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.
Swords Creek is a very small town located in the state of Virginia. With a population of 4,071 people and just one neighborhood, Swords Creek is the 143rd largest community in Virginia.
Occupations and Workforce
Unlike some towns, Swords Creek isn’t mainly white- or blue-collar. Instead, the most prevalent occupations for people in Swords Creek are a mix of both white- and blue-collar jobs. Overall, Swords Creek is a town of sales and office workers, service providers, and production and manufacturing workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Swords Creek who work in office and administrative support (17.59%), sales jobs (12.14%), and law enforcement and fire fighting (8.66%).
Setting & Lifestyle
It is a fairly quiet town 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!) Swords Creek 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. Swords Creek has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Swords Creek than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Swords Creek may be for you.
As is often the case in a small town, Swords Creek doesn't have a public transportation system that people use for their commute.
Demographics
In Swords Creek, just 8.14% 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 Swords Creek in 2022 was $29,129, which is lower middle income relative to Virginia and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $116,516 for a family of four. However, Swords Creek contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Swords Creek home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Swords Creek residents report their race to be White. Important ancestries of people in Swords Creek include English, Irish, German, Scottish, and Polish.
The most common language spoken in Swords Creek is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Polish.
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 97.1% of all neighborhoods in America, with 36.8% 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.
Occupations
There are more people living in the neighborhood employed as sales and service workers (62.2%) 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.
Migration / Stability
The freedom of moving to new places versus the comfort of home. How much and how often people move not only can create diverse and worldly neighborhoods, but simultaneously it can produce a loss of intimacy with one's surroundings and a lack of connectedness to one's neighbors. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive research has identified this neighborhood as unique with regard to the transience of its populace. More residents of the neighborhood live here today that also were living in this same neighborhood five years ago than is found in 97.3% 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.
The Neighbors
How wealthy a neighborhood is, from very wealthy, to middle income, to low income is very formative with regard to the personality and character of a neighborhood. Equally important is the rate of people, particularly children, who live below the federal poverty line. In some wealthy gated communities, the areas immediately surrounding can have high rates of childhood poverty, which indicates other social issues. NeighborhoodScout's analysis reveals both aspects of income and poverty for this neighborhood.
The neighbors in the neighborhood in Swords Creek are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 92.5% of U.S. neighborhoods. In addition, 2.2% of the children seventeen and under living in this neighborhood are living below the federal poverty line, which is a lower rate of childhood poverty than is found in 73.8% of America'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, 37.8% 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 27.0% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (17.9%), and 17.3% in executive, management, and professional occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 98.5% 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 Swords Creek, VA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as English (5.6%). There are also a number of people of Mexican ancestry (1.6%), and residents who report Irish roots (1.4%).
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 30 and 45 minutes commuting one-way to work (47.7% of working residents), which is at or a bit above the average length of a commute across all U.S. neighborhoods.
Here most residents (78.6%) 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 (14.8%) . 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.
