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.
Welaka is a tiny town located in the state of Florida. With a population of 743 people and just one neighborhood, Welaka is the 450th largest community in Florida.
Occupations and Workforce
Welaka is neither predominantly blue-collar nor white-collar, instead having a mixed workforce of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Overall, Welaka is a town of service providers, sales and office workers, and professionals. There are especially a lot of people living in Welaka who work in maintenance occupations (14.40%), sales jobs (10.54%), and healthcare suport services (9.77%).
Also of interest is that Welaka has more people living here who work in computers and math than 95% of the places in the US.
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, Welaka has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Welaka a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.
In Welaka, however, the average commute to work is quite long. On average, people spend 32.14 minutes each day getting to work, which is significantly higher than the national average.
As is often the case in a small town, Welaka doesn't have a public transportation system that people use for their commute.
Demographics
The percentage of people in Welaka with college degrees is quite a bit lower than the national average for cities and towns of 21.84%: just 11.90% of people over 25 have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Welaka in 2022 was $29,107, which is lower middle income relative to Florida and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $116,428 for a family of four. However, Welaka contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
Welaka is an extremely ethnically-diverse town. The people who call Welaka home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Welaka residents report their race to be Black or African-American, followed by White. Important ancestries of people in Welaka include English, Irish, German, Dutch, and French.
The most common language spoken in Welaka is English. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and Spanish.
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.
Modes of Transportation
In the neighborhood, carpooling is still a popular way to get to and from work. NeighborhoodScout's analysis reveals that 34.6% of commuters carpool here, which is more than in 99.4% of all U.S. neighborhoods.
Real Estate
The real estate in this neighborhood consists of more mobile homes than 98.0% of all neighborhoods in America, with 41.1% of the occupied housing here being classified as mobile homes. So if you are looking for a mobile home, or you like the look and feel of mobile home parks, this neighborhood might have the setting you desire.
In addition, 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 33.7%, which is higher than 96.4% of all U.S. neighborhoods.
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 41.7% of its working residents employed in such fields, which is a higher proportion than 95.3% of American neighborhoods.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more English ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 21.0% of this neighborhood's residents have English ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 5.1% 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 99.9% of the neighborhoods in America.
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 Welaka are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 85.0% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 49.5% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 94.0% 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, 41.7% 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 21.3% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in executive, management, and professional occupations (19.5%), and 15.7% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
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 84.0% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish, Greek, Italian and Polish.
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 Welaka, FL, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as English (21.0%). There are also a number of people of Mexican ancestry (13.5%), and residents who report German roots (8.9%), and some of the residents are also of Irish ancestry (7.2%), along with some French ancestry residents (2.1%), 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 between 45 minutes and one hour commuting one-way to work (40.1% of working residents), longer and tougher than most commutes in America.
Here most residents (57.5%) 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 (34.6%) . 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.
