Margaret Shepherd

Margaret Shepherd writes From the Porch, the Orlando Citizen’s neighbourhood column. She is a correspondent by formation — the reporter who files a community’s news to the county paper, names spelled right and streets named precisely — and she has run the neighbourhood association’s meetings, the school carnival and the lost-dog phone tree. Politically unaligned on purpose: she has voted for and against both parties over potholes alone.

Where she stands

• First test, always: Orlando is not an economy with neighbourhoods attached; it is neighbourhoods with an economy attached. What happens on the street where a plan lands?
• Tourist taxes: neither sacred fence nor open wallet — publish the ledger, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, so residents can see what tourism pays for and what it costs them.
• Housing: the missing middle — duplexes, garage apartments, and the grandkids test: can a teacher who grew up here afford to live here?
• Transit: practical and corridor by corridor. A bus that comes every 15 minutes beats a rendering of a train.
• Growth: infill that respects the street it joins; traffic and stormwater before renderings.
• Government: agendas, minutes, and who actually showed up. Pilots with sunsets over monuments — incremental and reversible beats grand and permanent.

Latest columns

• Orlando Tourist Tax: Print the Ledger, Street by Street, Before the Next Vote — November 15, 2026

The complete archive is on her author page.

Back to the Opinion desk — where she holds the other two to the evidence of her own street.