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.
Santa Maria is a tiny town located in the state of Texas. With a population of 651 people and just one neighborhood, Santa Maria is the 903rd largest community in Texas.
Occupations and Workforce
Unlike some towns, Santa Maria isn’t mainly white- or blue-collar. Instead, the most prevalent occupations for people in Santa Maria are a mix of both white- and blue-collar jobs. Overall, Santa Maria is a town of service providers, sales and office workers, and construction workers and builders. There are especially a lot of people living in Santa Maria who work in sales jobs (17.86%), maintenance occupations (12.24%), and office and administrative support (11.73%).
Setting & Lifestyle
The town is relatively quiet, having a combination of lower population density and few of those groups of people who have a tendency to be noisy. For example, Santa Maria has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Santa Maria a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.
Santa Maria is very much a car-oriented town. This is because the population of Santa Maria 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. 97.45% 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.
Santa Maria is a small town, and as such doesn't have a public transit system that people use to get to and from their jobs every day.
Demographics
Santa Maria ranks among the bottom of the nation in terms of college education compared to other cities and towns: only 1.71% of people over 25 have a college degree.
The per capita income in Santa Maria in 2022 was $14,120, which is low income relative to Texas and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $56,480 for a family of four. However, Santa Maria contains both very wealthy and poor people as well. Santa Maria also has one of the higher rates of people living in poverty in the nation, with 35.09% of its population below the federal poverty line.
Santa Maria is an extremely ethnically-diverse town. The people who call Santa Maria home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. People of Hispanic or Latino origin are the most prevalent group in Santa Maria, accounting for 100.00% of the town’s residents (people of Hispanic or Latino origin can be of any race). The greatest number of Santa Maria residents report their race to be Native Hawaiian. Important ancestries of people in Santa Maria include Yugoslavian, Other West Indian, West Indian, U.S. Virgin Islander, and Trinidadian and Tobagonian.
Foreign born people are also an important part of Santa Maria's cultural character, accounting for 30.15% of the town’s population.
The most common language spoken in Santa Maria is Spanish. Other important languages spoken here include English and African languages.
Notable & Unique Neighborhood Characteristics
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.
Modes of Transportation
While most Americans do drive to work alone each day, the neighborhood stands out by having 94.8% of commuters doing so, which is a higher proportion of people driving alone to work than NeighborhoodScout found in 99.4% of all American neighborhoods.
People
NeighborhoodScout's exclusive research revealed that 95.2% 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 97.3% of the neighborhoods in America.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Mexican ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 95.0% of this neighborhood's residents have Mexican ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 71.2% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak Spanish at home. This is a higher percentage than 97.6% of all U.S. neighborhoods.
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 Santa Maria are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 78.4% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 30.1% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 81.3% 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, 38.7% 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 25.8% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in executive, management, and professional occupations (21.9%), and 13.1% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is Spanish, spoken by 71.2% of households. Some people also speak English (28.8%).
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 Santa Maria, TX, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Mexican (95.0%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (1.1%). In addition, 35.0% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country.
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 (35.2% of working residents), which is at or a bit above the average length of a commute across all U.S. neighborhoods.
Here most residents (94.8%) 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.
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.
