Ocotillo is a tiny town located in the state of California. With a population of 215 people and just one neighborhood, Ocotillo is the 834th largest community in California.
Because occupations involving physical labor dominate the local economy, Ocotillo is generally considered to be a blue-collar town. 0.00% of the Ocotillo workforce is employed in blue-collar occupations, compared to the national average of 27.7%. Overall, Ocotillo is a town of sales and office workers, transportation and shipping workers, and production and manufacturing workers. There are especially a lot of people living in Ocotillo who work in office and administrative support (0.00%), sales jobs (0.00%), and personal care services (0.00%).
Another notable thing is that Ocotillo is an extremely popular vacation destination. A significant portion of the population is seasonal. During the vacation season, the town experiences a large influx of people who take up residence in second homes they own in the area. As the vacation season ends, the population drops again, leaving behind a substantially quieter and smaller town.
Overall, Ocotillo’s crime rate is one of the lowest in the nation, which makes a great place to live if safety is an important concern.
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, Ocotillo has relatively fewer families with younger children, and/or college students. Combined, this makes Ocotillo a pretty quiet place to live overall. If you like quiet, you will probably enjoy it here.
Compared to the rest of the country, citizens of Ocotillo spend much less time in their cars: on average, their commute to work is only 0.00 minutes. This also means that noise and pollution levels in the town are less than they would otherwise be.
Being a small town, Ocotillo does not have a public transit system used by locals to get to and from work.
The citizens of Ocotillo have a very low rate of college education: just 8.90% of people over 25 have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree, compared to a national average of 21.84% for all cities.
The per capita income in Ocotillo in 2022 was $12,340, which is low income relative to California and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $49,360 for a family of four. Ocotillo also has one of the higher rates of people living in poverty in the nation, with 43.84% of its population below the federal poverty line.
Ocotillo is an extremely ethnically-diverse town. The people who call Ocotillo home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of Ocotillo residents report their race to be White. Important ancestries of people in Ocotillo include Portuguese, Yugoslavian, Other West Indian, West Indian, and U.S. Virgin Islander.
Ocotillo also has a high percentage of its population that was born in another country: 26.71%.
The most common language spoken in Ocotillo is Spanish. Other important languages spoken here include English and Polish.
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.
An interesting characteristic about the neighborhood is that there are more incarcerated people living here than 99.8% of neighborhoods in the U.S. The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, currently with 1 out of every 100 adults in the country are incarcerated as a punishment for crimes committed. The extremely high incarceration rate of this neighborhood could mean that a prison, juvenile detention facility or other correctional facility occupies a large proportion of the neighborhood, or contains a large portion of the neighborhood's population.
In addition, neighborhoodScout's exclusive research revealed that 99.1% of the adult residents in the neighborhood do not have a 4-year college degree, which is a lower rate of college graduated adults than found in 98.8% of the neighborhoods in America.
Also, the neighborhood stands out for having an average per capita income lower than 97.2% of the neighborhoods in the United States.
In the neighborhood, many people's commute means walking from the bedroom to the home office. NeighborhoodScout's analysis found that 38.0% of residents worked from home. This may not seem like a large number, but Scout's research shows that this is a higher percentage of people working from home than 99.3% of the neighborhoods in America. Often people who work from home are engaged in the creative or technological economy, such as is found in areas around Boston, and in Silicon Valley. Other times, people may be engaged in other businesses like trading stocks from home, or running a small beauty salon.
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 10.9% of the workforce so employed, this neighborhood has a greater concentration of such workers than 99.1% of U.S. neighborhoods.
Renter-occupied real estate is dominant in the neighborhood. The percentage of rental real estate here, according to exclusive NeighborhoodScout analysis, is 84.5%, which is higher than 95.2% of the neighborhoods in America. If you were to buy and live in the property you bought here, you would be almost alone in doing so. 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 45.9%, which is higher than 98.3% of all U.S. neighborhoods.
In addition, uncrowded roads, rural America and space to be the individual you are. If you like these characteristics, this neighborhood may fit you. With just 5 residents per square mile, is less crowded than 98.2% of all U.S. neighborhoods.
Furthermore, the real estate in this neighborhood consists of more mobile homes than 96.2% of all neighborhoods in America, with 33.6% 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.
Did you know that the neighborhood has more African and Sub-Saharan African ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 15.3% of this neighborhood's residents have African ancestry and 15.9% have Sub-Saharan African ancestry.
is also pretty special linguistically. Significantly, 0.4% of its residents five years old and above primarily speak Mon-Khmer, which is the dominant language of Cambodia, at home. While this may seem like a small percentage, it is higher than 97.4% of the neighborhoods in America.
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 Ocotillo are low income, making it among the lowest income neighborhoods in America. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 97.2% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 25.6% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 76.3% 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, 29.2% 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 26.6% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations (24.0%), and 10.9% in farming, forestry, or commercial fishing.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is Spanish, spoken by 54.5% of households. Some people also speak English (43.6%).
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 Ocotillo, CA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Mexican (54.9%). There are also a number of people of Sub-Saharan African ancestry (15.9%), and residents who report African roots (15.3%), and some of the residents are also of Irish ancestry (3.8%), along with some German ancestry residents (2.2%), among others. In addition, 13.7% of the residents of this neighborhood were born in another country.
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 30 and 45 minutes commuting one-way to work (43.7% of working residents), which is at or a bit above the average length of a commute across all U.S. neighborhoods.
Here most residents (62.0%) drive alone in a private automobile to get to work. In a neighborhood like this, as in most of the nation, many residents find owning a car useful for getting to work.
