The Town of Winter Park 2025 Community Survey captured resident sentiment across a wide range of quality-of-life topics. When asked to describe the town’s personality, residents most strongly associated Winter Park with being expensive and adventurous, while also viewing it as welcoming and relaxed. Looking ahead, residents expressed a strong desire to preserve the town’s small-town, authentic character and avoid becoming another Vail or Aspen. Concerns about overdevelopment, the loss of community identity, and the displacement of locals were prominent themes throughout the open-ended responses.
Residents rated quality of life and their neighborhoods quite positively overall, though Winter Park scored lower as a place to work or raise children. Town government received moderately favorable marks for service quality and communication, and a majority felt the town was fiscally responsible, though a substantial portion disagreed. Most residents felt they received reasonable value for their taxes, though a significant minority did not.
Housing emerged as one of the most pressing concerns. Residents were largely unfamiliar with specific recent housing projects, and satisfaction with those developments was limited. Key themes included the need for truly affordable and attainable for-sale housing, better accountability for developers, limits on short-term rentals, and improved pathways to homeownership for local workers.
On transportation and parking, residents were broadly supportive of improving the public transit system, with near-unanimous support for The Lift bus service. However, paid parking was strongly opposed by the majority of respondents. Residents called for expanded and more reliable transit, better pedestrian infrastructure along Highway 40, and improved connectivity between the town and the resort.
Residents expressed strong support for Alterra’s planned gondola connecting the resort base to downtown, as well as on-mountain expansion. Support for new hotels and parking garages was also solid, though planned condominium development received more mixed reactions. Across all of Alterra’s plans, residents consistently emphasized the importance of managing crowding, protecting the environment, and ensuring that local workers and residents were not priced out.
The Urban Renewal Authority, established in 2024, was largely unfamiliar to residents, but once explained, most supported using its future revenues for trail connections, pedestrian improvements, and the gondola. Paid parking construction was the least supported use of those funds. Residents also called for URA investments in parks, transit, affordable housing, and childcare, while expressing skepticism about whether the funding would truly benefit residents over developers and tourists.
On two proposed ballot measures, residents leaned toward approving a cleanup of the town’s tax code to remove references to a non-existent use tax. The second measure, asking voters to reauthorize the town to retain and spend tax revenues without a cap, saw lower support and higher uncertainty, even after additional context was provided. Final open-ended responses reinforced the survey’s recurring themes: frustration with rapid growth, high costs, infrastructure strain, and a deep desire to keep Winter Park feeling like a genuine community rather than a resort destination.
