It was 1978, and Tipton had seen enough of the city to wonder where the officers might take him. Wou

About this series For more than a year, projects editor Derek Catron tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision led a team seeking answers to the question that s plagued Daytona Beach for 30 years: How do you fix beachside blight? The information in this series was gleaned from interviews with nearly 100 people and a review of hundreds of pages of government reports and newspaper archives.
Team members included designer Keith Saunders; photographers Jim Tiller, Nigel Cook, David Tucker and David Massey; reporters Andrew Gant, Dinah Voyles Pulver and Eileen Zaffiro-Kean; and editors Pat Rice and Cal Massey.
There was no way, though, the former Hilton manager could avoid the blocks that immediately surround the hotel and the region s tourism hub. As he drove along East International Speedway Boulevard, passing empty shops, an abandoned gas station and a strip club that was the site of a recent prostitution bust, Larkin turned and spoke, his voice so soft his passenger had to lean close to hear him.
Millions of visitors come to the area every year for its beaches or events like the Daytona 500 and Bike Week. Many of the more than 600,000 who call the Volusia-Flagler County area home are quick to praise its natural charms and quality of life.
Yet 30 years after Daytona Beach sought more funding options by declaring its core tourism area blighted, early triumphs like the Ocean Center and the Hilton have failed to rejuvenate the area in the ways community and business leaders envisioned.
The downtrodden beachside that some leaders compare to a third world country is more than just a collection of eyesores or a blight on the postcard images tourists take home. Your taxes are higher because of it. The community has fewer jobs because of it. There s less to do and fewer places to go in your free time because of it.
The spread of economic rot has shuttered storefronts and left hotel lots empty, even in the wake of the biggest building boom in more than a generation. It has created an atmosphere in which some of Volusia County s cheapest rents and house prices can be found within tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision a short walk of the World s Most Famous Beach.
Now Daytona Beach stands at a crossroads, with more at risk than ever because tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision of the major investments that have been made and are struggling today. Divisions in the community among political factions, business and residential interests alike complicate any effort to address problems.
Some leaders point to a convention hotel as the key to revitalizing what they call the entertainment zone. As they push a plan that would risk more tax dollars to support a new hotel, The News-Journal took an in-depth look at the beachside s persistent problems, in particular the areas in the e-zone that suffer the most blight.
We talked with dozens of local leaders, national experts and the people who live and work in the affected area in pursuit of answers: Why are there so many vacant and decrepit properties on what should be some of Volusia County tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision s most valuable tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision real estate? How did it get this way? And what will it take to foster lasting change?
It was 1978, and Tipton had seen enough of the city to wonder where the officers might take him. Would it be the U.S. 1 corridor where he d seen strip clubs? Would it be the historically black neighborhoods that had seen better days?
Two officers escorted Tipton down Main Street to the Boardwalk, past cheap bars and arcades and along a row of coquina booths set up under a walkway for concessions. The booths, the officers explained, were fronts for illegal activity. One was for prostitution. Another tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision had drugs. One was used for money laundering.
The area around tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision the Boardwalk is no longer the worst part of town, as Tipton described it. But the community failed to sustain tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision the progress city leaders envisioned when, less than a decade after Tipton s arrival, they not only had a convention center but a deal in place for an oceanfront resort hotel where the old coquina booths had been.
A new generation of leaders seeks to recapture it. Projects are in the works for a new marina on the north side of East International Speedway Boulevard. The city hopes to attract tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision a grocery store to the south side of the street. Proposals for building a parking garage to serve Main Street businesses are being discussed, and the city s in negotiations with a developer who wants to construct condo-hotels on the oceanfront in the South Atlantic district.
But more projects have been planned and discussed than built over the last three decades, and leaders hopes are pinned on attracting a developer to build a convention hotel that could connect to the Ocean Center.
