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Real Estate Prices & Overview

Downtown median real estate price is $940,463, which is more expensive than 87.3% of the neighborhoods in Virginia and 88.0% of the neighborhoods in the U.S.

The average rental price in Downtown is currently $1,746, based on NeighborhoodScout's exclusive analysis. Rents here are currently lower in price than 71.2% of Virginia neighborhoods.

Downtown is an urban neighborhood (based on population density) located in Roanoke, Virginia.

Downtown real estate is primarily made up of small (studio to two bedroom) to medium sized (three or four bedroom) apartment complexes/high-rise apartments and small apartment buildings. Most of the residential real estate is renter occupied. Many of the residences in the Downtown neighborhood are relatively historic, built no later than 1939, and in some cases, quite a bit earlier. A number of residences were also built between 1940 and 1969.

Vacant apartments or homes are a major fact of life in Downtown. The current real estate vacancy rate here is 17.0%. This is higher than the rate of vacancies in 81.1% of all U.S. neighborhoods. In addition, most vacant housing here is vacant year round. This can sometimes be the case in neighborhoods dominated by new construction that is not yet occupied. But often neighborhoods with vacancy rates this high are places that can be plagued by a protracted vacancy problem. If you live here, you may find that a number of buildings in your neighborhood are actually empty.

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.

People

An interesting characteristic about the Downtown neighborhood is that there are more incarcerated people living here than 99.1% 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.

Real Estate

The Downtown neighborhood is very unique in that it has one of the highest proportions of one, two, or no bedroom real estate of any neighborhood in America. Most neighborhoods have a mixture of home or apartment sizes from small to large, but here the concentration of studios and other small living spaces is at near-record heights. With 95.2% of the real estate here of this small size, this most assuredly is a notable feature that makes this neighborhood unique, along with just a handful of other neighborhoods in the U.S. that share this characteristic.

In addition, renter-occupied real estate is dominant in the Downtown neighborhood. The percentage of rental real estate here, according to exclusive NeighborhoodScout analysis, is 94.0%, which is higher than 97.8% 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.

Furthermore, one of the really unique and interesting things about the look and setting of the Downtown neighborhood is that it is almost entirely dominated by large apartment buildings, such as apartment complexes or high-rise apartments. 84.7% of the residential real estate here is classified as such. This puts this neighborhood on the map as having a higher proportion of large apartment buildings than 97.4% of all neighborhoods in America.

Modes of Transportation

More people in Downtown choose to walk to work each day (11.9%) than almost any neighborhood in America. If you are attracted to the idea of being able to walk to work, this neighborhood could be a good choice.

Diversity

Did you know that the Downtown neighborhood has more Scots-Irish and Armenian ancestry people living in it than nearly any neighborhood in America? It's true! In fact, 5.1% of this neighborhood's residents have Scots-Irish ancestry and 0.8% have Armenian ancestry.

Migration / Stability

The freedom of moving to new places versus the comfort of home. How much and how often people move not only can create diverse and worldly neighborhoods, but simultaneously it can produce a loss of intimacy with one's surroundings and a lack of connectedness to one's neighbors. NeighborhoodScout's exclusive research has identified this neighborhood as unique with regard to the transience of its populace. In the Downtown neighborhood, a greater proportion of the residents living here today did not live here five years ago than is found in 98.3% of U.S. Neighborhoods. This neighborhood, more than almost any other in America, has new residents from other areas.

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 Downtown neighborhood in Roanoke are lower-middle income, making it a below average income neighborhood. NeighborhoodScout's research shows that this neighborhood has an income lower than 68.7% of U.S. neighborhoods. With 24.0% of the children here below the federal poverty line, this neighborhood has a higher rate of childhood poverty than 73.5% 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 Downtown neighborhood, 59.3% 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 32.4% of the residents employed. Other residents here are employed in manufacturing and laborer occupations (4.7%), and 3.5% in clerical, assistant, and tech support occupations.

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 Downtown neighborhood is English, spoken by 90.2% 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 Downtown neighborhood in Roanoke, VA, residents most commonly identify their ethnicity or ancestry as Irish (13.9%). There are also a number of people of German ancestry (13.2%), and residents who report Asian roots (12.2%), and some of the residents are also of English ancestry (10.7%), along with some Italian ancestry residents (7.7%), among others. In addition, 14.1% 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 Downtown neighborhood spend between 15 and 30 minutes commuting one-way to work (40.3% of working residents), which is shorter than the time spent commuting to work for most Americans.

Here most residents (74.0%) drive alone in a private automobile to get to work. In addition, quite a number also hop out the door and walk to work 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.


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