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.
Gate City is a very small town located in the state of Virginia. With a population of 2,023 people and just one neighborhood, Gate City is the 218th largest community in Virginia.
Occupations and Workforce
Unlike some towns where white-collar or blue-collar occupations dominate the local economy, Gate City is neither predominantly one nor the other. Instead, it has a mixed workforce of both white- and blue-collar jobs. Overall, Gate City is a town of professionals, sales and office workers, and construction workers and builders. There are especially a lot of people living in Gate City who work in office and administrative support (18.35%), teaching (17.10%), and sales jobs (10.86%).
There are quite a few people in the armed forces living in Gate City, and when you visit or drive around town, you will see military people in and out of uniform, shopping, enjoying life, and being part of the community.
Also of interest is that Gate City has more people living here who work in computers and math than 95% of the places in the US.
Setting & Lifestyle
Being a small town, Gate City does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
Demographics
The education level of Gate City citizens is substantially higher than the typical US community, as 31.96% of adults in Gate City have at least a bachelor's degree.
The per capita income in Gate City in 2022 was $32,629, which is lower middle income relative to Virginia, and middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $130,516 for a family of four. However, Gate City contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Gate City home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Gate City residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Gate City include English, Irish, German, Scots-Irish, and European.
The most common language spoken in Gate City is English. Other important languages spoken here include German/Yiddish and Italian.
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
While most Americans do drive to work alone each day, the neighborhood stands out by having 91.4% of commuters doing so, which is a higher proportion of people driving alone to work than NeighborhoodScout found in 98.3% of all American neighborhoods.
Occupations
With 2.9% of employed workers living in the neighborhood active in the military, this neighborhood has the distinction of having a higher proportion of people in the military than 97.3% of American neighborhoods. This is a major shaper of the neighborhood's culture and character.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Scots-Irish ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 6.4% of this neighborhood's residents have Scots-Irish ancestry.
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 Gate City are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 81.4% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 14.8% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 60.7% of U.S. neighborhoods.
A neighborhood is far different if it is dominated by enlisted military personnel rather than people who earn their living by farming. It is also different if most of the neighbors are clerical support or managers. What is wonderful is the sheer diversity of neighborhoods, allowing you to find the type that fits your lifestyle and aspirations.
In the neighborhood, 39.0% of the working population is employed in executive, management, and professional 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 28.1% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations (18.6%), and 14.3% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 99.5% of households.
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 Gate City, VA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as English (15.2%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (8.0%), and residents who report Scots-Irish roots (6.4%), and some of the residents are also of German ancestry (6.0%), along with some Cuban ancestry residents (2.1%), among others.
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 15 and 30 minutes commuting one-way to work (41.8% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (91.4%) 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.
