Centralia, IL (Wamac)

There are two complementary measures for understanding the income of a neighborhood's residents: the average and the extremes. While a neighborhood may be relatively wealthy overall, it is equally important to understand the rate of people - particularly children - who are living at or below the federal poverty line, which is extremely low income. Some neighborhoods with a lower average income may actually have a lower childhood poverty rate than another with a higher average income, and this helps us understand the conditions and character of a neighborhood.

The neighbors in the Wamac neighborhood in Centralia are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 90.3% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 51.1% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 94.4% 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 Wamac neighborhood, 31.2% 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 30.8% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in executive, management, and professional occupations (28.7%), and 8.8% 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 Wamac neighborhood is English, spoken by 94.5% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Polish and Spanish.

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 Wamac neighborhood in Centralia, IL, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Irish (19.3%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (16.5%), and residents who report English roots (8.2%), and some of the residents are also of Polish ancestry (6.5%), along with some Italian ancestry residents (4.5%), among others.

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 Wamac neighborhood spend under 15 minutes commuting one-way to work (48.2% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.

Here most residents (81.3%) 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 (12.1%) . In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.