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Elma, WA

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



Overview

Elma is a very small city located in the state of Washington. With a population of 3,515 people and just one neighborhood, Elma is the 165th largest community in Washington.

Occupations and Workforce

Elma is neither predominantly blue-collar nor white-collar, instead having a mixed workforce of both blue-collar and white-collar jobs. Overall, Elma is a city of service providers, sales and office workers, and farmers, fishers, or foresters. There are especially a lot of people living in Elma who work in farm management occupations (18.52%), management occupations (11.94%), and sales jobs (11.35%).

You will also find that a lot of people in Elma work in agricultural jobs - much more than in the average community in America. This will be quite apparent if you drive around town, as much of the landscape is dedicated to farms.

Telecommuters are a relatively large percentage of the workforce: 7.64% 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

In Elma, however, the average commute to work is quite long. On average, people spend 30.40 minutes each day getting to work, which is significantly higher than the national average.

Demographics

The education level of Elma citizens is a little higher than the average for US cities and towns: 21.34% of adults in Elma have at least a bachelor's degree.

The per capita income in Elma in 2022 was $34,165, which is lower middle income relative to Washington, and middle income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $136,660 for a family of four. However, Elma contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.

Elma is a very ethnically-diverse city. The people who call Elma home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Elma residents report their race to be White, followed by Native Hawaiian. Elma also has a sizeable Hispanic population (people of Hispanic origin can be of any race). People of Hispanic or Latino origin account for 16.34% of the city’s residents. Important ancestries of people in Elma include Irish, German, English, Norwegian, and Polish.

The most common language spoken in Elma is English. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Polish.

Notable & Unique Neighborhood Characteristics

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.

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 15.6% of the workforce so employed, this neighborhood has a greater concentration of such workers than 99.5% of U.S. neighborhoods.

Diversity

Did you know that the neighborhood has more Croatian and Russian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 2.1% of this neighborhood's residents have Croatian ancestry and 3.7% have Russian ancestry.

The Neighbors

How wealthy a neighborhood is, from very wealthy, to middle income, to low income is very formative with regard to the personality and character of a neighborhood. Equally important is the rate of people, particularly children, who live below the federal poverty line. In some wealthy gated communities, the areas immediately surrounding can have high rates of childhood poverty, which indicates other social issues. NeighborhoodScout's analysis reveals both aspects of income and poverty for this neighborhood.

The neighbors in the neighborhood in Elma are upper-middle income, making it an above average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis reveals that this neighborhood has a higher income than 66.8% of the neighborhoods in America. In addition, 4.6% 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 65.1% 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, 26.5% of the working population is employed in executive, management, and professional occupations. The second most important occupational group in this neighborhood is manufacturing and laborer occupations, with 21.1% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations (20.2%), and 16.6% in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants.

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 79.1% of households. Other important languages spoken here include Spanish and Polish.

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 Elma, WA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Mexican (21.7%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (14.5%), and residents who report English roots (9.2%), and some of the residents are also of Irish ancestry (8.3%), along with some Russian ancestry residents (3.7%), among others. In addition, 10.2% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country.

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 between 30 and 45 minutes commuting one-way to work (31.1% of working residents), which is at or a bit above the average length of a commute across all U.S. neighborhoods.

Here most residents (71.0%) 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 (11.9%) . In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.

Real Estate includes:
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Economics & Demographics include:
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Race & Ethnic Diversity
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Higher Education Attainment
Crime includes:
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Schools include:
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