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.
Polo is a tiny city located in the state of Missouri. With a population of 509 people and just one neighborhood, Polo is the 414th largest community in Missouri. Polo has a large stock of pre-World War II architecture, making it one of the older and more historic cities in the country.
Occupations and Workforce
Polo is neither predominantly blue-collar nor white-collar, instead having a mixed workforce of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Overall, Polo is a city of sales and office workers, service providers, and professionals. There are especially a lot of people living in Polo who work in sales jobs (15.38%), management occupations (10.86%), and office and administrative support (9.95%).
Setting & Lifestyle
The city 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, Polo has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Polo a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.
One downside of living in Polo is that it can take a long time to commute to work. In Polo, the average commute to work is 31.50 minutes, which is quite a bit higher than the national average.
Being a small city, Polo does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
Demographics
The percentage of people in Polo with college degrees is quite a bit lower than the national average for cities and towns of 21.84%: just 10.44% of people over 25 have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Polo in 2022 was $42,662, which is wealthy relative to Missouri, and upper middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $170,648 for a family of four. However, Polo contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Polo home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Polo residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Polo include German, Irish, English, Scottish, and French.
The most common language spoken in Polo is English. Other important languages spoken here include Polish and Italian.
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.
People
Of particular note, 3.7% of the people in the neighborhood currently reside in a correction facility, held due to punishment for a crime.
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 19 people per square mile living here, this neighborhood is less crowded than 94.9% of America.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Croatian and Scottish ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 1.4% of this neighborhood's residents have Croatian ancestry and 5.0% have Scottish ancestry.
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 Polo are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 61.6% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 13.5% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 57.1% 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, 35.3% 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 28.5% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (18.1%), and 16.6% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 98.9% 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 Polo, MO, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (19.7%). There are also a number of people of English ancestry (13.4%), and residents who report Irish roots (8.9%), and some of the residents are also of Scottish ancestry (5.0%), along with some Norwegian ancestry residents (1.6%), 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 between 45 minutes and one hour commuting one-way to work (37.3% of working residents), longer and tougher than most commutes in America.
Here most residents (84.3%) 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 (6.4%) . 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.
