Moving to Rochester (Orono, Stewartville, Byron: low crime, houses, school district)

[C Lee]

We are moving to Rochester in a few months. Can anyone comment why houses in the SE part of town are relatively cheaper? Does that mean it's where the crimes and bad schools are? We are also looking in smaller town such as Byron, Eyota, Oronoco, and Stewartville. Are these towns friendly? What about school in these areas? We have kids, and we are not white, so we don't want to be in a place where people don't accept us, especially the kids. Our kids are currently in the gifted and talented program here, so we want a good school for them to explore their ability.

Any suggestion is highly appreciated. Thank you.

[fromupthere]

Rochester Public School District 535 Look at the Choice schools. They tend to have higher ratings but they are hard to get into. Not sure how that works for someone moving to Rochester at the start of a school year. There are parts of SE Rochester that are less desirable yet there are some areas that are highly desirable. Crime doesn't seem to be limited to any one particular area. I think it used to be more in the SE part but has now spread. We live in the SE part of town and there are lots of non-whites. I do believe that is the case all over the city but I do know at my son's school he had a great diversity of races in his class. His school is in SE and is in one of the highly desirable areas of town. Houses are selling relatively quickly in that area.

Not sure how the small towns treat non-whites as I am white. Stewartville has excellent schools as far as I understand. Oronoco is the Pine Island schools. They are going through some issues with those schools but not sure it's impacted the students and how well they do. Byron I believe also has good schools. We've looked at moving there ourselves. Someone else will probably have to let you know about how people are treated in those towns. But as far as in Rochester, the closer you are to downtown for SE is where it's generally much cheaper for houses.

[noscope4me]

Cause Se is old rochester and the crime is higher in that area. Other choices are Nw or Sw but much higher priced and safer.

[fromupthere]

That's interesting that you say NW and SW are safer. All the crime that occurred over the last weekend (which included a beating, a stabbing, and some robberies) occurred in NW and SW. It seems like recent gang activity here has been localized to the NW area. So they are not really safer than SE. There are many nice areas in SE Rochester.

[KayT28]

I used to live in Rochester (near downtown), but moved to another state 3 years ago. I recall that the SE was generally a poorer section of town with smaller houses, but still had its nice parts. Some people would say that crime was higher in the SE, but I never bought into that. There actually wasn't a lot of major crime that I was aware of when living there. Anyway, Rochester overall has a really low crime rate compared to other cities and I frequently walked and biked all over the city, including the southeast and never had problems.