Fairfax, VA (Merrifield)

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 Merrifield neighborhood in Fairfax are wealthy, making it among the 15% highest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 90.7% of the neighborhoods in America. With 23.2% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 74.5% 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 Merrifield neighborhood, 71.5% of the working population is employed in executive, management, and professional occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is government jobs, whether they are in local, state, or federal positions, with 19.9% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (19.1%), and 5.6% 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 Merrifield neighborhood is English, spoken by 53.3% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese.

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 Merrifield neighborhood in Fairfax, VA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Asian (23.1%). There are also a number of people of South American ancestry (12.6%), and residents who report Irish roots (8.9%), and some of the residents are also of German ancestry (8.1%), along with some British ancestry residents (5.1%), among others. In addition, 37.0% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country.

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 Merrifield neighborhood spend between 30 and 45 minutes commuting one-way to work (31.3% of working residents), which is at or a bit above the average length of a commute across all U.S. neighborhoods.

Here most residents (49.5%) 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 (8.2%) . In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.