Florida People: Do you live in or near....

[Virgo10]

Ocoee or Winter Garden? To those who do, please tell me about the area. How's the traffic on a daily basis? These areas don't look like they'd be a magnet for tourists. Are there grocery stores in the towns, a mall nearby or do you have to make shopping an all day event? Are they mentioned as a crime area. My son who lived in Kissimmee for several years says that Pine Hills was also known as CRIME Hills .

A more specific question for those who may know, can you buy a home that's not part of an association. I really want to avoid that.

From Ocoee it looks like you can access WDW without ever getting on one of the BIG roads. 535 seems like the logical route. What's the drive time to Disney from this area?

Schools are not important to us but access to a good medical group is for my DH. Anything else you can think of would be most appreciated.

Roberta

 

[ducklite]

IMHO most of Winter Garden is nice to very nice, especially where it borders the Windemere area. Ocoee is generally speaking, a pit. In fact it's one of the nastier parts of the greater Orlando area with what I've seen.

I don't live there...yet. But my house is done and I'm looking for a job down there--no more cold winters for me.

Anne

 

[SyracuseWolvrine]

I don't know about the neighborhoods, or if it's possible to buy a house that's not governed by a HOA, but the drive time down 535 (Apopka-Vineland Rd, if I'm not mistaken) to Disney took me about 15-20 minutes, and I'm coming from a few miles west of Ocoee. I'd guess probably about 30-35 mins.

 

[Feralpeg]

I live in Windermere just off of CR535. DD's school is in Winter Garden. We have not ventured off into a lot of the residential area of Winter Garden or Ocoee. Highway 50 (W. Colonial) is a very busy 4 lane road. The West Oaks Mall is located on HWY50. Lowes, Super Target, Wal-Mart and many other businesses are also on HWY50. We've found that it takes about 15 minutes to get anywhere we need to go. If you live closer to HWY50, shopping wouldn't be that big a deal. There is a large hospital on HWY50.

I would look south of HWY50 for a home. From what I've noticed (remember I haven't been here very long), north of HWY50 appears to be old and rather run down.

CR535 is how we get to WDW. It takes about 10 minutes to get there and the traffic is not bad at all. They are still in the process of widening CR535 closer to WDW, so there is some construction. Once they are finished, it will be a beautiful 4 lane highway between here and the Crossroads area. At this point, there is still a lot of open country along CR535. They are busy clearing much of it for development, however they've run into an issue with the city of Windermere. The county says that they will need to widen the main street through Windermere if they continue to add more homes to the area. Windermere refuses to do so. I don't know how that will turn out, but our builder said that they have lost 100 future homesites because of this.

Hope this helps. Feel free to PM me if you have further questions. I'll try to answer what I know.

 

[Virgo10]

Bumping up for the night time folks!

Roberta