Orlando Places Guide: Main Streets, Historic Districts and Redevelopment Areas

The City of Orlando names its neighborhoods through four official programs, each with its own map: Main Street districts, historic preservation districts, community redevelopment areas and Opportunity Zones (Orlando Main Streets; Historic Preservation Districts).

The layers overlap rather than nest. Thornton Park is both a Main Street district and part of the Lake Lawsona Historic District, and the Milk District Main Street covers a large part of Colonialtown South, which is also an Opportunity Zone (Historic Preservation Districts; Opportunity Zones). A single Orlando storefront can therefore sit inside more than one program, each with its own rules and incentives.

The ACFR uses the same redevelopment names, listing debt schedules for the Downtown District, the Republic Drive (Universal Boulevard) District and the Conroy Road District (City of Orlando FY 2025 ACFR).

Orlando has twelve Main Street districts: Audubon Park Garden District, City District, College Park, Curry Ford West, Gateway District, Ivanhoe Village, Mills 50, Parramore, SoDo, the Milk District, Thornton Park and West Lakes (City of Orlando, Orlando Main Streets).

Mayor Buddy Dyer and the Orlando City Council created the program in 2008 to strengthen neighborhood commercial districts. Each district is run by a nonprofit board that hires a full time executive director, raises matching funds and follows an annual work plan, while the city supplies yearly funding, technical help and training in the Main Street Four Point approach (Orlando Main Streets).

The program's own running totals, posted by the city, are more than $2.7 billion reinvested in improvements, more than 2,500 net new businesses, more than 15,000 new full and part time jobs and more than 190,000 volunteer hours (Orlando Main Streets impact data). The page gives no start date or method for those totals, so they read best as program claims rather than audited figures. Questions go to [email protected], and the city posts district boundary maps on the same page.

Orlando has six historic preservation districts: Downtown (1980), Lake Cherokee (1981), Lake Copeland (1984), Lake Eola Heights (1989), Lake Lawsona (1994) and Colonialtown South (2000) (City of Orlando, Historic Preservation Districts).

Downtown, the first, covers eight square blocks bounded by East Jefferson Street, Gertrude Avenue, Church Street and Rosalind Avenue, with about 80 buildings from the 1880s to the early 1940s; the Rogers Kiene Building (1886), the Old Orlando Railroad Depot (1889) and the Tinker Building (1925) are on the National Register (Historic Preservation Districts). Lake Eola Heights holds about 570 buildings, and Lake Lawsona, which takes in Lawsona/Fern Creek and Thornton Park, about 500 dating from 1911 to the 1950s.

The city's page disagrees with itself on Lake Copeland, the district east of Orange Avenue and south of Gore Street: one paragraph counts approximately 100 residences and the background paragraph approximately 110 (Historic Preservation Districts). Both figures are the city's; the difference is small but worth knowing before quoting either.

What is changing: on August 10, 2026, the Orlando City Council approved a 36 month temporary shift of Downtown Historic District project reviews from the Historic Preservation Board to the Appearance Review Board (Historic Preservation Districts). Owners in the five residential districts can reach the Historic Preservation Officer at 407.246.3416 before planning exterior work, while Downtown questions go to the Appearance Review Board Official at 407.246.3350.

The Downtown Redevelopment Area is a 1,664 acre district where Orlando's Community Redevelopment Agency, created by City Council resolution in 1980, spends tax increment revenue on housing, cultural arts, transportation and retail (Downtown Orlando, Community Redevelopment Agency).

The CRA adds no tax of its own; it is funded by the property tax revenue generated by rising values inside each area since the area was created. Two smaller Orlando areas, Conroy Road and Republic Drive, focus on transportation, and the seven members of the City Council sit as the CRA board, with Mayor Buddy Dyer as chairman (Community Redevelopment Agency).

The downtown plan, DTOutlook, grew out of the Project DTO visioning process launched in 2014 and was amended in 2023 and 2026 (Community Redevelopment Agency). CRA business is taken up at 2:00 p.m. on regular City Council meeting dates, and the remaining 2026 dates listed are October 26, November 9 and December 7.

Twelve Orlando areas are Opportunity Zones: Colonialtown South, the Executive Airport, Greater Washington Shores, Holden Heights, La Costa, Mercy Drive, the Packing District, Rosemont, the SoDo District, South Parramore, Lake Sunset and West Colonial (City of Orlando, Opportunity Zones).

They are twelve of the 427 Florida communities recommended for the federal program, which defers capital gains taxes for investors who put gains into qualified Opportunity Funds invested in designated low income census tracts (Opportunity Zones). The city's stated role is to connect funding with projects and to build a pipeline of investable ones in those Orlando tracts.

The city's short descriptions show what each zone is meant to become. La Costa is part of the gateway to Orlando International Airport and overlaps the Gateway Orlando Main Street district along South Semoran Boulevard; West Colonial is home to Camping World Stadium; and along East Colonial Drive the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority controls many city owned properties near the Executive Airport (Opportunity Zones). Questions go to Economic Development at 407.246.2821.

The City of Orlando's My Neighborhood tool takes a street address and returns nearby parks and facilities, events and projects, the district commissioner and garbage pickup details (City of Orlando, My Neighborhood).

It answers the everyday questions that come with an Orlando address, from which commissioner to call to which day the carts go out, and the historic districts page points to the separate Orlando Locator for checking whether a property sits inside a preservation district (My Neighborhood; Historic Preservation Districts). The My Neighborhood map needs JavaScript enabled to load.

No separate guides sit under this places section yet. Neighborhood questions about housing are answered in the Orlando real estate guides for Baldwin Park, College Park, downtown condos, Lake Nona and Thornton Park. The Orlando landmarks hub covers individual sites such as Lake Eola Park and Loch Haven Park, and the Orlando history hub covers how Jernigan became Orlando and when the railroad arrived.

Last verified: October 18, 2026, by re-reading the City of Orlando Main Streets, historic district, Opportunity Zone and My Neighborhood pages, the downtown CRA page and the CRA district schedules in the fiscal 2025 financial report.