Brookneal is a very small town located in the state of Virginia. With a population of 1,077 people and just one neighborhood, Brookneal is the 279th largest community in Virginia.
Because occupations involving physical labor dominate the local economy, Brookneal is generally considered to be a blue-collar town. 41.33% of the Brookneal workforce is employed in blue-collar occupations, compared to the national average of 27.7%. Overall, Brookneal is a town of service providers, transportation and shipping workers, and sales and office workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Brookneal who work in healthcare suport services (17.10%), office and administrative support (11.64%), and food service (8.55%).
Telecommuters are a relatively large percentage of the workforce: 7.67% of people work from home. While this number may seem small overall, as a fraction of the total workforce it is high relative to the nation. 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.
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!) Brookneal 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. Brookneal has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Brookneal than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Brookneal may be for you.
One downside of living in Brookneal, however, is that residents on average have to contend with a long commute, spending on average 30.33 minutes every day commuting to work.
Being a small town, Brookneal does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
The population of Brookneal has a very low overall level of education: only 8.59% of people over 25 hold a 4-year college degree or higher.
The per capita income in Brookneal in 2022 was $20,292, which is low income relative to Virginia and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $81,168 for a family of four.
Brookneal is an extremely ethnically-diverse town. The people who call Brookneal home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Brookneal residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Brookneal include African, Irish, English, German, and Scots-Irish.
The most common language spoken in Brookneal is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and German/Yiddish.
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 Brookneal, the neighborhood, has some outstanding things about the way it looks and its way of life that are worth highlighting.
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 37 people per square mile living here, this neighborhood is less crowded than 91.5% of America.
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 Brookneal are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 74.7% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 11.1% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 51.8% of U.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, 33.2% of the working population is employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is executive, management, and professional occupations, with 25.0% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (24.5%), and 16.5% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 98.2% of households.
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 Brookneal, VA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as English (18.7%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (3.8%), and residents who report Sub-Saharan African roots (3.8%), and some of the residents are also of African ancestry (3.8%), along with some Irish ancestry residents (3.7%), among others.
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 45 minutes and one hour commuting one-way to work (27.9% of working residents), longer and tougher than most commutes in America.
Here most residents (87.4%) 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 (7.3%) . In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.