Orlando Standard

With the UCF and Valencia College downtown campus, Creative Village has quickly developed into an educational hub. But it's also an urban neighborhood with residential, restaurants and businesses. It was the perfect location for Downtown Orlando Partnership’s State of Downtown, allowing me to showcase how we're starting to chart the next course for downtown to ensure it has something for everyone.

To do that, we need to turn some major one-way thoroughfares into two-way streets. We need to increase walkability. We need to nurture more locally-owned small businesses to increase retail and dining options to help create the character that helps define a neighborhood. We also need to continue bring high-wage jobs to downtown and create career opportunities for residents. 

These are long-term parts of our Downtown Action Plan, but we’ll see key pieces in action soon. This includes public safety efforts, where we are working to amend our land development code to increase safety at night by better regulating parking lots, reducing nuisances and enhancing noise ordinances. This aligns with the work of Orlando Police Department officers to reduce crime in downtown and all of our city.  

Bringing our vision of an urban neighborhood to life also means continuing to support our most vulnerable neighbors. Through our Accelerate Orlando initiative, we’re leveraging $58 million in federal funding to invest in trusted homeless service providers to help modernize their campuses, offer more wrap-around services and grow daytime operations to help those experiencing homelessness get off the street. 

These actions don’t lead to the big, shiny buildings and projects that get so much attention. But these are the critical things we can do to create a downtown that serves as a real neighborhood for everyone.

Original source can be found here.