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.
Darden is a tiny town located in the state of Tennessee. With a population of 364 people and just one neighborhood, Darden is the 353rd largest community in Tennessee. Darden has seen a significant amount of newer housing growth in recent years. Quite often, new home construction is the result of new residents moving in who are middle class or wealthier, attracted by jobs, a healthy local economy, or other amenities as they leave nearby or far away areas for greener pastures. This seems to be the case in Darden, where the median household income is .
Occupations and Workforce
Because occupations involving physical labor dominate the local economy, Darden is generally considered to be a blue-collar town. 58.11% of the Darden workforce is employed in blue-collar occupations, compared to the national average of 27.7%. Overall, Darden is a town of transportation and shipping workers, professionals, and construction workers and builders. There are especially a lot of people living in Darden who work in computer science and math (13.96%), business and financial occupations (5.86%), and food service (5.41%).
Also of interest is that Darden 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 Darden telecommute to their jobs. Overall, about 16.67% 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
Darden’s overall crime rate ranks among the lowest in the nation, making it a very safe place to live.
It is a fairly quiet town 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!) Darden 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. Darden has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Darden than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Darden may be for you.
In Darden, however, the average commute to work is quite long. On average, people spend 30.53 minutes each day getting to work, which is significantly higher than the national average.
Being a small town, Darden does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
Demographics
The rate of college-level education in Darden is quite a bit lower than the national average among all cities of 21.84%: just 12.27% of people here over 25 have a bachelor's degree or an advanced degree.
The per capita income in Darden in 2022 was $39,910, which is wealthy relative to Tennessee, and upper middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $159,640 for a family of four. However, Darden contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Darden home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Darden residents report their race to be White. Important ancestries of people in Darden include Dutch, Irish, German, Scottish, and Polish.
The most common language spoken in Darden is English. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and German/Yiddish.
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.
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 28 people per square mile living here, this neighborhood is less crowded than 93.2% of America.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Dutch ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 4.1% of this neighborhood's residents have Dutch ancestry.
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 Darden are middle-income, making it a moderate income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 58.0% of the neighborhoods in America. In addition, 8.0% 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 55.2% of America's neighborhoods.
What we choose to do for a living reflects who we are. Each neighborhood has a different mix of occupations represented, and together these tell you about the neighborhood and help you understand if this neighborhood may fit your lifestyle.
In the neighborhood, 35.8% 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 35.5% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (19.5%), and 8.1% in government jobs, whether they are in local, state, or federal positions.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 98.3% of households. Some people also speak Italian (3.4%).
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 Darden, TN, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (14.0%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (12.2%), and residents who report English roots (7.1%), and some of the residents are also of Sub-Saharan African ancestry (4.1%), along with some Dutch ancestry residents (4.1%), 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 (32.6% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (80.3%) 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.
