Van is a tiny town located in the state of West Virginia. With a population of 177 people and just one neighborhood, Van is the 258th largest community in West Virginia. Much of the housing stock in Van was built prior to World War II, making it one of the older and more historic towns in the country.
Van is a decidedly white-collar town, with fully 100.00% of the workforce employed in white-collar jobs, well above the national average. Overall, Van is a town of professionals, service providers, and sales and office workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Van who work in healthcare (39.39%), community and social services (31.82%), and law enforcement and fire fighting (15.15%).
Van’s overall crime rate ranks among the lowest in the nation, making it a very safe place to live.
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, Van is worth considering.
One downside of living in Van is that it can take a long time to commute to work. In Van, the average commute to work is 36.36 minutes, which is quite a bit higher than the national average.
Van is very much a car-oriented town. This is because the population of Van isn't large enough or dense enough to support an extensive public transit system. It has a lot of rural roads, and the distance between houses can be quite large, which together tends to discourage walking and bicycling to work. 100.00% of residents commute to work in their own car (and the drive is typically to a job out of town). People also tend to drive out of town for other services as well, such as shopping, doctors appointments, and more.
Van 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.
Van ranks among the bottom of the nation in terms of college education compared to other cities and towns: only 4.95% of people over 25 have a college degree.
The per capita income in Van in 2022 was $29,654, which is upper middle income relative to West Virginia, and lower middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $118,616 for a family of four. However, Van contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Van home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Van residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Van include Irish, Greek, Yugoslavian, Other West Indian, and West Indian.
The most common language spoken in Van is English. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and Polish.
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.
The neighborhood is unique for having just 2.1% of adults here having earned a bachelor's degree. This is a lower rate of college graduates than NeighborhoodScout found in 98.6% of America's neighborhoods.
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. 12.4% 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 97.5% of all neighborhoods in America.
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 96.0% of the neighborhoods in America.
Some neighborhoods have more internal cohesiveness than others. While other neighborhoods feel like a collection of strangers who just happen to live near each other. Sometimes this comes down to not only the personalities of the people in a place, but how long people have been together in that neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research has revealed some interesting things about the rootedness of people in the neighborhood. More residents of the neighborhood live here today that also were living in this same neighborhood five years ago than is found in 96.9% 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.
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 Van are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 94.9% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 41.9% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 90.5% 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, 36.2% 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 31.9% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (18.6%), and 13.3% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
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 99.3% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and Polish.
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 Van, WV, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (7.3%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (5.6%), and residents who report Italian roots (5.3%), and some of the residents are also of English ancestry (4.3%), along with some Polish ancestry residents (2.3%), 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 neighborhood spend under 15 minutes commuting one-way to work (25.8% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America. However, there is also a significant group of residents (12.4%) who commute over an hour in each direction.
Here most residents (86.3%) drive alone in a private automobile to get to work. In addition, quite a number also hop out the door and walk to work to get to work (7.5%) and 6.2% of residents also carpool with coworkers, friends, or neighbors for their daily commute. In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.