Walton, OR

ZIP code 97490 is assigned to Walton, OR, and falls within Lane County. Like every US postal code, it began as a mail-routing device rather than a geographic boundary — the US Postal Service groups delivery routes under a single code so carriers and sorting equipment can process mail efficiently. Today it also serves as a practical shorthand for the area itself: roughly 476 people live inside it.

At 5 residents per square mile spread over 96.288 square miles, 97490 reads as a rural area. It is a sparsely populated postal code, and density shapes almost everything else on this page — how people get to work, whether they own or rent, and what housing costs.

Household earnings here sit well above the national picture. The median household income of $135,179 places 97490 in the upper reaches of American postal codes, ahead of 95% of them. The US median for comparison is $70,109. Bear in mind that median income describes the midpoint household, not the average — it is not pulled upward by a handful of very high earners the way a mean would be.

Housing in 97490 costs well above the national median. A typical home is valued at $385,000 against a US median of $207,500, and median gross rent runs $1,404 a month. Ownership dominates: 82.0% of occupied homes are owner-occupied, which usually signals an established residential area with relatively low turnover.

The building stock is dominated by detached single-family houses, which account for 68.9% of housing units here. The median construction year is 1991, making the housing here from the later twentieth century. The vacancy rate of 30.0% is high, which in many places reflects seasonal or second-home use rather than abandonment.

The population skews younger than the country as a whole, with a median age of 33.6 against 42 nationally. Households are relatively large at 3.58 people on average, with 92.5% classified as family households.

Getting to work takes 43.0 minutes on average one way. The dominant mode is worked from home at 47.8% of workers, while 47.8% work from home. Commute patterns are one of the better proxies for how a place actually functions day to day.

Beyond addressing mail, 97490 does a lot of quiet administrative work. Retailers use it to calculate shipping and sales tax at checkout. Insurers use it to set premiums, since risk profiles vary geographically. Employers and marketers use it to define service areas. Government agencies use it to route benefits and organise reporting. If you have ever been asked for a postal code by a form that clearly does not intend to send you anything, this is why.

For anyone weighing a move, 97490 offers a compact profile of Walton: 476 residents, a median household income of $135,179, 8.7% of adults holding a bachelor's degree or higher, and an unemployment rate of 12.2%. A handful of figures like these answer more relocation questions than most neighbourhood guides do.

One caution worth repeating: a postal code is not a neighbourhood. 97490 may cover parts of several distinct areas, and a single neighbourhood in Walton may be split across more than one code. Boundaries also shift as USPS adjusts delivery routes. Treat the figures here as describing a delivery area, which is what they actually measure.