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.
Dowling is a tiny town located in the state of Michigan. With a population of 351 people and just one neighborhood, Dowling is the 606th largest community in Michigan. Dowling has a large stock of pre-World War II architecture, making it one of the older and more historic towns in the country.
Occupations and Workforce
Because occupations involving physical labor dominate the local economy, Dowling is generally considered to be a blue-collar town. 48.18% of the Dowling workforce is employed in blue-collar occupations, compared to the national average of 27.7%. Overall, Dowling is a town of construction workers and builders, sales and office workers, and production and manufacturing workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Dowling who work in sales jobs (16.79%), personal care services (6.57%), and office and administrative support (5.84%).
Setting & Lifestyle
The overall crime rate in Dowling 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.
The town is relatively quiet, having a combination of lower population density and few of those groups of people who have a tendency to be noisy. For example, Dowling has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Dowling a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.
In Dowling, however, the average commute to work is quite long. On average, people spend 30.81 minutes each day getting to work, which is significantly higher than the national average.
Dowling 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.
Demographics
The rate of college-level education in Dowling is quite a bit lower than the national average among all cities of 21.84%: just 12.56% of people here over 25 have a bachelor's degree or an advanced degree.
The per capita income in Dowling in 2022 was $28,971, which is middle income relative to Michigan, and lower middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $115,884 for a family of four.
Dowling is a very ethnically-diverse town. The people who call Dowling home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Dowling residents report their race to be White. Dowling also has a sizeable Hispanic population (people of Hispanic origin can be of any race). People of Hispanic or Latino origin account for 14.89% of the town’s residents. Important ancestries of people in Dowling include German, Scottish, Irish, English, and Polish.
The most common language spoken in Dowling 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.
Occupations
It used to be that most Americans lived on the farm, or otherwise made their living from the land, the forests, or the sea. With global trade and an economy increasingly based on providing services to one another, fewer people farm, fish or harvest timber now than at any time in American history. But according to NeighborhoodScout's leading analysis, the neighborhood stands apart from most American neighborhood due to the proportion of its residents still working in these fields. With 3.5% of the workforce so employed, this neighborhood has a greater concentration of such workers than 95.0% of U.S. neighborhoods.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Dutch ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 6.5% of this neighborhood's residents have Dutch ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 1.8% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak German/Yiddish at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 95.8% 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 Dowling are middle-income, making it a moderate income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 44.5% of the neighborhoods in America. With 21.8% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 71.4% 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, 38.0% 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 30.2% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (17.7%), and 10.6% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 94.4% of households. Some people also speak Spanish (3.7%).
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 Dowling, MI, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (29.0%). There are also a number of people of English ancestry (12.9%), and residents who report Irish roots (7.1%), and some of the residents are also of Dutch ancestry (6.5%), along with some Mexican ancestry residents (4.1%), among others.
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 (41.8% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (80.9%) 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 (11.3%) . 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.
