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.
Tama is a very small city located in the state of Iowa. With a population of 3,064 people and just one neighborhood, Tama is the 159th largest community in Iowa.
Occupations and Workforce
When you are in Tama, you'll notice that it is more blue-collar than most other communities in America. 45.56% of Tama’s employed work in blue-collar jobs, while America averages only 27.7% that do. Overall, Tama is a city of service providers, production and manufacturing workers, and construction workers and builders. There are especially a lot of people living in Tama who work in sales jobs (7.94%), maintenance occupations (7.40%), and office and administrative support (7.01%).
Setting & Lifestyle
Tama 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
The percentage of people in Tama with college degrees is quite a bit lower than the national average for cities and towns of 21.84%: just 12.54% of people over 25 have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Tama in 2022 was $24,944, which is low income relative to Iowa, and lower middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $99,776 for a family of four. However, Tama contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
Tama is an extremely ethnically-diverse city. The people who call Tama home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Tama residents report their race to be White, followed by Native American. Tama also has a sizeable Hispanic population (people of Hispanic origin can be of any race). People of Hispanic or Latino origin account for 38.40% of the city’s residents. Important ancestries of people in Tama include German, Irish, Czech, English, and Norwegian.
Foreign born people are also an important part of Tama's cultural character, accounting for 19.43% of the city’s population.
The most common language spoken in Tama is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and French.
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 Tama, the neighborhood, has some outstanding things about the way it looks and its way of life that are worth highlighting.
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 43.2% of its working residents employed in such fields, which is a higher proportion than 96.2% of American neighborhoods.
People
There is an especially high percentage of incarcerated people (0.8%) living in the neighborhood.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Native American ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 10.4% of this neighborhood's residents have Native American ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 8.0% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak Native American languages at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 99.7% of the neighborhoods in America.
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 Tama are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 75.7% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 31.0% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 82.2% of U.S. neighborhoods.
A neighborhood is far different if it is dominated by enlisted military personnel rather than people who earn their living by farming. It is also different if most of the neighbors are clerical support or managers. What is wonderful is the sheer diversity of neighborhoods, allowing you to find the type that fits your lifestyle and aspirations.
In the neighborhood, 43.2% 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 28.5% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in executive, management, and professional occupations (17.1%), and 10.8% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The languages spoken by people in this neighborhood are diverse. These are tabulated as the languages people preferentially speak when they are at home with their families. The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 64.9% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Native American languages.
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 Tama, IA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Mexican (26.2%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (15.0%), and residents who report Irish roots (10.9%), and some of the residents are also of Native American ancestry (10.4%), along with some English ancestry residents (2.7%), among others. In addition, 16.4% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country.
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 (56.1% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.
Here most residents (82.5%) 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 (14.4%) . 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.
