Mears is a tiny town located in the state of Michigan. With a population of 332 people and just one neighborhood, Mears is the 613th largest community in Michigan.
Mears is neither predominantly blue-collar nor white-collar, instead having a mixed workforce of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Overall, Mears is a town of professionals, service providers, and sales and office workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Mears who work in maintenance occupations (16.54%), sales jobs (9.77%), and legal occupations (9.02%).
Of important note, Mears is also a town of artists. Mears has more artists, designers and people working in media than 90% of the communities in America. This concentration of artists helps shape Mears’s character.
Mears’s overall crime rate ranks among the lowest in the nation, making it a very safe place to live.
Residents will find that the town is relatively quiet. This is because it is not over-populated, and it has fewer college students, renters, and young children - all of whom can be noisy at times. So, if you're looking for a relatively peaceful place to live, Mears is worth considering.
Residents of the town have the good fortune of having one of the shortest daily commutes compared to the rest of the country. On average, they spend only 16.07 minutes getting to work every day.
As is often the case in a small town, Mears doesn't have a public transportation system that people use for their commute.
The percentage of people in Mears with college degrees is quite a bit lower than the national average for cities and towns of 21.84%: just 11.56% of people over 25 have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Mears in 2022 was $25,970, which is lower middle income relative to Michigan and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $103,880 for a family of four. However, Mears contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
Mears is an extremely ethnically-diverse town. The people who call Mears home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Mears residents report their race to be White. Mears also has a sizeable Hispanic population (people of Hispanic origin can be of any race). People of Hispanic or Latino origin account for 20.55% of the town’s residents. Important ancestries of people in Mears include German, English, Dutch, Irish, and Scottish.
The most common language spoken in Mears is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Polish.
When you see a neighborhood for the first time, the most important thing is often the way it looks, like its homes and its setting. Some places look the same, but they only reveal their true character after living in them for a while because they contain a unique mix of occupational or cultural groups. This neighborhood is very unique in some important ways, according to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive exploration and analysis.
Despite all of the residential real estate here in the neighborhood, NeighborhoodScout has discovered that much of it is vacant. In resort or second-home vacation areas, this naturally occurs because homes and apartments are seasonally occupied, and empty for a portion of the year. In non-vacation or resort areas, however, this can be an indicator of property abandonment or a weak real estate market. The vacancy rate here is 65.8%, which is higher than 99.6% of all U.S. neighborhoods.
In addition, one of the notable things about is that it is one of the quietest neighborhoods in America, according to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis and quantitative rating of quietness. When you are here, you will find it to be very quiet. If quiet and peaceful are your cup of tea, you may have found a great place for you.
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Dutch and Yugoslav ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 12.4% of this neighborhood's residents have Dutch ancestry and 1.4% have Yugoslav ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 0.8% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak Greek at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 95.9% of the neighborhoods in America.
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 Mears are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 61.8% of U.S. neighborhoods. In addition, 3.5% 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 69.6% 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, 38.0% 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 31.0% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (16.6%), and 12.4% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
The languages spoken by people in this neighborhood are diverse. These are tabulated as the languages people preferentially speak when they are at home with their families. The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 89.4% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish, Polish and Italian.
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 Mears, MI, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (24.0%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (16.2%), and residents who report Mexican roots (14.8%), and some of the residents are also of Dutch ancestry (12.4%), along with some English ancestry residents (10.6%), among others.
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 (35.5% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.
Here most residents (72.3%) 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 (17.8%) . In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.