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.
Dunkirk is a very small city located in the state of Indiana. With a population of 2,098 people and just one neighborhood, Dunkirk is the 230th largest community in Indiana.
Occupations and Workforce
When you are in Dunkirk, you'll notice that it is more blue-collar than most other communities in America. 47.28% of Dunkirk’s employed work in blue-collar jobs, while America averages only 27.7% that do. Overall, Dunkirk is a city of production and manufacturing workers, service providers, and sales and office workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Dunkirk who work in food service (12.98%), office and administrative support (11.39%), and sales jobs (8.21%).
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!) Dunkirk 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. Dunkirk has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Dunkirk than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Dunkirk may be for you.
Being a small city, Dunkirk does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
Demographics
The population of Dunkirk has a very low overall level of education: only 6.88% of people over 25 hold a 4-year college degree or higher.
The per capita income in Dunkirk in 2022 was $25,250, which is low income relative to Indiana and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $101,000 for a family of four. However, Dunkirk contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Dunkirk home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Dunkirk residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Dunkirk include English, Irish, German, Russian, and Dutch.
The most common language spoken in Dunkirk is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and West Germanic languages.
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
More people work in manufacturing and as laborers here in the neighborhood than in 98.1% of the neighborhoods in America. Despite the loss of manufacturing jobs across the nation, this neighborhood remains a place where, compared to other parts of the country, you will find many laborers and manufacturers.
Modes of Transportation
Our research reveals that 88.9% of commuters who live in the neighborhood get to work each day by driving alone in their automobiles, which is a higher proportion than 96.1% of U.S. neighborhoods.
People
NeighborhoodScout's exclusive research revealed that 93.3% of the adult residents in the neighborhood do not have a 4-year college degree, which is a lower rate of college graduated adults than found in 95.9% of the neighborhoods in America.
In addition, astoundingly, the neighborhood has one of the highest concentrations of divorcees living here than of any neighborhood, a higher concentration than NeighborhoodScout found in 95.8% of U.S. neighborhoods. This may be because people living here divorce more often than others, or that divorced people move here after they become divorced. If you are divorced, you will be in good company in this particular Dunkirk neighborhood.
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 Dunkirk are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 84.9% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 25.3% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 76.7% 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, 47.1% 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 23.4% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (21.1%), and 8.4% in executive, management, and professional occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 97.1% 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 Dunkirk, IN, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Irish (12.1%). There are also a number of people of English ancestry (11.5%), and residents who report German roots (8.5%), and some of the residents are also of Russian ancestry (1.6%), along with some Dutch ancestry residents (1.6%), 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 (38.0% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (88.9%) 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 (6.0%) . 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.
