Building a Future of Social Connection with Affordable Housing
This post was coauthored by Jonathan Wolf, founder of Wendover Housing Partners, and Neil P. Kittredge, AIA, AICP, and also posted on Medium.
The Surgeon General’s reports have long alerted Americans to unexpected hazards, from TV violence to smoking. Last year, Former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy highlighted a threat impacting one in two adults. Its effects include a higher risk of depression, dementia, heart disease, and stroke. That threat? The loneliness epidemic.
Americans’ loneliness is compounded by another challenge: the lack of affordable housing that fosters community and connection. When affordable housing is built, it is often distant from work and everyday needs, which does more than lengthen commutes: it isolates individuals and families, making daily life harder while stripping away free time.
We believe an important way to tackle these challenges is by building affordable housing communities that integrate services, from healthcare to education, with easy transportation access to employers. We also believe housing can be designed in a way that makes it easier for people to meet their own needs while creating spaces that foster community and social connections.
To bring this vision to life, Wendover engaged Beyer Blinder Belle, an acclaimed urban planning and architectural firm, to lead the design of an innovative affordable and workforce housing development. This project stems from a unique collaboration between Universal Destinations & Experiences, Orange County, and Wendover Housing Partners. When its 1,000 homes open in 2026 near the Orange County Convention Center in Central Florida, Catchlight Crossings will demonstrate how housing can address a rent-burdened region while enhancing lives and combating the loneliness epidemic.
From “Nowhere Place” to a Sense of Place
The need for more affordable housing is urgent. In metro Orlando, the National Low Income Housing Coalition counts 24 affordable, available rentals for every 100 households earning no more than 50% of the area median income (AMI): in other words, more than three-quarters of median-income households have no local affordable options. That was a factor in our reserving 60% of Catchlight’s homes for families with incomes at or below 60% AMI.
Twenty barren acres around the corner from a theme park and behind a convention center barely feels like a place, let alone a place for a new community. But more than 100,000 people work within seven miles of this location, many of whom — hotel and restaurant workers, ride attendants, nurses and healthcare staff, and many others — are the ones who provide the experiences and hospitality that drew over 74 million visitors to the Orlando area last year. Living in closer proximity to jobs, with multiple transportation choices, will have a powerful effect on their quality of life.
What’s more, the seemingly isolated site is adjacent to a potential intermodal transportation center that would connect this region to Brightline and SunRail services that link to Orlando’s airport and Florida’s major cities, along with regional bus service, bike rentals, employee shuttles, and other transportation options. As it turns out, it’s the perfect place for a community. Too often, affordable housing combines geographic isolation and long commutes with the social isolation of faceless apartments and acres of parking lots. Instead, Wendover and Beyer Blinder Belle worked in collaboration with our partners at Universal and Orange County to create a design that would help make for fulfilling and connected lives for the community’s future residents.
A new neighborhood built from scratch, Catchlight Crossings will benefit from its increasingly central location, with plentiful housing, convenient access to jobs, and built-in services families need to thrive.
Designing for Everyday Lives
Catchlight Crossings will be built around a pedestrian promenade that forms the spine of the new neighborhood, with intimate lanes connecting its many buildings to playgrounds, community gardens, and green spaces overlooking a nearby pond — spaces that will make the neighborhood vibrant and dynamic, and encourage the interactions that help cure social isolation. Catchlight’s parking will sit out of sight on its edges, leaving a car-free center for people of all ages to safely wander and play.
While connecting buildings with pedestrian streets and green spaces is novel in affordable housing, it’s hardly a new idea. If you’ve toured the narrow streets and bustling squares of a European city center and been captivated by the energy humming around you, you’ve experienced its distant ancestor. In these places, the right amount of population density is key — ensuring that streets and playgrounds are always bustling and that neighbors see each other and catch up while going about their daily routines. Here in the U.S., however, zoning laws, parking regulations, and other requirements often preclude this result, creating low-density, oversized, and empty spaces dominated by cars and more suited to exiting than experiencing. Luckily, we were able to collaborate with Orange County, which already had a more aspirational vision for this site than a standard suburban sprawl development, and working together, we were able to modify existing codes and create a model development for the region.
It isn’t just Catchlight’s design that will make a difference for residents: its on-site services will also help make it a true neighborhood and greatly reduce the need for frequent driving trips. A tuition-free preschool provided by the Bezos Academy and a community health clinic will turn hours-long trips into neighborhood strolls, while purpose-built features like workshops, craft rooms, computer labs, and classrooms operated by the University of Central Florida will allow residents to build new skills or complete a degree program.
In typical residential designs, amenities like gyms and activity rooms are squirreled away in basements and other undesirable spaces. At Catchlight, however, promenades will be dotted with community art installations and public amenities like these, as well as game rooms, lounges, pools, and barbeques. We located these amenities at ground level, opening directly onto plazas and covered walkways. This will allow the energy of these spaces to spill outward, spreading a social atmosphere that invites residents to see what’s happening, spend time with their neighbors, and join in activities.
Catchlight’s 1,000 apartments alone will not solve Central Florida’s pressing need for affordable and workforce housing, but it’s a bold step in the right direction. Imagine the benefits of going from spending more than half your income on housing hours away from work, to living in a welcoming neighborhood that is convenient to work — and being able to afford it.
As proud as we are of the ways Catchlight is redefining affordable and workforce developments, our hope, given the severity of our national housing crisis and loneliness epidemic, is that it won’t be alone for long. If developers and designers around the country view Catchlight as a model and collaborate with public- and private-sector partners to create similar communities, we can build not just much-needed housing, but also convenient, connected communities that support the fulfilling neighborhood life we so urgently need.
