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.
Fort Gay is a tiny town located in the state of West Virginia. With a population of 661 people and just one neighborhood, Fort Gay is the 178th largest community in West Virginia.
Occupations and Workforce
Because occupations involving physical labor dominate the local economy, Fort Gay is generally considered to be a blue-collar town. 66.43% of the Fort Gay workforce is employed in blue-collar occupations, compared to the national average of 27.7%. Overall, Fort Gay is a town of production and manufacturing workers, construction workers and builders, and sales and office workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Fort Gay who work in sales jobs (13.99%), food service (4.20%), and art, media, and design (4.20%).
Of important note, Fort Gay is also a town of artists. Fort Gay has more artists, designers and people working in media than 90% of the communities in America. This concentration of artists helps shape Fort Gay’s character.
Setting & Lifestyle
Residents will find that the town is relatively quiet. This is because it is not over-populated, and it has fewer college students, renters, and young children - all of whom can be noisy at times. So, if you're looking for a relatively peaceful place to live, Fort Gay is worth considering.
One downside of living in Fort Gay, however, is that residents on average have to contend with a long commute, spending on average 33.79 minutes every day commuting to work.
As is often the case in a small town, Fort Gay doesn't have a public transportation system that people use for their commute.
Demographics
The population of Fort Gay has one of the lowest overall levels of education in the country: only 5.31% of people over 25 hold a college degree. The national average for all municipalities is 21.84%.
The per capita income in Fort Gay in 2022 was $19,434, which is low income relative to West Virginia and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $77,736 for a family of four. Fort Gay also has one of the higher rates of people living in poverty in the nation, with 35.73% of its population below the federal poverty line.
The people who call Fort Gay home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Fort Gay residents report their race to be White. Important ancestries of people in Fort Gay include Irish, English, Scottish, German, and Yugoslavian.
The most common language spoken in Fort Gay is English. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and African languages.
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.
Real Estate
The real estate in this neighborhood consists of more mobile homes than 98.0% of all neighborhoods in America, with 41.0% 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.
People
Astoundingly, the neighborhood has one of the highest concentrations of divorcees living here than of any neighborhood, a higher concentration than NeighborhoodScout found in 97.7% of U.S. neighborhoods. This may be because people living here divorce more often than others, or that divorced people move here after they become divorced. If you are divorced, you will be in good company in this particular Fort Gay neighborhood.
In addition, the neighborhood is unique for having just 6.9% of adults here having earned a bachelor's degree. This is a lower rate of college graduates than NeighborhoodScout found in 95.7% of America's neighborhoods.
Modes of Transportation
Our research reveals that 89.2% of commuters who live in the neighborhood get to work each day by driving alone in their automobiles, which is a higher proportion than 96.4% of U.S. neighborhoods.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Finnish ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 3.1% of this neighborhood's residents have Finnish 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 Fort Gay are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 91.5% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 26.2% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 77.8% 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, 36.1% 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 31.7% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in executive, management, and professional occupations (22.3%), and 9.9% 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 92.8% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Italian.
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 Fort Gay, WV, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as English (19.5%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (10.5%), and residents who report German roots (3.6%), and some of the residents are also of Finnish ancestry (3.1%), along with some Scottish ancestry residents (2.8%), 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 15 and 30 minutes commuting one-way to work (37.8% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (89.2%) 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 (8.9%) . 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.
