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.
Sheep Springs is a tiny town located in the state of New Mexico. With a population of 262 people and just one neighborhood, Sheep Springs is the 148th largest community in New Mexico.
Occupations and Workforce
Unlike some towns, Sheep Springs isn’t mainly white- or blue-collar. Instead, the most prevalent occupations for people in Sheep Springs are a mix of both white- and blue-collar jobs. Overall, Sheep Springs is a town of sales and office workers, service providers, and professionals. There are especially a lot of people living in Sheep Springs who work in healthcare suport services (20.37%), office and administrative support (18.52%), and teaching (16.67%).
Setting & Lifestyle
Sheep Springs’s overall crime rate ranks among the lowest in the nation, making it a very safe place to live.
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, Sheep Springs has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Sheep Springs a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.
In Sheep Springs, however, the average commute to work is quite long. On average, people spend 40.63 minutes each day getting to work, which is significantly higher than the national average.
Sheep Springs 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
In Sheep Springs, just 6.22% of people over 25 hold a college degree, which is very low compared to the rest of the nation, whereas the average among all cities is 21.84%.
The per capita income in Sheep Springs in 2022 was $12,243, which is low income relative to New Mexico and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $48,972 for a family of four. However, Sheep Springs contains both very wealthy and poor people as well. Sheep Springs also has one of the higher rates of people living in poverty in the nation, with 34.97% of its population below the federal poverty line.
The people who call Sheep Springs home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Sheep Springs residents report their race to be Native American. Important ancestries of people in Sheep Springs include Yugoslavian, Other West Indian, West Indian, U.S. Virgin Islander, and Trinidadian and Tobagonian.
The most common language spoken in Sheep Springs is English. Other important languages spoken here include Native American languages and Navajo.
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.
Real Estate
Unpopulated, and rural, the neighborhood is one of the least crowded neighborhoods in all of America. If you like open space, no traffic, and lots of room, this neighborhood may be just what you are looking for. According to NeighborhoodScout's leading research, this neighborhood is less densely populated than 98.4% of the neighborhoods in America.
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 29.7%, which is higher than 95.0% of all U.S. neighborhoods.
Length of Commute
Regardless of the means by which residents commute, this neighborhood has a length of commute that is notable. Long commutes can be brutal. They take time, money, and energy, leaving less of you for yourself and your family. The residents of the neighborhood unfortunately have the distinction of having, on average, a longer commute than most any neighborhood in America. 13.3% of commuters here travel more than one hour just one-way to work. That is more than two hours per day. This percentage with two-hour + round-trip commutes is higher than NeighborhoodScout found in 98.0% of all neighborhoods in America.
People
The neighborhood stands out for having an average per capita income lower than 97.3% of the neighborhoods in the United States.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Native American ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 96.5% of this neighborhood's residents have Native American ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 69.2% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak Native American languages at home. This is a higher percentage than 100.0% of all U.S. neighborhoods.
Migration / Stability
The freedom of moving to new places versus the comfort of home. How much and how often people move not only can create diverse and worldly neighborhoods, but simultaneously it can produce a loss of intimacy with one's surroundings and a lack of connectedness to one's neighbors. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive research has identified this neighborhood as unique with regard to the transience of its populace. More residents of the neighborhood live here today that also were living in this same neighborhood five years ago than is found in 98.1% of U.S. neighborhoods. This neighborhood is really made up of people who know each other, don't move often, and have lived here in this very neighborhood for quite a while.
The Neighbors
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 neighborhood in Sheep Springs are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 97.3% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 38.6% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 88.6% 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, 38.8% 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 22.0% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (20.5%), and 17.4% in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is Native American languages, spoken by 69.2% of households. Some people also speak English (43.1%).
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 Sheep Springs, NM, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Native American (96.5%). There are also a number of people of Mexican ancestry (1.9%).
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 45 minutes and one hour commuting one-way to work (50.5% of working residents), longer and tougher than most commutes in America.
Here most residents (86.2%) 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 (5.4%) . 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.
