Manville-Albion

Manville-Albion isn’t the flashiest neighborhood in the town of Lincoln, Rhode Island, but it’s a lower-priced way to land a home in this well-regarded suburb of Providence. “When I get clients who are more marginal when it comes to their ability to buy a home, they're OK with buying in Manville because they get all the benefits of Lincoln,” explains Amy Bedard, a Realtor at CrossRoads Real Estate Group who has worked in the local real estate market for nearly 20 years. Niche ranks Lincoln the 11th-best Rhode Island suburb to buy a house in, and the website gives the town’s school district an A-minus.

Manville-Albion is home to a large concentration of renters, but the pair of villages aren’t without their single-family homes. Among Manville’s dense array of colonial-style multifamily homes are Dutch colonials and ranch homes on narrow lots. In Albion, the yards get a bit bigger as the village’s split-levels and colonial-style homes are more spaced out. A three-bedroom house in Albion can be picked up in the mid-$300,000s, while a similar home in Manville is likely to cost $500,000. Homes on big chunks of land are hard to come by, so house hunters in search of large lots should be prepared to pay more. For example, a Manville farmhouse on roughly 3 acres can fetch more than $1 million. As Bedard mentioned, prices in the neighborhood tend to be lower than what’s common across the town of Lincoln. For example, homes in Manville list for a median price of $218 per square foot, compared to $245 per square foot overall in Lincoln.

Students attending the Lincoln Public School District are likely to go to Northern Lincoln Elementary School from prekindergarten through fifth grade. Located in Manville, the school earns a Niche grade of B-plus. Next, they’d take classes 5 miles south of the neighborhood at Lincoln Middle School, graded an A-minus. Less than a mile from Manville-Albion is Lincoln High School, also graded an A-minus. Budding business owners can live out the ABC show “Shark Tank” through the school’s entrepreneurship class. The course tasks students with perfecting a product and pitching it to a panel of make-believe investors. Lincoln High offers a long list of other business courses, including sports marketing and international business.

Near the center of Manville is Manville Memorial Park, known for its sports fields. They include a baseball field, as well as a versatile soccer field recently added by the town government. The soccer field also can host lacrosse or field hockey matches. Past the park’s playground, about a mile of paths skirt by a small pond. Meanwhile, most of Albion’s homes are built around Kirkbrae Country Club. The club’s manicured grass and bright flower beds make it a busy wedding venue, but the private 18-hole, par-72 course also stays active with golfers.

It’s far from a shopping and dining hub, but Manville-Albion does feature a few neighborhood hangouts. Residents may munch on Irish spring rolls or spicy Thai peanut chicken wings at Miller’s Tavern in between rounds of darts, games of pool or glances at the football-filled TVs. Meanwhile, the Coffee Cubby lives up to its name; only a few customers can squeeze into the café at a time, but they can take their latte and breakfast BLT to the shaded patio when the weather is nice. About 2 miles south of the neighborhood, the Lincoln Commons shopping center corrals all the basic shopping and recreation stops locals need, including Stop & Shop, Target and a CWTheaters cinema.

Interstate 295 and Route 46 stretch past Manville-Albion, another of the community’s advantages, Bedard says. That makes it easy to make the 15-mile drive to Providence, a trip locals can do in less than an hour if they hop on the RIPTA public bus near the movie theater. Perhaps even more important is the neighborhood’s proximity to Massachusetts, Bedard adds. Driving 10 miles north or east brings a resident to Massachusetts, the state where jobs pay the highest average salaries in the nation, according to Forbes.

Written By

Alex Soderstrom

Photography Contributed By

Pushparaj Aitwal

Video By

GL Moses