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.
West Liberty is a very small town located in the state of West Virginia. With a population of 1,441 people and just one neighborhood, West Liberty is the 132nd largest community in West Virginia. West Liberty 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
West Liberty is a decidedly white-collar town, with fully 90.80% of the workforce employed in white-collar jobs, well above the national average. Overall, West Liberty is a town of service providers, sales and office workers, and professionals. There are especially a lot of people living in West Liberty who work in sales jobs (24.71%), food service (24.37%), and maintenance occupations (10.00%).
Setting & Lifestyle
Demographics
The education level of West Liberty citizens is very high relative to the national average among all cities (21.84%): 36.52% of adults in West Liberty have a bachelor's degree or even advanced degree.
The per capita income in West Liberty in 2022 was $12,295, which is low income relative to West Virginia and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $49,180 for a family of four. However, West Liberty contains both very wealthy and poor people as well. West Liberty also has one of the higher rates of people living in poverty in the nation, with 34.53% of its population below the federal poverty line.
The people who call West Liberty home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of West Liberty residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in West Liberty include Irish, German, Italian, Polish, and Scots-Irish.
The most common language spoken in West Liberty is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Russian.
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 West Liberty, the neighborhood, has some outstanding things about the way it looks and its way of life that are worth highlighting.
People
An extraordinary 33.3% of the residents of the neighborhood are currently enrolled in college. This is such a large part of life in this neighborhood that the neighborhood changes a great deal with the change of semesters and is far quieter during the summer when many students are away.
In addition, with a nice mix of college students, safety from crime, and decent walkability, the neighborhood rates highly as a college student friendly place to live, and one that college students and their parents may want to consider. NeighborhoodScout's analysis shows that it rates more highly for a good place for college students to live than 87.4% of the neighborhoods in WV. This often also means that the area has certain amenities and services geared towards college students, from undergraduates to graduate students.
Modes of Transportation
In the neighborhood, walking to work is a real option for many. In fact, NeighborhoodScout's exclusive research reveals walking to and from work is the chosen way to commute for 14.0% of residents here. This is a higher proportion of walking commuters than we found in 96.8% of American neighborhoods. Get ready to put on your walking shoes if you move here!
Occupations
There are more people living in the neighborhood employed as sales and service workers (60.2%) than almost any neighborhood in the country. From fast-food service workers to major sales accounts, sales and service workers make up the largest proportion of our national employment picture. But despite that size and importance nationally, this neighborhood still stands out as unique due to the dominance of people living here who work in such occupations.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Scots-Irish and Slovak ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 5.4% of this neighborhood's residents have Scots-Irish ancestry and 2.3% have Slovak 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 West Liberty are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 62.2% of U.S. neighborhoods. In addition, 5.3% of the children seventeen and under living in this neighborhood are living below the federal poverty line, which is a lower rate of childhood poverty than is found in 63.8% of America'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, 39.8% 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 23.7% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations (21.8%), and 14.5% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 97.2% 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 West Liberty, WV, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (23.8%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (12.5%), and residents who report English roots (9.8%), and some of the residents are also of Italian ancestry (7.7%), along with some Scots-Irish ancestry residents (5.4%), 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 (40.7% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (73.2%) drive alone in a private automobile to get to work. In addition, quite a number also hop out the door and walk to work to get to work (14.0%) . 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.
