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.
Smoaks is a tiny town located in the state of South Carolina. With a population of 98 people and just one neighborhood, Smoaks is the 290th largest community in South Carolina.
Occupations and Workforce
Smoaks is neither predominantly blue-collar nor white-collar, instead having a mixed workforce of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Overall, Smoaks is a town of professionals, construction workers and builders, and service providers. There are especially a lot of people living in Smoaks who work in teaching (24.07%), community and social services (12.96%), and office and administrative support (7.41%).
Smoaks is home to a number of people employed in the armed forces. When you visit or walk around Smoaks, some of the people you will bump into will be military people In and out of uniform, jogging, shopping and generally out and about town.
Also of interest is that Smoaks has more people living here who work in computers and math than 95% of the places in the US.
Setting & Lifestyle
Overall, Smoaks’s crime rate is one of the lowest in the nation, which makes a great place to live if safety is an important concern.
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, Smoaks has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Smoaks a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.
One downside of living in Smoaks is that it can take a long time to commute to work. In Smoaks, the average commute to work is 33.21 minutes, which is quite a bit higher than the national average.
As is often the case in a small town, Smoaks doesn't have a public transportation system that people use for their commute.
Demographics
In terms of college education, Smoaks is somewhat better educated than the 21.84% who have a 4-year degree or higher in the typical US community: 27.00% of adults 25 and older in the town have at least a bachelor's degree.
The per capita income in Smoaks in 2022 was $41,548, which is wealthy relative to South Carolina, and upper middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $166,192 for a family of four. However, Smoaks contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Smoaks home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Smoaks residents report their race to be White. Important ancestries of people in Smoaks include English, Irish, European, German, and Scots-Irish.
The most common language spoken in Smoaks 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 Smoaks, the neighborhood, has some outstanding things about the way it looks and its way of life that are worth highlighting.
Real Estate
The real estate in this neighborhood consists of more mobile homes than 98.7% of all neighborhoods in America, with 46.5% of the occupied housing here being classified as mobile homes. So if you are looking for a mobile home, or you like the look and feel of mobile home parks, this neighborhood might have the setting you desire.
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 21 people per square mile living here, this neighborhood is less crowded than 94.5% of 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 Smoaks are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 82.6% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 13.8% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 57.7% 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, 34.1% 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 (23.5%), and 17.3% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 100.0% of households.
Ethnicity / Ancestry
Boston's Beacon Hill blue-blood streets, Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish enclaves, Los Angeles' Persian neighborhoods. Each has its own culture derived primarily from the ancestries and culture of the residents who call these neighborhoods home. Likewise, each neighborhood in America has its own culture – some more unique than others – based on lifestyle, occupations, the types of households – and importantly – on the ethnicities and ancestries of the people who live in the neighborhood. Understanding where people came from, who their grandparents or great-grandparents were, can help you understand how a neighborhood is today.
In the neighborhood in Smoaks, SC, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as English (5.5%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (4.3%), and residents who report Sub-Saharan African roots (4.3%), and some of the residents are also of African ancestry (4.3%), along with some Irish ancestry residents (3.1%), 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 (30.7% of working residents), which is at or a bit above the average length of a commute across all U.S. neighborhoods.
Here most residents (80.8%) 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 (13.2%) . 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.
