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.
Switzer is a tiny town located in the state of West Virginia. With a population of 593 people and just one neighborhood, Switzer is the 186th largest community in West Virginia.
Occupations and Workforce
Switzer is a decidedly white-collar town, with fully 100.00% of the workforce employed in white-collar jobs, well above the national average. Overall, Switzer is a town of managers, sales and office workers, and transportation and shipping workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Switzer who work in management occupations (80.65%), office and administrative support (19.35%), and sales jobs (0.00%).
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, Switzer is worth considering.
One downside of living in Switzer, however, is that residents on average have to contend with a long commute, spending on average 57.90 minutes every day commuting to work.
Switzer is a small town, and as is often the case with smaller towns, the population isn't large or dense enough to support much in the way of a public transportation system. In fact, there are many rural roads around Switzer, which makes walking or biking to and from work a bit difficult. This makes for a very car-oriented town: 100.00% of residents commute to work by private automobile, and people often drive out of town for work, shopping, and other activities.
Switzer 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 Switzer, just 9.15% 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 Switzer in 2022 was $24,629, which is lower middle income relative to West Virginia, and low income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $98,516 for a family of four.
The people who call Switzer home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Switzer residents report their race to be White. Important ancestries of people in Switzer include Irish, Yugoslavian, Other West Indian, West Indian, and U.S. Virgin Islander.
The most common language spoken in Switzer 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.
Modes of Transportation
While most Americans do drive to work alone each day, the neighborhood stands out by having 93.7% of commuters doing so, which is a higher proportion of people driving alone to work than NeighborhoodScout found in 99.3% of all American neighborhoods.
People
Divorcees may find friendship and understanding in this neighborhood, as 20.4% of its residents are divorced. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis found that this divorce rate is higher than in 96.1% of the neighborhoods in America.
Length of Commute
Whether walking, biking, riding, or driving, the length of one's commute is an important factor for one's quality of life. The neighborhood stands out for its commute length, according to NeighborhoodScout's analysis. 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. 10.3% 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 96.0% of all neighborhoods in America.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Hungarian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 4.1% of this neighborhood's residents have Hungarian 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 Switzer are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 87.3% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 40.2% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 89.5% 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, 36.8% of the working population is employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is executive, management, and professional occupations, with 29.6% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (17.4%), and 16.3% 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 English, spoken by 100.0% of households. Some people also speak Italian (3.5%).
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 Switzer, WV, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Irish (14.4%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (13.1%), and residents who report English roots (6.0%), and some of the residents are also of Hungarian ancestry (4.1%), along with some Italian 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 under 15 minutes commuting one-way to work (40.1% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America. However, there is also a significant group of residents (10.3%) who commute over an hour in each direction.
Here most residents (93.7%) 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.
