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.
Lithonia is a very small city located in the state of Georgia. With a population of 2,611 people and just one neighborhood, Lithonia is the 233rd largest community in Georgia.
Occupations and Workforce
Unlike some cities, Lithonia isn’t mainly white- or blue-collar. Instead, the most prevalent occupations for people in Lithonia are a mix of both white- and blue-collar jobs. Overall, Lithonia is a city of professionals, service providers, and transportation and shipping workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Lithonia who work in healthcare (16.71%), business and financial occupations (7.20%), and food service (6.74%).
Also of interest is that Lithonia has more people living here who work in computers and math than 95% of the places in the US.
Setting & Lifestyle
In Lithonia, however, the average commute to work is quite long. On average, people spend 37.08 minutes each day getting to work, which is significantly higher than the national average. One bright side is that local public transit is widely used, so it may be an option to avoid the headache of driving in the heavy traffic by leaving the car at home and taking transit.
Despite the fact that it is a small city, Lithonia has quite a few people who take public transportation – mostly the bus - for their daily commute to work. This helps to fill a real need in the city for affordable transportation.
Demographics
The citizens of Lithonia are slightly better educated than the national average of 21.84% for all cities and towns, with 24.64% of adults in Lithonia having a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Lithonia in 2018 was $37,638, which is wealthy relative to Georgia, and upper middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $150,552 for a family of four. However, Lithonia contains both very wealthy and poor people as well. Lithonia also has one of the higher rates of people living in poverty in the nation, with 34.67% of its population below the federal poverty line.
Lithonia is a somewhat ethnically-diverse city. The people who call Lithonia home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Lithonia residents report their race to be Black or African-American, followed by Asian. Important ancestries of people in Lithonia include African, Jamaican, German, Other Subsaharan African, and English.
The most common language spoken in Lithonia is English. Other important languages spoken here include Tagalog and Spanish.
Notable & Unique Neighborhood Characteristics
When you see a neighborhood for the first time, the most important thing is often the way it looks, like its homes and its setting. Some places look the same, but they only reveal their true character after living in them for a while because they contain a unique mix of occupational or cultural groups. This neighborhood is very unique in some important ways, according to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive exploration and analysis.
People
One of the most interesting things about the neighborhood is that it has a greater concentration of residents who live alone than most all neighborhoods in America. With 63.6% of the households here made up of people living alone, NeighborhoodScout's research reveals that this is a larger proportion of people living alone than in 99.3% of the neighborhoods in America.
In addition, the neighborhood stands out for having an average per capita income lower than 97.7% of the neighborhoods in the United States. Also of note, 59.1% of the children in this area live in poverty; an extraordinarily high percentage compared to other neighborhoods in the nation. In a nation where approximately one in four children grows up in poverty, this neighborhood stands out for the depth of the problem manifested here.
Length of Commute
Whether walking, biking, riding, or driving, the length of one's commute is an important factor for one's quality of life. The neighborhood stands out for its commute length, according to NeighborhoodScout's analysis. Long commutes can be brutal. They take time, money, and energy, leaving less of you for yourself and your family. The residents of the neighborhood unfortunately have the distinction of having, on average, a longer commute than most any neighborhood in America. 13.3% of commuters here travel more than one hour just one-way to work. That is more than two hours per day. This percentage with two-hour + round-trip commutes is higher than NeighborhoodScout found in 97.9% of all neighborhoods in America.
Car Ownership
We Americans love our cars. Not only are they a necessity for most Americans due to the shape of our neighborhoods and the distances between where we live, work, shop, and go to school, but we also fancy them. As a result, most households in America have one, two, or three cars. But NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis shows that the neighborhood has a highly unusual pattern of car ownership. 22.1% of the households in this neighborhood don't own a car at all. This is more carless households than NeighborhoodScout found in 95.8% of U.S. neighborhoods.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more African and Jamaican ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 13.8% of this neighborhood's residents have African ancestry and 6.7% have Jamaican 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 Lithonia are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 97.7% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 59.1% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 96.6% 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, 38.7% 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 36.2% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (15.5%), and 9.6% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 94.8% of households. Some people also speak Spanish (3.3%).
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 Lithonia, GA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Sub-Saharan African (15.7%). There are also a number of people of African ancestry (13.8%), and residents who report Jamaican roots (6.7%), and some of the residents are also of Haitian ancestry (3.8%), along with some Mexican ancestry residents (2.5%), 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 between 30 and 45 minutes commuting one-way to work (35.3% of working residents), which is at or a bit above the average length of a commute across all U.S. neighborhoods. However, there is also a significant group of residents (13.3%) who commute over an hour in each direction.
Here most residents (80.4%) 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 (9.2%) . 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.
