Where to live in Orlando
Almost nothing people call Orlando is the City of Orlando. Winter Park and Maitland are separate municipalities with their own councils; Dr. Phillips, Celebration, Hunter's Creek and Horizon West are unincorporated county; the theme parks sit in Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake. What is left is a city on high ground — these guides sit between seventy-six and a hundred and four feet above sea level — so the storm-surge argument that dominates this site's Miami and Tampa pages barely applies here. What costs money instead appears on no tax table. These are 4 neighborhood guides, filterable by sector below.
Browse dedicated guides for Downtown, Lake Eola and Thornton Park, College Park and north Orlando, , Lake Nona and south Orlando.
4 communities across the city
A start on a city where almost everything people call Orlando is somewhere else. Filter by sector, then page through the rest.
Baldwin Park
A naval training centre redeveloped from 1999 as an 1,100-acre New Urbanist neighbourhood — a master plan inside a city.
College Park
1920s bungalows on a chain of lakes, with streets named after universities and a main street that still works.
Lake Nona
Seventeen square miles of master plan around Medical City, and the first place on this site where a community development district assessment becomes a number instead of a caveat.
Thornton Park
Brick streets and bungalows a few minutes' walk from the office towers — the walkable case in a city built for cars.
Showing 1–4 of 4 communities
The four sides at a glance
Orlando's four sectors are not variations on a theme; they are four different products. A 1920s bungalow grid around the lakes, a naval base rebuilt as a New Urbanist neighbourhood, and seventeen square miles of master plan by the airport are governed differently, assessed differently and cost differently to hold. The variable that separates them is not elevation, as it is on the coast — it is whether the infrastructure was paid for by the city a century ago or is being repaid by the residents now.
| Side | Neighborhoods | Character |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown, Lake Eola and Thornton Park | Thornton Park | A sinkhole lake with a skyline around it, and a grid of brick streets and bungalows immediately east — the walkable case in a city built for cars. |
| College Park and north Orlando | College Park | 1920s bungalows on a chain of lakes, with streets named after universities and a main street that still works. |
| — | A naval training centre rebuilt from 1999 as an 1,100-acre New Urbanist neighbourhood, and the older streets around it. | |
| Lake Nona and south Orlando | Lake Nona | Seventeen square miles of master plan around Medical City, and the clearest look this site gets at what a community development district actually costs. |
The four sectors above are ours; the neighbourhood boundaries are not. The City of Orlando publishes named neighbourhood boundaries, which makes this the best-sourced grouping of the three Florida cities on this site — what stays editorial is which neighbourhood lands in which sector. The noun is “sector” rather than “district” deliberately: Orlando's six numbered City Commission districts are official and electoral, and a route called /communities/districts/east would collide with them in a reader's head. Each guide takes its map point from the OpenStreetMap place node for the name and its elevation from a USGS point query at that node.
What is not here, and where it is instead. Winter Park and Maitland are separate municipalities with their own councils and their own millage, and they are on the Orlando metro comparison along with Kissimmee, Sanford, Apopka and twenty more. Dr. Phillips, Celebration, Hunter's Creek, Meadow Woods and Horizon West are unincorporated county — no council, no municipal rate, no row on that table and no guide here, despite being among the most-searched “Orlando” names there are. The theme parks are in Lake Buena Vista and Bay Lake, two tiny municipalities that exist largely for that purpose. Inside the city limits this selection still leaves real places out — Mills 50, Audubon Park, Colonialtown, Delaney Park, SoDo, Parramore and Rosemont among them — and they come as the guides do.