ORLANDO, Fla. – Around Camping World Stadium, one of Orlando’s most historic neighborhoods is undergoing a major transformation.
Lift Orlando is spearheading the effort to revitalize the West Lakes and Washington Shores communities, securing a $500,000 planning grant to upgrade two public housing sites in the neighborhood.
The grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will support the comprehensive redevelopment planning of Washington Shores’ Lake Mann Homes, a family public housing site with 210 units, and West Lakes’ Lorna Doone Apartments, an elderly site with 104 units.
“They need a facelift,” Shirley Bradley said. “They may need more than a facelift. They need a new start.”
Bradley has lived in the West Lakes community since 1963. She’s seen the neighborhood at its best and its worst.
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“I used to be the president of our neighborhood association, and I thought the people who grew up there would fulfill and keep on,” Bradley said. “But that hasn’t happened.”
Bradley, a retired teacher, helped integrate Orange County’s schools in the early 1970s. Today, she’s helping Lift Orlando revitalize the five historically black neighborhoods that make up the West Lakes community.
“We’re trying to show people that you don’t have to live in filth,” she said.
Sandy Hostetter, the vice president of asset development for Lift Orlando, says the redevelopment planning process will be resident-led.
“What you do for a community without the community, you do to a community,” Hostetter said. “That’s something from the very beginning we said we would never do.”
News 6 spoke with Hostetter inside the new Heart of West Lakes Wellness Center along Tampa Avenue, one of the major investments the nonprofit has made in the area.
“When we first started our work, there was a lack of trust,” she said. “That was because they had been promised for decades, ‘Oh yeah, I’m going to buy this rundown community and I’m going to totally redo it,’ only to have someone come in and slap some paint on and not do anything they said they were going to do.”
Hostetter said the neighborhood, like much of Orange County, has seen continued demand for affordable housing units. When the Pendana at West Lakes community opened five years ago, there were more than 8,000 applications for roughly 200 units.
“And that was pre-pandemic,” she said. “I think all of us would say, with the rise in rental rates, that problem has only gotten so much worse.”
Providing enough housing is just part of Lift Orlando’s long-term plan for the 32805 zip code. Leaders want to make sure residents have parks, walkability and enough resources around them.
“We want beauty,” Bradley said. “We want nice-looking homes. We want nice-looking facilities like the Heart and what Lift has put up. I see this being a real hub of the city of Orlando.”
Once the planning phase is successfully completed, Lift Orlando and the Orlando Housing Authority will be eligible to apply for a HUD Choice Neighborhoods Implementation Grant, which can potentially provide upwards of $50 million to turn the revitalization plan into reality.
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