Norfolk is a very small town located in the state of New York. With a population of 1,238 people and just one neighborhood, Norfolk is the 715th largest community in New York. Norfolk has an unusually large stock of pre-World War II architecture, making it one of the older and more historic towns.
Norfolk is neither predominantly blue-collar nor white-collar, instead having a mixed workforce of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Overall, Norfolk is a town of service providers, professionals, and transportation and shipping workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Norfolk who work in healthcare suport services (17.80%), law enforcement and fire fighting (12.76%), and teaching (11.87%).
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!) Norfolk 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. Norfolk has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Norfolk than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Norfolk may be for you.
Norfolk is very much a car-oriented town. This is because the population of Norfolk isn't large enough or dense enough to support an extensive public transit system. It has a lot of rural roads, and the distance between houses can be quite large, which together tends to discourage walking and bicycling to work. 97.63% of residents commute to work in their own car (and the drive is typically to a job out of town). People also tend to drive out of town for other services as well, such as shopping, doctors appointments, and more.
Being a small town, Norfolk does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
The population of Norfolk 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 Norfolk in 2022 was $27,210, which is low income relative to New York, and lower middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $108,840 for a family of four. However, Norfolk contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Norfolk home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Norfolk residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Norfolk include French, English, Irish, German, and Dutch.
The most common language spoken in Norfolk is English. Other important languages spoken here include Polish and Greek.
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.
Our research reveals that 98.3% of commuters who live in the neighborhood get to work each day by driving alone in their automobiles, which is a higher proportion than 99.9% of U.S. neighborhoods.
Did you know that the neighborhood has more French Canadian and French ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 7.7% of this neighborhood's residents have French Canadian ancestry and 12.3% have French ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 1.1% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak Native American languages at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 97.7% 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 Norfolk are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 74.0% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 18.7% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 66.6% 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, 32.3% of the working population is employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is manufacturing and laborer occupations, with 32.0% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in executive, management, and professional occupations (25.3%), and 10.4% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 97.6% 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 Norfolk, NY, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Irish (15.3%). There are also a number of people of French ancestry (12.3%), and residents who report English roots (9.6%), and some of the residents are also of French Canadian ancestry (7.7%), along with some German ancestry residents (7.2%), 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 between 15 and 30 minutes commuting one-way to work (53.4% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (98.3%) drive alone in a private automobile to get to work. In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.