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.
Rockford is a tiny town located in the state of Alabama. With a population of 349 people and just one neighborhood, Rockford is the 357th largest community in Alabama.
Occupations and Workforce
Because occupations involving physical labor dominate the local economy, Rockford is generally considered to be a blue-collar town. 43.01% of the Rockford workforce is employed in blue-collar occupations, compared to the national average of 27.7%. Overall, Rockford is a town of service providers, transportation and shipping workers, and production and manufacturing workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Rockford who work in law enforcement and fire fighting (12.95%), maintenance occupations (9.33%), and management occupations (6.74%).
Setting & Lifestyle
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, Rockford has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Rockford a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.
Being a small town, Rockford does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
Demographics
In terms of college education, Rockford is somewhat better educated than the 21.84% who have a 4-year degree or higher in the typical US community: 27.76% of adults 25 and older in the town have at least a bachelor's degree.
The per capita income in Rockford in 2022 was $23,209, which is lower middle income relative to Alabama, and low income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $92,836 for a family of four. However, Rockford contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
Rockford is an extremely ethnically-diverse town. The people who call Rockford home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Rockford residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Rockford include Irish, English, German, Eastern European, and Italian.
The most common language spoken in Rockford is English. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and Polish.
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 Rockford, the neighborhood, has some outstanding things about the way it looks and its way of life that are worth highlighting.
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 12 people per square mile living here, this neighborhood is less crowded than 96.6% 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.
In addition, vacant homes and apartments are a significant characteristic of this neighborhood. In fact, with 34.3% of the residential real estate vacant, the neighborhood claims the distinction of having a higher vacancy rate than 96.5% of the neighborhoods in America. This can either be because much of the property is seasonally occupied, like in many vacation areas, or that much of the real estate is more permanently abandoned.
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 Rockford are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 66.0% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 15.4% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 61.7% 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, 32.3% 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 31.8% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (25.9%), and 10.0% 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 Rockford, AL, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as English (13.8%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (11.3%), and residents who report Irish roots (9.4%), and some of the residents are also of Scottish ancestry (2.2%), along with some Scots-Irish ancestry residents (1.9%), 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 (47.7% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
Here most residents (84.5%) 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 (8.7%) . 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.
