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.
Belle Plaine is a very small city located in the state of Iowa. With a population of 2,340 people and just one neighborhood, Belle Plaine is the 243rd largest community in Iowa. Much of the housing stock in Belle Plaine was built prior to World War II, making it one of the older and more historic cities in the country.
Occupations and Workforce
Because occupations involving physical labor dominate the local economy, Belle Plaine is generally considered to be a blue-collar town. 49.06% of the Belle Plaine workforce is employed in blue-collar occupations, compared to the national average of 27.7%. Overall, Belle Plaine is a city of production and manufacturing workers, service providers, and transportation and shipping workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Belle Plaine who work in office and administrative support (9.75%), healthcare suport services (5.11%), and business and financial occupations (5.03%).
Setting & Lifestyle
It is a fairly quiet city 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!) Belle Plaine 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. Belle Plaine has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Belle Plaine than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Belle Plaine may be for you.
As is often the case in a small city, Belle Plaine doesn't have a public transportation system that people use for their commute.
Demographics
In terms of college education, Belle Plaine is nearly on par with the US average for all cities of 21.84%: 18.40% of adults 25 and older in Belle Plaine have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Belle Plaine in 2022 was $39,158, which is upper middle income relative to Iowa and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $156,632 for a family of four. However, Belle Plaine contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Belle Plaine home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Belle Plaine residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Belle Plaine include German, English, Irish, Czech, and Scottish.
The most common language spoken in Belle Plaine is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish 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.
Occupations
NeighborhoodScout's exclusive research identifies the neighborhood as having one of the highest concentrations of people employed in manufacturing or as laborers of any neighborhood in America. In fact, despite the loss of manufacturing jobs nationally, this neighborhood has 46.9% of its working residents employed in such fields, which is a higher proportion than 98.1% of American neighborhoods.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Belgian and Czechoslovakian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 1.3% of this neighborhood's residents have Belgian ancestry and 1.0% have Czechoslovakian 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 Belle Plaine are middle-income, making it a moderate income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 45.4% of the neighborhoods in America. In addition, 10.0% 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 50.1% of America'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, 46.9% 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 19.2% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (17.1%), and 16.6% in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 98.0% of households.
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 Belle Plaine, IA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (32.6%). There are also a number of people of English ancestry (14.3%), and residents who report Irish roots (11.0%), and some of the residents are also of Scottish ancestry (3.6%), along with some Norwegian ancestry residents (3.5%), 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 (42.6% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across 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 (5.7%) . 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.
