood stands out by having 92.3% of commuters doing so, which is a higher proportion of people driving alone to work than NeighborhoodScout found in 98.4% of all American neighborhoods.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Lithuanian and Ukrainian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 7.6% of this neighborhood's residents have Lithuanian ancestry and 6.3% have Ukrainian ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 11.3% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak Polish at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 98.6% 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 Seltzer are middle-income, making it a moderate income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 50.1% of the neighborhoods in America. With 17.7% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 65.1% 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, 37.4% 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 28.4% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (22.1%), and 12.2% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The languages spoken by people in this neighborhood are diverse. These are tabulated as the languages people preferentially speak when they are at home with their families. The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 98.6% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and Polish.
Ethnicity / Ancestry
Culture is the shared learned behavior of peoples. Undeniably, different ethnicities and ancestries have different cultural traditions, and as a result, neighborhoods with concentrations of residents of one or another ethnicities or ancestries will express those cultures. It is what makes the North End in Boston so fun to visit for the Italian restaurants, bakeries, culture, and charm, and similarly, why people enjoy visiting Chinatown in San Francisco.
In the neighborhood in Seltzer, PA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Irish (30.5%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (24.2%), and residents who report Italian roots (14.7%), and some of the residents are also of Polish ancestry (10.8%), along with some Lithuanian ancestry residents (7.6%), 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 under 15 minutes commuting one-way to work (43.6% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.
Here most residents (92.3%) 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.
