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.
Kistler is a tiny town located in the state of West Virginia. With a population of 420 people and just one neighborhood, Kistler is the 211th largest community in West Virginia.
Occupations and Workforce
Kistler is a decidedly white-collar town, with fully 85.11% of the workforce employed in white-collar jobs, well above the national average. Overall, Kistler is a town of sales and office workers, transportation and shipping workers, and professionals. There are especially a lot of people living in Kistler who work in office and administrative support (46.81%), sales jobs (29.79%), and teaching (8.51%).
Setting & Lifestyle
Overall, Kistler’s crime rate is one of the lowest in the nation, which makes a great place to live if safety is an important concern.
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!) Kistler 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. Kistler has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Kistler than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Kistler 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 17.07 minutes getting to work every day.
Kistler is a small town, and as is often the case with smaller towns, the population isn't large or dense enough to support much in the way of a public transportation system. In fact, there are many rural roads around Kistler, which makes walking or biking to and from work a bit difficult. This makes for a very car-oriented town: 100.00% of residents commute to work by private automobile, and people often drive out of town for work, shopping, and other activities.
As is often the case in a small town, Kistler doesn't have a public transportation system that people use for their commute.
Demographics
The percentage of adults in Kistler with college degrees is slightly lower than the national average of 21.84% for all communities. 15.56% of adults in Kistler have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Kistler in 2022 was $24,762, which is middle income relative to West Virginia, and lower middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $99,048 for a family of four. However, Kistler contains both very wealthy and poor people as well. Kistler also has one of the higher rates of people living in poverty in the nation, with 38.64% of its population below the federal poverty line.
Kistler is a very ethnically-diverse town. The people who call Kistler home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Kistler residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Kistler include African, English, Irish, Yugoslavian, and Other West Indian.
The most common language spoken in Kistler is English. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and Pacific Island languages.
Notable & Unique Neighborhood Characteristics
Many things matter about a neighborhood, but the first thing most people notice is the way a neighborhood looks and its particular character. For example, one might notice whether the buildings all date from a certain time period or whether shop signs are in multiple languages. This particular neighborhood in Kistler, the neighborhood, has some outstanding things about the way it looks and its way of life that are worth highlighting.
Real Estate
Unpopulated, and rural, the neighborhood is one of the least crowded neighborhoods in all of America. If you like open space, no traffic, and lots of room, this neighborhood may be just what you are looking for. According to NeighborhoodScout's leading research, this neighborhood is less densely populated than 90.1% 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 Kistler are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 90.1% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 35.6% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 86.1% 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, 36.2% 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 executive, management, and professional occupations, with 25.6% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (20.6%), and 17.6% in manufacturing and laborer occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 99.9% of households.
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 Kistler, WV, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Irish (5.3%). There are also a number of people of English ancestry (4.3%), and residents who report German roots (4.0%), and some of the residents are also of Mexican ancestry (1.9%), along with some Scottish 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 15 and 30 minutes commuting one-way to work (50.5% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (88.4%) 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 (7.4%) . 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.
