This is a small community in a single neighborhood.
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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.
Melstone is a tiny town located in the state of Montana. With a population of 145 people and just one neighborhood, Melstone is the 149th largest community in Montana. Much of the housing stock in Melstone was built prior to World War II, making it one of the older and more historic towns in the country.
Occupations and Workforce
When you are in Melstone, you'll notice that it is more blue-collar than most other communities in America. 36.96% of Melstone’s employed work in blue-collar jobs, while America averages only 27.7% that do. Overall, Melstone is a town of sales and office workers, transportation and shipping workers, and managers. There are especially a lot of people living in Melstone who work in office and administrative support (17.39%), teaching (13.04%), and management occupations (13.04%).
Setting & Lifestyle
Overall, Melstone’s crime rate is one of the lowest in the nation, which makes a great place to live if safety is an important concern.
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, Melstone has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Melstone a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.
Compared to the rest of the country, citizens of Melstone spend much less time in their cars: on average, their commute to work is only 16.28 minutes. This also means that noise and pollution levels in the town are less than they would otherwise be.
Melstone is very much a car-oriented town. This is because the population of Melstone isn't large enough or dense enough to support an extensive public transit system. It has a lot of rural roads, and the distance between houses can be quite large, which together tends to discourage walking and bicycling to work. 100.00% of residents commute to work in their own car (and the drive is typically to a job out of town). People also tend to drive out of town for other services as well, such as shopping, doctors appointments, and more.
As is often the case in a small town, Melstone doesn't have a public transportation system that people use for their commute.
Demographics
Melstone ranks among the bottom of the nation in terms of college education compared to other cities and towns: only 3.77% of people over 25 have a college degree.
The per capita income in Melstone in 2022 was $31,220, which is middle income relative to Montana and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $124,880 for a family of four. However, Melstone contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
Melstone is an extremely ethnically-diverse town. The people who call Melstone home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Melstone residents report their race to be White, followed by Native American. Important ancestries of people in Melstone include German, English, Irish, Norwegian, and Yugoslavian.
The most common language spoken in Melstone 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.
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 99.2% of all American neighborhoods. This is truly a unique cultural characteristic of this neighborhood.
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 1 people per square mile living here, this neighborhood is less crowded than 99.2% of America. One of the notable things about is that it is one of the quietest neighborhoods in America, according to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis and quantitative rating of quietness. When you are here, you will find it to be very quiet. If quiet and peaceful are your cup of tea, you may have found a great place for you.
People
Astoundingly, NeighborhoodScout's research reveals that this single neighborhood has a higher concentration of married couples living here than 95.3% of all U.S. neighborhoods. Whether they have school-aged children or not, married couples are the rule in the neighborhood. If you are a married couple, you may find many people here with a similar lifestyle, and perhaps common interests. But if you are single, you might not find many other singles here.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Danish and Scots-Irish ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 4.8% of this neighborhood's residents have Danish ancestry and 3.8% have Scots-Irish ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 2.1% 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 96.6% 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 Melstone are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 70.5% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 27.6% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 79.2% 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, 32.0% of the working population is employed in executive, management, and professional occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is manufacturing and laborer occupations, with 19.3% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (18.9%), and 18.0% in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants.
Languages
The languages spoken by people in this neighborhood are diverse. These are tabulated as the languages people preferentially speak when they are at home with their families. The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 96.6% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and German/Yiddish.
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 Melstone, MT, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (23.3%). There are also a number of people of English ancestry (13.5%), and residents who report Irish roots (10.0%), and some of the residents are also of Norwegian ancestry (6.3%), along with some Danish ancestry residents (4.8%), 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 (27.9% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.
Here most residents (67.5%) 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 (6.1%) . 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.
