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.
Lithonia is a very small city located in the state of Georgia. With a population of 2,611 people and just one neighborhood, Lithonia is the 233rd largest community in Georgia.
Occupations and Workforce
Lithonia is neither predominantly blue-collar nor white-collar, instead having a mixed workforce of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Overall, Lithonia is a city of professionals, service providers, and transportation and shipping workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Lithonia who work in healthcare (16.71%), business and financial occupations (7.20%), and food service (6.74%).
Also of interest is that Lithonia has more people living here who work in computers and math than 95% of the places in the US.
Setting & Lifestyle
One downside of living in Lithonia is that it can take a long time to commute to work. In Lithonia, the average commute to work is 37.08 minutes, which is quite a bit higher than the national average. On the other hand, local public transit is widely used in the city, so leaving the car at home and taking transit is often a viable alternative.
Despite the fact that it is a small city, Lithonia has quite a few people who take public transportation – mostly the bus - for their daily commute to work. This helps to fill a real need in the city for affordable transportation.
Demographics
The education level of Lithonia citizens is a little higher than the average for US cities and towns: 24.64% of adults in Lithonia have at least a bachelor's degree.
The per capita income in Lithonia in 2022 was $37,638, which is wealthy relative to Georgia, and upper middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $150,552 for a family of four. However, Lithonia contains both very wealthy and poor people as well. Lithonia also has one of the higher rates of people living in poverty in the nation, with 34.67% of its population below the federal poverty line.
Lithonia is a somewhat ethnically-diverse city. The people who call Lithonia home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Lithonia residents report their race to be Black or African-American, followed by Asian. Important ancestries of people in Lithonia include African, Jamaican, German, Other Subsaharan African, and English.
The most common language spoken in Lithonia is English. Other important languages spoken here include Tagalog and Spanish.
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.
People
The types of households in a neighborhood can tell a lot about the character and lifestyle of those living here. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood, above nearly every neighborhood in America, has a greater percentage of its residents living alone: 63.6%. This is a higher percent living alone than we found in 99.3% of all U.S. neighborhoods. Often residents who live alone are new arrivals to an area who are single, and often senior citizens who have lost a spouse.
In addition, the neighborhood stands out for having an average per capita income lower than 97.7% of the neighborhoods in the United States. Also of note, 59.1% 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.
Length of Commute
Whether walking, biking, riding, or driving, the length of one's commute is an important factor for one's quality of life. The neighborhood stands out for its commute length, according to NeighborhoodScout's analysis. Long commutes can be brutal. They take time, money, and energy, leaving less of you for yourself and your family. The residents of the neighborhood unfortunately have the distinction of having, on average, a longer commute than most any neighborhood in America. 13.3% of commuters here travel more than one hour just one-way to work. That is more than two hours per day. This percentage with two-hour + round-trip commutes is higher than NeighborhoodScout found in 97.9% of all neighborhoods in America.
Car Ownership
American households most often have a car, and regularly they have two or three. But households in the neighborhood buck this trend. 22.1% of the households in this neighborhood don't own a car at all. This is more carless households than NeighborhoodScout found in 95.8% of U.S. neighborhoods.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more African and Jamaican ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 13.8% of this neighborhood's residents have African ancestry and 6.7% have Jamaican 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 Lithonia are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 97.7% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 59.1% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 96.6% of U.S. neighborhoods.
A neighborhood is far different if it is dominated by enlisted military personnel rather than people who earn their living by farming. It is also different if most of the neighbors are clerical support or managers. What is wonderful is the sheer diversity of neighborhoods, allowing you to find the type that fits your lifestyle and aspirations.
In the neighborhood, 38.7% 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 36.2% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (15.5%), and 9.6% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 94.8% of households. Some people also speak Spanish (3.3%).
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 Lithonia, GA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Sub-Saharan African (15.7%). There are also a number of people of African ancestry (13.8%), and residents who report Jamaican roots (6.7%), and some of the residents are also of Haitian ancestry (3.8%), along with some Mexican ancestry residents (2.5%), 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 30 and 45 minutes commuting one-way to work (35.3% of working residents), which is at or a bit above the average length of a commute across all U.S. neighborhoods. However, there is also a significant group of residents (13.3%) who commute over an hour in each direction.
Here most residents (80.4%) 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 (9.2%) . 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.
