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.
Custer is a very small city located in the state of South Dakota. With a population of 1,844 people and just one neighborhood, Custer is the 71st largest community in South Dakota.
Custer real estate is some of the most expensive in South Dakota, although Custer house values don't compare to the most expensive real estate in the U.S.
Occupations and Workforce
Unlike some cities, Custer isn’t mainly white- or blue-collar. Instead, the most prevalent occupations for people in Custer are a mix of both white- and blue-collar jobs. Overall, Custer is a city of managers, sales and office workers, and service providers. There are especially a lot of people living in Custer who work in management occupations (19.21%), office and administrative support (13.58%), and maintenance occupations (9.38%).
Telecommuters are a relatively large percentage of the workforce: 8.61% 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
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!) Custer 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. Custer has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Custer than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Custer may be for you.
Being a small city, Custer does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
Demographics
In terms of college education, Custer is somewhat better educated than the 21.84% who have a 4-year degree or higher in the typical US community: 28.56% of adults 25 and older in the city have at least a bachelor's degree.
The per capita income in Custer in 2022 was $41,284, which is wealthy relative to South Dakota, and upper middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $165,136 for a family of four. However, Custer contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Custer home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Custer residents report their race to be White, followed by Native American. Important ancestries of people in Custer include German, Irish, English, Norwegian, and Swedish.
The most common language spoken in Custer is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Tagalog.
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
Each year, fewer and fewer Americans make their living as farmers, foresters, or fishers. But the neighborhood truly stands out among U.S. neighborhoods. According to exclusive NeighborhoodScout analysis, this neighborhood has a greater proportion of farmers, foresters, or fishers than 97.5% of all American neighborhoods. This is truly a unique cultural characteristic of this neighborhood.
People
If you are planning to retire in South Dakota, this neighborhood should be on your must-see list. For many reasons, may be considered a retiree's dream neighborhood. According to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis and metrics, it's peaceful and quiet, has above average safety from crime compared to other neighborhoods in South Dakota, while also offering a diverse range of housing options. This, along with the vibrant mix of very educated seniors and other age groups who choose to live here, makes the neighborhood more retiree-friendly than 95.5% of neighborhoods in SD. If a South Dakota retirement is in your future, this neighborhood should be one of the places you visit.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Finnish and Norwegian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 3.2% of this neighborhood's residents have Finnish ancestry and 8.9% have Norwegian 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 Custer are middle-income, making it a moderate income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 57.2% of the neighborhoods in America. With 11.0% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 51.6% 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, 38.2% of the working population is employed in executive, management, and professional 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 25.9% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations (15.4%), and 14.7% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 97.1% of households.
Ethnicity / Ancestry
Culture is the shared learned behavior of peoples. Undeniably, different ethnicities and ancestries have different cultural traditions, and as a result, neighborhoods with concentrations of residents of one or another ethnicities or ancestries will express those cultures. It is what makes the North End in Boston so fun to visit for the Italian restaurants, bakeries, culture, and charm, and similarly, why people enjoy visiting Chinatown in San Francisco.
In the neighborhood in Custer, SD, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (34.2%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (14.0%), and residents who report English roots (10.7%), and some of the residents are also of Norwegian ancestry (8.9%), along with some Polish ancestry residents (5.2%), 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 under 15 minutes commuting one-way to work (55.0% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.
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 (9.9%) . 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.
