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Belle Plaine, IA

This is a small community in a single neighborhood. As throughout the site, some neighborhood-level data are reserved for subscribers.





Overview


Belle Plaine is a very small city located in the state of Iowa. With a population of 2,326 people and just one neighborhood, Belle Plaine is the 243rd largest community in Iowa. Belle Plaine has a large stock of pre-World War II architecture, making it one of the older and more historic cities in the country.

Occupations and Workforce

Because occupations involving physical labor dominate the local economy, Belle Plaine is generally considered to be a blue-collar town. 52.93% of the Belle Plaine workforce is employed in blue-collar occupations, compared to the national average of 27.7%. Overall, Belle Plaine is a city of production and manufacturing workers, service providers, and construction workers and builders. There are especially a lot of people living in Belle Plaine who work in office and administrative support (6.91%), healthcare suport services (6.42%), and sales jobs (5.77%).

Setting & Lifestyle

The city 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, Belle Plaine has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Belle Plaine a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.

Belle Plaine is a small city, and as such doesn't have a public transit system that people use to get to and from their jobs every day.

Demographics

In terms of college education, the citizens of Belle Plaine rank slightly lower than the national average. 14.94% of adults 25 and older in Belle Plaine have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree, while 21.84% of adults have a 4-year degree or higher in the average American community.

The per capita income in Belle Plaine in 2022 was $35,218, which is middle income relative to Iowa, and upper middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $140,872 for a family of four. However, Belle Plaine contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.

The people who call Belle Plaine home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Belle Plaine residents report their race to be White. Important ancestries of people in Belle Plaine include German, Irish, Czech, English, and Scottish.

The most common language spoken in Belle Plaine is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Italian.

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.

Occupations

NeighborhoodScout's exclusive research identifies the neighborhood as having one of the highest concentrations of people employed in manufacturing or as laborers of any neighborhood in America. In fact, despite the loss of manufacturing jobs nationally, this neighborhood has 52.2% of its working residents employed in such fields, which is a higher proportion than 99.3% of American neighborhoods.

Modes of Transportation

Our research reveals that 89.1% of commuters who live in the neighborhood get to work each day by driving alone in their automobiles, which is a higher proportion than 95.2% of U.S. neighborhoods.

Diversity

Did you know that the neighborhood has more Czechoslovakian and Belgian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 1.2% of this neighborhood's residents have Czechoslovakian ancestry and 0.9% have Belgian 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 Belle Plaine are middle-income, making it a moderate income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 43.8% of the neighborhoods in America. In addition, 9.8% of the children seventeen and under living in this neighborhood are living below the federal poverty line, which is a lower rate of childhood poverty than is found in 51.2% of America'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, 52.2% of the working population is employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants, with 16.3% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in executive, management, and professional occupations (15.7%), and 15.6% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.

Languages

The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 98.7% of households.

Ethnicity / Ancestry

Boston's Beacon Hill blue-blood streets, Brooklyn's Orthodox Jewish enclaves, Los Angeles' Persian neighborhoods. Each has its own culture derived primarily from the ancestries and culture of the residents who call these neighborhoods home. Likewise, each neighborhood in America has its own culture – some more unique than others – based on lifestyle, occupations, the types of households – and importantly – on the ethnicities and ancestries of the people who live in the neighborhood. Understanding where people came from, who their grandparents or great-grandparents were, can help you understand how a neighborhood is today.

In the neighborhood in Belle Plaine, IA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (30.8%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (12.4%), and residents who report English roots (7.4%), and some of the residents are also of Scottish ancestry (3.1%), along with some Norwegian ancestry residents (2.3%), 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 under 15 minutes commuting one-way to work (43.5% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.

Here most residents (89.1%) 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 (5.7%) . In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.


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Economics & Demographics include:
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Commute To Work
Migration & Mobility
Race & Ethnic Diversity
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Crime includes:
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Schools include:
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