Downtown Orlando’s next horizon extends south
After stretching in recent years to the north and west, downtown Orlando is pushing southward with hotels, boutique grocers, apartment mid-rises and a bike trail extension.
A strip of South Orange Avenue known in the past mostly as the home of the Orlando Health medical complex is being reshaped as cranes demolish old buildings to make way for more urban-style apartments and the city preps a redo of the avenue itself.
“Orlando Health and the SoDo area [south of downtown Orlando] have had a lot of development, but now we are seeing more visible and larger projects,” said Jason Burton, a chief planner with Orlando. “Hopefully, it will make it into a more urban destination, and with these improvements to South Orange Avenue, it will really make it into more of a Main Street.”
Downtown’s southward momentum comes after developers lined North Orange Avenue with luxury apartments in recent
“Many of the storefronts have been redeveloped or are in the process of being redeveloped. And now we’re seeing new retail come into the market.” Greg Allowe, president of Delaney Hotel Corp.
years and staked out the west side of downtown with the fast-emerging footprint of a campus for the University of Central Florida and Valencia College. With historic neighborhoods to the east, the next direction for the urban core to grow has been to the south.
Revitalization of the area started more than a decade ago when the SoDo project opened at South Orange Avenue and Grant Street in 2006 to the thud of the Great Recession. Apartments filled fast, but prime retail spots became offices, and other storefronts stayed vacant for years with lease rates dropping. Now, only a few retail spaces are empty as the Target-anchored complex appears to have stabilized.
Restaurant manager Cody Pitre lived for years in an older apartment building just south of downtown and frequented shops and eateries at SoDo. He said he is excited to see new restaurants, such as Gator’s Dockside, but he thinks it’s a stressful place to live.
“The biggest thing is traffic,” said Pitre, as he was loading up his U-Haul to move to Panama City because he wants to live close to the beach. “They need to do something. But I don’t know what that would be.”
Starting next year, South Orange Avenue will be revamped from Pineloch Avenue to Gore Street. Lanes are now various widths but will all be 10 feet wide. Treelined sidewalks are planned to help bridge what city officials describe as a “gap” between the urban core of downtown and the SoDo mid-rise, which is about 1.5 miles south of City Hall.
City officials have also started the design for an extension of the Orlando Urban Trail, which now starts at the Orlando Museum of Art and is expected to run south of downtown near Division Avenue to Michigan Street. Completion is years away, but it would eventually link that area through downtown and up to Winter Park, officials said.
The remake of South Orange is geared to professionals seeking an urban lifestyle with rooftop clubhouses and trendy grocery stores, and rents are likely to reflect that — even in a region starved for affordable housing.
The latest project to launch along South Orange is Ecco on Orange with four mid-rise residential towers, a roof-level pool and a parking garage just south of Michigan Street. Roger B. Kennedy Construction started work this month on the $40 million project, which will include a Lucky’s supermarket. With a design by 5G Studio Collaborative in Miami, LeCesse Development expects to complete the 300-unit project at 3135 S. Orange Ave. in November 2019.
Closer to central downtown, Crescent Communities expects to start leasing this summer at its Novel Lucerne project at 733 Main Lane. With 375 residences in a mid-rise complex the size of a city block, the project is anchored by the Earth Fare supermarket that is set to open early next year. The city agreed to subsidize the project with as much as $500,000 in exchange for developers’ help with sponsoring downtown events, adding about $50,000 of public art and bringing in an organic grocer that would help train residents of the Parramore community west of downtown.
New lodging is also planned. Marriott recently submitted plans to the city for a hotel near the Hampton Inn on Columbia Street.
Another project nearing completion is the Delaney Hotel and Delaney’s Tavern at 1315 S. Orange Ave.
A development group led by Orlando physicians Dr. Tom Winters and Dr. Rebecca Moroose announced two years ago that construction of the 54-room hotel and 6,000 square foot restaurant and bar would be completed a year ago.
Developer Greg Allowe, president of the Delaney Hotel Corp., said the project had construction delays but is slated to open in mid-July with prices starting about $189 per night and plans to compete with the Grand Bohemian.
The area has only grown stronger during the construction process, Allowe said. Brick and Fire Pizza and Applebee’s have moved there in recent years.
“What we’ve seen come to reality during the18 months we’ve been under construction is many of the storefronts have been redeveloped or are in the process of being redeveloped,” he said. “And now we’re seeing new retail come into the market.”