Gap Mills is a very small town located in the state of West Virginia. With a population of 2,682 people and just one neighborhood, Gap Mills is the 85th largest community in West Virginia.
Because occupations involving physical labor dominate the local economy, Gap Mills is generally considered to be a blue-collar town. 39.15% of the Gap Mills workforce is employed in blue-collar occupations, compared to the national average of 27.7%. Overall, Gap Mills is a town of professionals, service providers, and sales and office workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Gap Mills who work in farm management occupations (8.68%), teaching (8.47%), and office and administrative support (7.85%).
You will also find that a lot of people in Gap Mills 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.
Gap Mills’s overall crime rate ranks among the lowest in the nation, making it a very safe place to live.
The town 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, Gap Mills has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Gap Mills a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.
In Gap Mills, however, the average commute to work is quite long. On average, people spend 40.90 minutes each day getting to work, which is significantly higher than the national average.
Gap Mills is a small town, and as such doesn't have a public transit system that people use to get to and from their jobs every day.
The percentage of people in Gap Mills with college degrees is quite a bit lower than the national average for cities and towns of 21.84%: just 10.36% of people over 25 have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree.
The per capita income in Gap Mills in 2022 was $26,108, which is lower middle income relative to West Virginia, and low income relative to the rest of the US. This equates to an annual income of $104,432 for a family of four. However, Gap Mills contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call Gap Mills home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Gap Mills residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in Gap Mills include English, Irish, German, Polish, and Italian.
The most common language spoken in Gap Mills is English. Other important languages spoken here include German/Yiddish and Italian.
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.
Each year, fewer and fewer Americans make their living as farmers, foresters, or fishers. But the neighborhood truly stands out among U.S. neighborhoods. According to exclusive NeighborhoodScout analysis, this neighborhood has a greater proportion of farmers, foresters, or fishers than 98.8% of all American neighborhoods. This is truly a unique cultural characteristic of this neighborhood.
Whether walking, biking, riding, or driving, the length of one's commute is an important factor for one's quality of life. The neighborhood stands out for its commute length, according to NeighborhoodScout's analysis. Long commutes can be brutal. They take time, money, and energy, leaving less of you for yourself and your family. The residents of the neighborhood unfortunately have the distinction of having, on average, a longer commute than most any neighborhood in America. 12.3% of commuters here travel more than one hour just one-way to work. That is more than two hours per day. This percentage with two-hour + round-trip commutes is higher than NeighborhoodScout found in 97.6% of all neighborhoods in America.
Despite all of the residential real estate here in the neighborhood, NeighborhoodScout has discovered that much of it is vacant. In resort or second-home vacation areas, this naturally occurs because homes and apartments are seasonally occupied, and empty for a portion of the year. In non-vacation or resort areas, however, this can be an indicator of property abandonment or a weak real estate market. The vacancy rate here is 37.6%, which is higher than 97.5% of all U.S. neighborhoods.
In addition, this neighborhood has wide open spaces, few people, and lots of space to stretch out. If you like locations that fit that description, you may like this neighborhood. Based on NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis, with only 13 people per square mile living here, this neighborhood is less crowded than 96.5% of America.
Furthermore, the real estate in this neighborhood consists of more mobile homes than 95.1% of all neighborhoods in America, with 29.6% of the occupied housing here being classified as mobile homes. So if you are looking for a mobile home, or you like the look and feel of mobile home parks, this neighborhood might have the setting you desire.
Some neighborhoods have more internal cohesiveness than others. While other neighborhoods feel like a collection of strangers who just happen to live near each other. Sometimes this comes down to not only the personalities of the people in a place, but how long people have been together in that neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research has revealed some interesting things about the rootedness of people in the neighborhood. More residents of the neighborhood live here today that also were living in this same neighborhood five years ago than is found in 97.9% of U.S. neighborhoods. This neighborhood is really made up of people who know each other, don't move often, and have lived here in this very neighborhood for quite a while.
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 Gap Mills are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 82.7% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 12.5% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 56.4% 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, 30.5% 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 28.8% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (23.1%), and 8.9% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 100.0% of households.
Culture is the shared learned behavior of peoples. Undeniably, different ethnicities and ancestries have different cultural traditions, and as a result, neighborhoods with concentrations of residents of one or another ethnicities or ancestries will express those cultures. It is what makes the North End in Boston so fun to visit for the Italian restaurants, bakeries, culture, and charm, and similarly, why people enjoy visiting Chinatown in San Francisco.
In the neighborhood in Gap Mills, WV, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as English (11.1%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (5.7%), and residents who report German roots (4.3%), and some of the residents are also of Polish ancestry (2.1%), along with some Italian ancestry residents (1.2%), 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 (32.8% of working residents), longer and tougher than most commutes in America.
Here most residents (77.1%) 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 (18.0%) . In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.