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.
Raysal is a tiny town located in the state of West Virginia. With a population of 364 people and just one neighborhood, Raysal is the 222nd largest community in West Virginia.
Occupations and Workforce
Raysal is a blue-collar town, with 66.67% of people working in blue-collar occupations, while the average in America is just 27.7%. Overall, Raysal is a town of construction workers and builders, managers, and professionals. There are especially a lot of people living in Raysal who work in management occupations (30.77%), healthcare (2.56%), and office and administrative support (0.00%).
Setting & Lifestyle
Overall, Raysal’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, Raysal has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Raysal a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.
One downside of living in Raysal is that it can take a long time to commute to work. In Raysal, the average commute to work is 47.88 minutes, which is quite a bit higher than the national average.
Raysal is very much a car-oriented town. This is because the population of Raysal 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.
Being a small town, Raysal does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
Demographics
In terms of college education, Raysal ranks among the least educated cities in the nation, as only 0.23% of people over 25 have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Raysal in 2022 was $15,123, which is low income relative to West Virginia and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $60,492 for a family of four. However, Raysal contains both very wealthy and poor people as well. Raysal also has one of the higher rates of people living in poverty in the nation, with 42.70% of its population below the federal poverty line.
The people who call Raysal home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Raysal residents report their race to be White. Important ancestries of people in Raysal include Irish, English, German, Yugoslavian, and Other West Indian.
The most common language spoken in Raysal is English. Other important languages spoken here include African languages and Arabic.
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
From major sales accounts to fast-food workers, sales and service employees are often the backbone of the local economy. In the neighborhood, they truly stand out. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis identifies this neighborhood as having a higher percentage of sales and service workers than 97.4% of all American neighborhoods.
People
One of the unique characteristics of the neighborhood revealed by analysis is that the per capita income of residents here is lower than that found in 96.6% of the neighborhoods in America.
In addition, neighborhoodScout's exclusive research revealed that 94.3% of the adult residents in the neighborhood do not have a 4-year college degree, which is a lower rate of college graduated adults than found in 96.6% of the neighborhoods in America.
Also, 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 85.9% 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.
Migration / Stability
The freedom of moving to new places versus the comfort of home. How much and how often people move not only can create diverse and worldly neighborhoods, but simultaneously it can produce a loss of intimacy with one's surroundings and a lack of connectedness to one's neighbors. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive research has identified this neighborhood as unique with regard to the transience of its populace. More residents of the neighborhood live here today that also were living in this same neighborhood five years ago than is found in 100.0% of U.S. neighborhoods. This neighborhood is really made up of people who know each other, don't move often, and have lived here in this very neighborhood for quite a while.
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 Raysal are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 96.6% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 32.3% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 83.3% of U.S. neighborhoods.
What we choose to do for a living reflects who we are. Each neighborhood has a different mix of occupations represented, and together these tell you about the neighborhood and help you understand if this neighborhood may fit your lifestyle.
In the neighborhood, 41.7% 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 25.1% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (19.5%), and 13.6% in manufacturing and laborer occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 100.0% of households.
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 Raysal, WV, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Irish (7.4%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (3.1%), and residents who report English roots (2.6%).
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 (54.6% of working residents), which is at or a bit above the average length of a commute across all U.S. neighborhoods.
Here most residents (76.0%) 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 (10.2%) . 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.
