Not at all. For years, Ivy and husband Rodney Taylor had watched the Dignowity Hill neighborhood. Rodney Taylor grew up near the historic district and periodically would visit the woman who owned their current home on North Olive Street, urging her to notify him if she ever decided to sell the house that had been in her family since 1911.

After she died last year, the Taylors contacted her estate to buy the house. They immediately began restoring the original metal light fixtures, wood floors and transoms in the house.

“We always wanted to live in a historic neighborhood,” Rodney Taylor said. “I think this is going to be the final home.”

More and more professionals are moving into up-and-coming older neighborhoods such as Dignowity Hill, Alta Vista, Highland Park and Tobin Hill Historic District. Buyers often are charmed by such original details as lacelike gingerbread on porch roofs, pocket doors and wraparound porches on the vintage homes. But increasingly, they’re also attracted to the mix of neighbors from a variety of backgrounds, financial and otherwise.

Many buyers of vintage homes are lured in by the diversity of architecture in older communities.

The architecture in these homes is often impossible to replicate in a modern home.

For instance, Tobin Hill and Alta Vista both date to the 19th century, and so reflect the period’s tendency to mix Victorian, French and Italian details. Highland Park, which dates to the 1910s, has ’20s wood bungalows, ’30s rock homes, some stucco and ’50s modern designs, said Laura Clark-Arguijo, an agent at King William Realty.

For Carolyn Kelley, the appeal of a vintage home was more about the neighborhood. She bought a 1923 Craftsman cottage surrounded by waist-high weeds in Tobin Hill because the area and home reminded her of the working-class neighborhood where she grew up in Long Island.

Like many buyers of vintage homes, Kelley has spent nearly two years trying to restore its original architectural features.

At one point, her plugged-in refrigerator sat in the backyard for three weeks while the contractor removed and rebuilt a brick wall on the house. Kelley would walk to the backyard each morning to get milk from the refrigerator for her coffee.

But, she said, the short inconveniences have been worth joining the effort to recycle and to reuse existing homes.

“It’s nice to be part of something that’s more than yourself, to be restoring something that will be a gift to the city,” Kelley said.

Older, up-and-coming neighborhoods also can offer housing stock at a discount to better-established inner-city communities, agents say. For instance, a home priced at $249,000 in Alta Vista would sell for $400,000 in Monte Vista Historic District, said Rosemary Roessling, an agent with Home Team America who has four listings currently in Alta Vista and Monte Vista.

Homes for sale in Alta Vista ranged between $102,750 and $369,900 last week, with an average price of $199,500, according to Realtor.com. In Tobin Hill, asking prices ranged between $65,000 and $379,500, averaging $166,000. In Dignowity Hill, excluding newer luxury condominiums, prices ranged between $25,000 and $259,900, averaging $71,000, according to Realtor.com.

Still, picking a bid price for a home in a transitional neighborhood can be tricky, agents say. Buyers need to consult agents who can explain the differences in features in homes for sale based on having visited several properties in that community, Clark-Arguijo said.

“The challenge with a lot of historic neighborhoods is that you have homes in such differing conditions that one may sell for $90 a square foot and one that will sell for half of that price,” Clark-Arguijo said. “It makes it very difficult for appraisers.”

Beth Booher did a lot of driving through Highland Park and read over several property listings online before putting in a bid on a home in the near Southeast Side neighborhood. She found homes priced between $45,000 and $120,000.

Booher bought a 1,100-square-foot two-bedroom, one-bathroom Craftsman cottage. It is appraised at $67,540 by the Bexar Appraisal District.

“It was a better price than many other neighborhoods with similar homes,” she said.

Highland Park homes range between $75 per square and $80 per square for homes needing minor repairs, according to Clark-Arguijo who lives in and has listings in that community.

Buyers in up-and-coming older areas also often face challenges — such as a high level of renters, which tends to be accompanied by less attention to the exterior of homes — as the community revitalizes.

For Ivy Taylor, an urban planning specialist, the diversity was a selling point. She was struck by a desire to preserve Dignowity Hill’s mixed socioeconomic character after attending community meetings in that area as part of her job.

“I liked that the neighborhood association is open to anyone — not just homeowners — so it’s more diverse,” Ivy Taylor said.

Grocery stores and food options are limited in the East Side community, she said. But, during renovations on their brick Victorian-style home that features nearly 12-foot ceilings, pocket doors and a view of downtown San Antonio, they have found easy access to downtown amenities.

For instance, when the Taylors missed a bus from A Night In Old San Antonio back to Dignowity Hill this year, they opted to walk back from La Villita and were pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to navigate the trip from a downtown hotspot to home.

“It just opened up a whole new world for me, walking places,” she said.