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.
Hessmer is a tiny village located in the state of Louisiana. With a population of 742 people and just one neighborhood, Hessmer is the 258th largest community in Louisiana.
Occupations and Workforce
Unlike some villages, Hessmer isn’t mainly white- or blue-collar. Instead, the most prevalent occupations for people in Hessmer are a mix of both white- and blue-collar jobs. Overall, Hessmer is a village of service providers, sales and office workers, and construction workers and builders. There are especially a lot of people living in Hessmer who work in law enforcement and fire fighting (13.30%), maintenance occupations (12.88%), and sales jobs (11.16%).
Setting & Lifestyle
It is a fairly quiet village because there are relatively few of those groups of people who have a tendency to be noisy. (Children, for example, often can't help themselves from being noisy, and being parents ourselves, we know!) Hessmer has relatively few families with children living at home, and is quieter because of it. Renters and college students, for their own reasons, can also be noisy. Hessmer has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Hessmer than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Hessmer may be for you.
As is often the case in a small village, Hessmer doesn't have a public transportation system that people use for their commute.
Demographics
The rate of college-level education in Hessmer is quite a bit lower than the national average among all cities of 21.84%: just 10.41% of people here over 25 have a bachelor's degree or an advanced degree.
The per capita income in Hessmer in 2022 was $22,839, which is lower middle income relative to Louisiana, and low income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $91,356 for a family of four. However, Hessmer contains both very wealthy and poor people as well. Hessmer also has one of the higher rates of people living in poverty in the nation, with 39.94% of its population below the federal poverty line.
Hessmer is a very ethnically-diverse village. The people who call Hessmer home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Hessmer residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Hessmer include French, English, Irish, German, and French Canadian.
The most common language spoken in Hessmer is English. Other important languages spoken here include French and Spanish.
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 92.4% of commuters doing so, which is a higher proportion of people driving alone to work than NeighborhoodScout found in 98.4% of all American neighborhoods.
Occupations
There are more people living in the neighborhood employed as sales and service workers (59.7%) than almost any neighborhood in the country. From fast-food service workers to major sales accounts, sales and service workers make up the largest proportion of our national employment picture. But despite that size and importance nationally, this neighborhood still stands out as unique due to the dominance of people living here who work in such occupations.
Furthermore, each year, fewer and fewer Americans make their living as farmers, foresters, or fishers. But the neighborhood truly stands out among U.S. neighborhoods. According to exclusive NeighborhoodScout analysis, this neighborhood has a greater proportion of farmers, foresters, or fishers than 96.6% of all American neighborhoods. This is truly a unique cultural characteristic of this neighborhood.
People
The neighborhood stands out within Louisiana for its college student friendly environment. NeighborhoodScout's analysis reveals that this neighborhood is home to a number of college students, is relatively walkable, and above average in safety. In combination, this makes it stand out for a good place for college students to consider. Because a number of college students live here, this neighborhood may be close to a college campus and offer certain amenities nearby geared towards the student body. While it's not an environment for everyone, ambitious scholars can enjoy seasonal excitement between semesters and school breaks, and parents can rest easy knowing that the area has an above average safety rating. For each of these reasons, the neighborhood is rated among the top 6.8% of college-friendly places to live in LA.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more French and Arab ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 25.9% of this neighborhood's residents have French ancestry and 4.5% have Arab ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 11.8% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak French at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 99.3% of the neighborhoods in America.
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 Hessmer are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 65.9% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 28.2% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 79.3% of U.S. neighborhoods.
What we choose to do for a living reflects who we are. Each neighborhood has a different mix of occupations represented, and together these tell you about the neighborhood and help you understand if this neighborhood may fit your lifestyle.
In the neighborhood, 40.3% of the working population is employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is manufacturing and laborer occupations, with 21.6% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in executive, management, and professional occupations (18.0%), and 15.4% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 86.4% of households. Some people also speak French (11.8%).
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 Hessmer, LA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as French (25.9%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (10.6%), and residents who report German roots (4.6%), and some of the residents are also of Arab ancestry (4.5%), along with some English ancestry residents (2.4%), 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 under 15 minutes commuting one-way to work (30.8% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.
Here most residents (92.4%) 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 (5.6%) . 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.
