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 seventeen 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 16 neighborhood guides, filterable by sector below.
Where to start looking in Orlando
Most people arrive with one constraint rather than a map. Each line below names one, one place to begin, and the figure behind it, which comes from the guide the line points at.
- The lowest price of entry. The Milk District, where the 308 single-family parcels had a median just value of $331,132 on the 2025 roll. A mile south in Delaney Park the same figure is $640,275.
- A single-family house and a yard. Wadeview Park: 712 single-family parcels at a median just value of $407,190. For more house, Delaney Park's median living area is 2,277 square feet.
- To know the annual bill in advance. Wadeview Park has no community development district, because Florida's Chapter 190 districts date from 1980 and none reaches ground built out this early. A newer address like Lake Nona typically carries $1,200 to $3,000 a year, and it appears on the tax bill without appearing in the tax rate.
- To be on a lake. Lake Fairview fronts 405 acres of water that has been on Florida's verified impaired waters list since May 2004. On the Conway chain, land inside the Lake Conway Water and Navigation Control District pays an extra 0.4107 mills.
- The oldest streets. Lake Eola Heights, with a National Register period of significance running 1875 to 1949. Exterior changes go to a review board, and a major certificate of appropriateness costs $250 to file.
Browse dedicated guides for Downtown, Lake Eola and Thornton Park, College Park and north Orlando, Baldwin Park and the east side, Lake Nona and south Orlando.
16 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.
Audubon Park
Post-war ranch houses built for the naval training center next door, now a Main Street district with a food hall, and the highest measured ground on this site outside Conway.
Baldwin Park
A naval training center redeveloped from 1999 as an 1,100-acre New Urbanist neighborhood: 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.
Colonialtown North
Bungalow blocks between Colonial Drive and Corrine, carrying most of what people mean when they say Mills 50, and the walkable market Baldwin Park was built to imitate.
Conway
A chain of lakes on the highest measured ground of any guide here, where most of what buyers call Conway is unincorporated county and the City's own slice is 222 acres.
Delaney Park
1920s houses on brick streets south of the expressway, in the catchment everyone argues about, and a five-minute drive from the hospital campus that employs the block.
Lake Eola Heights
Orlando's largest local historic district, a few blocks of 1910s and 1920s houses north of Lake Eola where the review board, not the market, decides what the street looks like.
Lake Fairview
The north end of Edgewater Drive, where College Park's main street runs out into a ski lake and the prices step down with it.
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.
Milk District
Named for the dairy that is still there, a Main Street district of small 1940s houses a mile east of downtown, and the cheapest walkable address in the city.
Park Lake/Highland
The 1920s houses of the historic district next door without the designation: no local historic district covers Park Lake/Highland, the second-lowest measured ground of any Orlando guide, a few inches above Thornton Park.
Parramore
The historically Black neighborhood west of the tracks that got a stadium, a university campus and a plan, and is the one place downtown where the question is whether the plan reaches the residents.
Photographs: Orlando by Quintin Soloviev, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · Downtown Baldwin Park by Simonhardt93, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · A cottage on Gerda Terrace, College Park by Gerdater, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Harry P Leu Gardens by KimonBerlin, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons · Conway, Florida by LittleT889, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · Skyline of Orlando, 9 Feb 2017 by Artystyk386, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · St. James Cathedral School-2 by Visitor7, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · College Park by Eric Friedebach, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Lake Nona Boulevard by East Park, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons · Fashion Square by Miosotis Jade, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · Downtown from Lake Eola by JER3L1337, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons · Orlando City Stadium - Three Weeks Before the Open House by elisfkc from Orlando, FL, United States, CC BY-SA 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.
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Showing 1–12 of 16 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 neighborhood, 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 | Lake Eola Heights, Parramore, South Eola, 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, Lake Fairview, Park Lake/Highland, Rosemont | 1920s bungalows on a chain of lakes, with streets named after universities and a main street that still works. |
| Baldwin Park and the east side | Audubon Park, Baldwin Park, Colonialtown North, Milk District | A naval training center rebuilt from 1999 as an 1,100-acre New Urbanist neighborhood, and the older streets around it. |
| Lake Nona and south Orlando | Conway, Delaney Park, Lake Nona, Wadeview Park | 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 neighborhood boundaries are not. The City of Orlando publishes named neighborhood boundaries, which makes this the best-sourced grouping of the three Florida cities on this site: what stays editorial is which neighborhood 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, SoDo, MetroWest, Washington Shores, Dover Shores and Lake Como among them, and they come as the guides do.