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.
St. Thomas is a somewhat small township located in the state of Pennsylvania. With a population of 5,933 people and just one neighborhood, St. Thomas is the 242nd largest community in Pennsylvania.
Occupations and Workforce
Because occupations involving physical labor dominate the local economy, St. Thomas is generally considered to be a blue-collar town. 36.71% of the St. Thomas workforce is employed in blue-collar occupations, compared to the national average of 27.7%. Overall, St. Thomas is a township of professionals, sales and office workers, and transportation and shipping workers. There are especially a lot of people living in St. Thomas who work in office and administrative support (11.04%), architecture and engineering (6.98%), and management occupations (6.95%).
A relatively large number of people in St. Thomas telecommute to their jobs. Overall, about 7.28% of the workforce works from home. While this may seem like a small number, as a fraction of the total workforce it ranks among the highest in the country. 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
It is a fairly quiet township because there are relatively few of those groups of people who have a tendency to be noisy. (Children, for example, often can't help themselves from being noisy, and being parents ourselves, we know!) St. Thomas has relatively few families with children living at home, and is quieter because of it. Renters and college students, for their own reasons, can also be noisy. St. Thomas has few renters and college students. But the biggest reason it is quieter in St. Thomas than in most places in America, is that there are just simply fewer people living here. If you think trees make good neighbors, St. Thomas may be for you.
Demographics
In terms of college education, the citizens of St. Thomas rank slightly lower than the national average. 14.50% of adults 25 and older in St. Thomas have a bachelor's degree or advanced degree, while 21.84% of adults have a 4-year degree or higher in the average American community.
The per capita income in St. Thomas in 2022 was $28,477, which is lower middle income relative to Pennsylvania and the nation. This equates to an annual income of $113,908 for a family of four. However, St. Thomas contains both very wealthy and poor people as well.
The people who call St. Thomas home describe themselves as belonging to a variety of racial and ethnic groups. The greatest number of St. Thomas residents report their race to be White, followed by Black or African-American. Important ancestries of people in St. Thomas include German, Irish, English, Polish, and European.
The most common language spoken in St. Thomas is English. Other important languages spoken here include Italian and Polish.
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.
Car Ownership
We Americans love our cars. Not only are they a necessity for most Americans due to the shape of our neighborhoods and the distances between where we live, work, shop, and go to school, but we also fancy them. As a result, most households in America have one, two, or three cars. But NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis shows that the neighborhood has a highly unusual pattern of car ownership. Residents of this neighborhood must really love automobiles. NeighborhoodScout's Analysis reveals that 34.6% of the households here have four, five, or more cars. That is more cars per household than in 95.9% of the neighborhoods in the nation.
Diversity
Did you know that the neighborhood has more German and Slovak ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 41.6% of this neighborhood's residents have German ancestry and 1.2% have Slovak 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 St. Thomas are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 70.2% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 12.9% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 55.8% 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, 35.5% 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 31.1% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in sales and service jobs, from major sales accounts, to working in fast food restaurants (17.5%), and 14.7% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.
Languages
The most common language spoken in the neighborhood is English, spoken by 98.9% of households. Some people also speak Italian (4.2%).
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 St. Thomas, PA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as German (41.6%). There are also a number of people of Irish ancestry (11.1%), and residents who report English roots (5.9%), and some of the residents are also of Polish ancestry (3.5%), along with some Dutch ancestry residents (1.9%), among others.
Getting to Work
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 15 and 30 minutes commuting one-way to work (57.3% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.
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 (9.6%) . 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.
