Norway is a very small city located in the state of Michigan. With a population of 2,837 people and just one neighborhood, Norway is the 287th largest community in Michigan. Norway has an unusually large stock of pre-World War II architecture, making it one of the older and more historic cities.
Norway is neither predominantly blue-collar nor white-collar, instead having a mixed workforce of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Overall, Norway is a city of service providers, transportation and shipping workers, and sales and office workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Norway who work in healthcare suport services (17.66%), food service (12.49%), and sales jobs (10.57%).
Norway’s overall crime rate ranks among the lowest in the nation, making it a very safe place to live.
It is a fairly quiet city 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!) Norway 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. Norway has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Norway than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Norway may be for you.
One of the benefits of Norway is that there is very little traffic. The average commute to work is 17.48 minutes, which is substantially less than the national average. Not only does this mean that the drive to work is less aggravating, but noise and pollution levels are lower as a result.
As is often the case in a small city, Norway doesn't have a public transportation system that people use for their commute.
The percentage of adults in Norway who are college-educated is close to the national average for all communities of 21.84%: 18.61% of the adults in Norway have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Norway in 2022 was $28,439, which is lower middle income relative to Michigan and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $113,756 for a family of four. However, Norway contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Norway home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Norway residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Norway include German, Irish, English, French, and Italian.
The most common language spoken in Norway is English. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and French.
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.
Did you know that the neighborhood has more French Canadian and Belgian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 8.1% of this neighborhood's residents have French Canadian ancestry and 1.9% have Belgian ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 17.4% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak Italian at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 99.4% of the neighborhoods in America.
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 Norway are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 74.7% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 16.5% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 63.8% 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, 31.0% 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 manufacturing and laborer occupations, with 26.3% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in executive, management, and professional occupations (22.8%), and 19.5% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 96.4% of households. Some people also speak Italian (17.4%).
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 Norway, MI, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (19.8%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (13.2%), and residents who report French roots (9.7%), and some of the residents are also of English ancestry (8.6%), along with some Polish ancestry residents (8.1%), among others.
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 under 15 minutes commuting one-way to work (55.8% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.
Here most residents (86.1%) drive alone in a private automobile to get to work. In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.