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.
Custer is a very small city located in the state of South Dakota. With a population of 1,900 people and just one neighborhood, Custer is the 71st largest community in South Dakota.
Custer real estate is some of the most expensive in South Dakota, although Custer house values don't compare to the most expensive real estate in the U.S.
Occupations and Workforce
Unlike some cities, Custer isn’t mainly white- or blue-collar. Instead, the most prevalent occupations for people in Custer are a mix of both white- and blue-collar jobs. Overall, Custer is a city of managers, sales and office workers, and service providers. There are especially a lot of people living in Custer who work in management occupations (19.21%), office and administrative support (13.58%), and maintenance occupations (9.38%).
Telecommuters are a relatively large percentage of the workforce: 8.61% of people work from home. While this number may seem small overall, as a fraction of the total workforce it is high relative to the nation. These workers are often telecommuters who work in knowledge-based, white-collar professions. For example, Silicon Valley has large numbers of people who telecommute. Other at-home workers may be self-employed people who operate small businesses out of their homes.
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, Custer has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Custer a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.
Being a small city, Custer does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
Demographics
In terms of college education, Custer is somewhat better educated than the 21.84% who have a 4-year degree or higher in the typical US community: 28.56% of adults 25 and older in the city have at least a bachelor's degree.
The per capita income in Custer in 2022 was $41,284, which is wealthy relative to South Dakota, and upper middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $165,136 for a family of four. However, Custer contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Custer home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Custer residents report their race to be White, followed by Native American. Important ancestries of people in Custer include German, Irish, English, Norwegian, and Swedish.
The most common language spoken in Custer is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Tagalog.
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
It used to be that most Americans lived on the farm, or otherwise made their living from the land, the forests, or the sea. With global trade and an economy increasingly based on providing services to one another, fewer people farm, fish or harvest timber now than at any time in American history. But according to NeighborhoodScout's leading analysis, the neighborhood stands apart from most American neighborhood due to the proportion of its residents still working in these fields. With 5.8% of the workforce so employed, this neighborhood has a greater concentration of such workers than 97.5% of U.S. neighborhoods.
People
If you're planning where to retire, the neighborhood in Custer is a great option to consider. According to NeighborhoodScout's exclusive retirement dream area analysis, it's peaceful and quiet, has above average safety ratings compared to other neighborhoods in SD, offers a wide range of housing options, and has already attracted an enviable mix of college educated seniors. This neighborhood ranks as better for retirement living than 89.7% of the neighborhoods in South Dakota. If you are considering retiring to South Dakota, this is a good neighborhood to look at.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more Finnish and Norwegian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 3.2% of this neighborhood's residents have Finnish ancestry and 8.9% have Norwegian 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 Custer are middle-income, making it a moderate income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 57.2% of the neighborhoods in America. With 11.0% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 51.6% 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, 38.2% of the working population is employed in executive, management, and professional 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 25.9% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations (15.4%), and 14.7% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 97.1% of households.
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 Custer, SD, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (34.2%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (14.0%), and residents who report English roots (10.7%), and some of the residents are also of Norwegian ancestry (8.9%), along with some Polish ancestry residents (5.2%), among others.
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 under 15 minutes commuting one-way to work (55.0% of working residents), one of the shortest commutes across America.
Here most residents (78.6%) 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 (9.9%) . 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.
