Priest River is a very small city located in the state of Idaho. With a population of 1,785 people and just one neighborhood, Priest River is the 81st largest community in Idaho.
Priest River is a blue-collar town, with 41.65% of people working in blue-collar occupations, while the average in America is just 27.7%. Overall, Priest River is a city of service providers, construction workers and builders, and sales and office workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Priest River who work in office and administrative support (12.30%), maintenance occupations (8.35%), and management occupations (7.77%).
A relatively large number of people in Priest River telecommute to their jobs. Overall, about 8.82% of the workforce works from home. While this may seem like a small number, as a fraction of the total workforce it ranks among the highest in the country. 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.
It is a fairly quiet city 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!) Priest River 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. Priest River has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Priest River than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Priest River may be for you.
As is often the case in a small city, Priest River doesn't have a public transportation system that people use for their commute.
The citizens of Priest River have a very low rate of college education: just 8.16% of people over 25 have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree, compared to a national average of 21.84% for all cities.
The per capita income in Priest River in 2022 was $28,731, which is upper middle income relative to Idaho, and lower middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $114,924 for a family of four. However, Priest River contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Priest River home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Priest River residents report their race to be White, followed by Native American. Important ancestries of people in Priest River include German, Irish, English, Swedish, and Norwegian.
The most common language spoken in Priest River is English. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and Polish.
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.
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Swedish and Canadian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 6.9% of this neighborhood's residents have Swedish ancestry and 1.7% have Canadian ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 1.9% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak Greek at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 99.0% of the neighborhoods in America.
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 Priest River are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 78.2% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 12.5% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 55.0% 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, 40.0% of the working population is employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants, with 23.7% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in executive, management, and professional occupations (19.8%), and 16.6% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 99.3% of households. Some people also speak Italian (5.3%).
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 Priest River, ID, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (20.1%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (14.2%), and residents who report English roots (9.8%), and some of the residents are also of Swedish ancestry (6.9%), along with some Norwegian ancestry residents (5.0%), 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 (43.8% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.
Here most residents (78.4%) 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 (6.7%) . In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.