Guide B
Areas and neighborhoods
One page per part of the county — commute times, what your money buys, HOA or no HOA, where the nearest groceries and hospital are, and how the place actually feels.
Marion County is roughly 1,600 square miles and the difference between two addresses twenty minutes apart is enormous — pavement or clay road, county water or a well, ten minutes to a hospital or forty, an HOA with rules about your roof or no HOA at all. A countywide average tells you almost nothing useful about any actual street in it.
These pages describe places: what the housing stock is, how long the drive is to the things you will drive to, whether you are on utilities or on your own, and what the trade-off is in each direction. They describe areas and not the people in them. Nothing here ranks one part of the county against another, and schools and crime are covered by linking to the offices that publish the figures rather than by summarising them into a verdict — the reasons are set out on the editorial policy page.
If you do not know the county at all, read southwest Ocala and downtown and the historic district first. They sit at opposite ends of almost every axis that matters here — age of housing, lot size, walkability, how far you are from a grocery store — so between them they give you the range the rest of the county falls inside.
- Living in Southwest Ocala
- Living in Downtown Ocala and the historic district
- Living in Silver Springs Shores
- Living in Marion Oaks
- Living in Dunnellon
New articles go up every month.