Paragon is a tiny town located in the state of Indiana. With a population of 572 people and just one neighborhood, Paragon is the 397th largest community in Indiana. Much of the housing stock in Paragon was built prior to World War II, making it one of the older and more historic towns in the country.
When you are in Paragon, you'll notice that it is more blue-collar than most other communities in America. 41.99% of Paragon’s employed work in blue-collar jobs, while America averages only 27.7% that do. Overall, Paragon is a town of sales and office workers, construction workers and builders, and service providers. There are especially a lot of people living in Paragon who work in sales jobs (13.85%), healthcare suport services (12.99%), and office and administrative support (9.09%).
It is a fairly quiet town 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!) Paragon 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. Paragon has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in Paragon than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, Paragon may be for you.
Being a small town, Paragon does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
The population of Paragon has one of the lowest overall levels of education in the country: only 2.14% of people over 25 hold a college degree. The national average for all municipalities is 21.84%.
The per capita income in Paragon in 2022 was $25,850, which is low income relative to Indiana and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $103,400 for a family of four. However, Paragon contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Paragon home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Paragon residents report their race to be White. Important ancestries of people in Paragon include German, English, Irish, Welsh, and Pennsylvania German.
The most common language spoken in Paragon is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Italian.
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.
The neighborhood stands out nationally for having a greater proportion of its residents active in the military than 98.7% of other U.S. neighborhoods. If you come here, you will notice military people active in their jobs, going to and from work, and in plain clothes out and about the neighborhood.
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 Paragon are middle-income, making it a moderate income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 59.1% of the neighborhoods in America. With 13.7% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 59.0% 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, 40.4% of the working population is employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is executive, management, and professional occupations, with 25.9% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (17.2%), and 15.5% in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants.
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 99.1% of households. Some people also speak Italian (2.4%).
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 Paragon, IN, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (8.3%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (5.9%), and residents who report English roots (5.2%), and some of the residents are also of Scottish ancestry (2.2%), along with some Welsh ancestry residents (1.3%), 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 between 45 minutes and one hour commuting one-way to work (30.6% of working residents), longer and tougher than most commutes in America.
Here most residents (75.5%) 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 (12.6%) . In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.