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Desert Center, CA

This is a small community in a single neighborhood. As throughout the site, some neighborhood-level data are reserved for subscribers.





Overview


Desert Center is a tiny town located in the state of California. With a population of 256 people and just one neighborhood, Desert Center is the 826th largest community in California.

Occupations and Workforce

Desert Center is neither predominantly blue-collar nor white-collar, instead having a mixed workforce of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Overall, Desert Center is a town of professionals, sales and office workers, and service providers. There are especially a lot of people living in Desert Center who work in office and administrative support (14.29%), sales jobs (10.00%), and healthcare (10.00%).

Of important note, Desert Center is also a town of artists. Desert Center has more artists, designers and people working in media than 90% of the communities in America. This concentration of artists helps shape Desert Center’s character.

Telecommuters are a relatively large percentage of the workforce: 14.29% of people work from home. While this number may seem small overall, as a fraction of the total workforce it is high relative to the nation. These workers are often telecommuters who work in knowledge-based, white-collar professions. For example, Silicon Valley has large numbers of people who telecommute. Other at-home workers may be self-employed people who operate small businesses out of their homes.

Setting & Lifestyle

Another notable thing is that Desert Center is an extremely popular destination for tourists and seasonal residents. So much of the population is seasonal such that the town’s population swells significantly during the vacation season, and drops again when the season ends. Because of this, much of the local economy is centered around tourism; some businesses may be operated only during the high season. During the low season, year-round residents will notice that the city is a substantially quieter place to live.

The overall crime rate in Desert Center is one of the lowest in the US. This makes it one of the safer places to live in the country in terms of crime.

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!) Desert Center 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. Desert Center has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Desert Center than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Desert Center may be for you.

Residents of the town have the good fortune of having one of the shortest daily commutes compared to the rest of the country. On average, they spend only 15.75 minutes getting to work every day.

Being a small town, Desert Center does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.

Demographics

The education level of Desert Center citizens is substantially higher than the typical US community, as 29.41% of adults in Desert Center have at least a bachelor's degree.

The per capita income in Desert Center in 2022 was $31,393, which is lower middle income relative to California, and middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $125,572 for a family of four. However, Desert Center contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.

Desert Center is an extremely ethnically-diverse town. The people who call Desert Center home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Desert Center residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Desert Center also has a sizeable Hispanic population (people of Hispanic origin can be of any race). People of Hispanic or Latino origin account for 29.32% of the town’s residents. Important ancestries of people in Desert Center include Irish, German, English, Welsh, and Italian.

The most common language spoken in Desert Center is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Pacific Island 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

This neighborhood has wide open spaces, few people, and lots of space to stretch out. If you like locations that fit that description, you may like this neighborhood. Based on NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis, with only 0 people per square mile living here, this neighborhood is less crowded than 99.6% of America.

In addition, the real estate in this neighborhood consists of more mobile homes than 98.2% of all neighborhoods in America, with 43.1% 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.

Furthermore, vacant homes and apartments are a significant characteristic of this neighborhood. In fact, with 40.3% of the residential real estate vacant, the neighborhood claims the distinction of having a higher vacancy rate than 97.5% of the neighborhoods in America. This can either be because much of the property is seasonally occupied, like in many vacation areas, or that much of the real estate is more permanently abandoned.

Occupations

There are more people living in the neighborhood employed as sales and service workers (51.4%) 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.

Diversity

Did you know that the neighborhood has more Lithuanian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 1.7% of this neighborhood's residents have Lithuanian ancestry.

is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 6.0% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak Chinese at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 95.9% 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 Desert Center are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 80.0% of U.S. neighborhoods. In addition, 9.2% 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 52.7% 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, 48.6% 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 24.6% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in executive, management, and professional occupations (14.2%), and 12.3% 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 51.6% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Chinese.

Ethnicity / Ancestry

Boston's Beacon Hill blue-blood streets, Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish enclaves, Los Angeles' Persian neighborhoods. Each has its own culture derived primarily from the ancestries and culture of the residents who call these neighborhoods home. Likewise, each neighborhood in America has its own culture – some more unique than others – based on lifestyle, occupations, the types of households – and importantly – on the ethnicities and ancestries of the people who live in the neighborhood. Understanding where people came from, who their grandparents or great-grandparents were, can help you understand how a neighborhood is today.

In the neighborhood in Desert Center, CA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Mexican (51.3%). There are also a number of people of English ancestry (11.6%), and residents who report Irish roots (8.2%), and some of the residents are also of German ancestry (7.7%), along with some Lithuanian ancestry residents (1.7%), among others. In addition, 15.7% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country.

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 (34.3% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.

Here most residents (68.6%) 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 (21.8%) . In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.


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