[Normy]

Hi-

Well, I lived in Orlando from 1997 until 2005, and I have to say that the place went down hill while I was there.

When I was in college in Daytona Beach, we used to drive over to Orlando to party downtown and at UCF parties. It was a great place, pretty quiet, and I noted the fact that it was a "bedroom" community. That simply means that it was a place where people lived, not a place where there was a lot of industrial activity. In 1996 I finally landed a job that paid enough for me to buy a house, and since my brother was living in ORL at the time, I started looking for a place there. I found a house in Gulfstream Shores, a subdivision near the airport off of Hoffner, and moved in.

The downtown of Orlando is a great undiscovered secret!! Orange avenue is the place to hang out nearly every night of the week. There is always something going on, and you can find almost any sort of music you want. When friends came to visit, I took them down there and we always had a great time. I'm serious- in the eight years I was in Orlando, I don't think I went out to International drive/ Disney more than twice. That whole southwest side of town is for British tourists [I'm not kidding; the local grocery stores have a "British foods" section] or employees of the various parks and attractions.

The local car culture is GREAT too! Not so much from a Porsche standpoint, but again, take your car downtown on a Friday or Saturday night and look for a crowd of people standing around various parked cars. They literally have a dozen of these impromptu car shows on weekend evenings at various places down there. It doesn't matter if most of the cars are Honda's...bring your Porsche and you'll wind up with a crowd of people checking it out.

NOW. Why did I move?

1. Orange county, Florida's planning board is basically "owned" by land developers. They buy a cheap piece of land in the country, put in cheap roads, and then build about 400 cheap carboard-box homes on it. Then they sell them cheap, and go on to the next parcel of land. And the schools consist of a 1960's building with about 300 tornado-attractors [mobile classrooms] around them to ease the overcrowding, and the water system is overwhelmed...and the roads are a disaster. The sprawl in Orlando is ridiculous! When I moved there in 1997, I could drive the 6 miles to downtown in rush hour typically in about 15-20 minutes. These days it is likely to take closer to an hour! And the whole town is like that. I don't know for sure, but it seems like the population has increased about 50% in the past 10 years, but the roads are about the same.

2. The quality of the people that live in Orlando has gone down hill drastically. Recent survey, though somewhat suspect, called Orlando the 11th most dangerous place in the country. When I moved there in 1997, I always felt safe nearly anywhere downtown at night. I never worried about my car at all. These days? Well, I still think the downtown area is pretty safe

[Realtors aren't allowed to tell you this, but I can: there is an area called "Paramour" that is just west of downtown, just south of Colonial drive/HWY 50, and just east of the Orange Blossom trail that is so bad that I wouldn't drive through it at night. And generally didn't drive through it during the day! It is filled with trashy, drugged out black people, and crime is rampant.]

But I sometimes wonder about the car now. In the past 10 years, a lot of people from New York and the caribbean have moved to Orlando- in particular, people from Puerto Rico. While these folks are generally very nice and make good neighbors, at the same time most of them work in the service industry in jobs that are paid in $ per hour, and of course when you have many of them around, you naturally wind up with a few who would rather steal your car than wash it. More than a few in fact. I never had a problem, but my brother had his '92 GTI 16 valve stolen from the parking lot in front of the apartment we were living in just before I bought my house. It just seems like there are a WHOLE LOT MORE gang-bang wanna-be hip-hop types in Orlando now. In the end, I watched the conditions in Orlando slowly go down hill while I lived there. I can't recommend the place any more.

3. Orlando is A LOT hotter than the coastal areas in the summer, and you get some hellacious, Texas-style air mass thunderstorms in the summer. Tornados are fairly common, along with damaging hail.

In the end, I moved to Wilton Manors, a suburb of Fort Lauderdale, where nearly everything has been renovated in the past 10 years, and the crime is pretty much under control. The prices of housing down here approach TWICE what they are asking for similar homes in Orlando, but that has a good side: it keeps the number of people who might cause trouble down to a minimum.

Best of luck, and you'll enjoy washing your Porsche in shorts....in January. And telling your friends back home about it!

N!