You don t need rose-colored glasses to share the vision: Area hotels struggle with about 55 percent occupancy from leisure travelers, and that s too low, Larkin said. How do you get to a 65 to 70 percent occupancy rate at a price that will keep all the hotels in business?
The Hilton understands if it is going to do well there has to be other hotels that come in and create that sense of place for them to get things tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision moving. Daytona has to become a destination, tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision said Daniels, who represents the Hilton but was not speaking tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision on the company s behalf. We can t rely on dividing tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision up the customer base that we already have. The customer base we have now is accustomed to paying low dollar to come here.
More convention business would help sustain the area s flagging tourism economy between the high points of NASCAR races and biker festivals. It would attract more shopping and dining options that would appeal to tourists and locals alike.
That s basically the Cliff s Notes version tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision of a 400-page consultant s study known as the E-Zone Master Plan received by the city last year. The first priority, the report concluded, is a convention hotel.
It was the same argument Tipton and others used three decades earlier when the city created a Community Redevelopment Area to spur a beachside make-over. When the Ocean Center opened Oct. 3, 1985 (for an Amy Grant concert), the chairman of the Main Street Area Redevelopment tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision Committee crowed tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision that it was the hoped-for catalyst for downtown redevelopment.
In December 1996 when the Volusia County Council voted to remove cars from a mile-long stretch of beach as part of a deal to attract the Ocean Walk development, including a new parking garage and water park, then-Mayor Bud Asher described it as a catalyst to excite people about what can happen south of Main Street.
All of this, how old and blighted and neglected this is, this is going to change, Bruno said from a second-floor balcony, a sweep of his arm taking in a view of much of the redevelopment area. Main Street is totally going to change. You re not going to have vacant buildings.
While that vision remains unfulfilled, the catalysts have made an impact, replacing some of the city s worst housing, its biggest crime hot spot and a public park that was a notorious haunt for runaways and pedophiles who preyed on them.
If those different ingredients didn t come at the times they came, we d be looking at a worse situation than we are today, Larry McKinney, the president of the Daytona Regional Chamber of Commerce, said in a joint interview with attorney Tom Leek, the chamber chairman in 2011.
I think the Ocean Center was a catalyst, Leek added. Without the Ocean Center, you probably don t end up with a (Hilton). Without the (Hilton), you don t end up with an Ocean Walk or an expanded Ocean Center. They probably were the catalysts that people said they were. But did they generate the self-sustaining progress everyone hoped they would? I think they did, but you ve got to look at it as a 50-year history, not a five-year history.
tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision Even before the reopening, Dino Paspalakis, whose family tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision has owned businesses along the Boardwalk since 1960, said he s seen evidence of rejuvenation in the families and couples that he sees most weekends tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision strolling tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision between Main Street and the Ocean Walk Shoppes.
The preponderance of evidence, though, suggests Daytona Beach needs more than a few busy weekend nights. Nearly all of the projects once viewed as saviors of the beachside have instead been pulled down by their surroundings, so that they risk becoming part of the blight.
The Ocean Center doesn t make enough to pay its costs and for years has been receiving about $1.3 million that could go to other county services; the Hilton was described last year as in imminent default by Fitch Ratings, which said the hotel was working on its loan to avoid foreclosure; the Ocean Walk shopping and dining complex has been in foreclosure for nearly two years.
The recession, of course, hasn t helped these ventures. The 2008 bankruptcy of Bray Gillespie, tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision which owned 24 hotels at the time, was another major setback for area tourism. And there are signs that things are picking up, including convention bookings for the Shriners in 2017; recent sales and renovations of many old Bray Gillespie properties; recently rising bed tax collections; a lease deal for a new management company at the Ocean Walk movie theater.
Consider: The Halifax Area Advertising Authority collected more than $5.2 million in bed taxes over the last fiscal year. The figure was 20 percent higher than the $4.3 million the agency collected 15 years earlier, tiger woods pga tour unlimited tiger vision which might sound like a good number except when you adjust for inflation the 2011 total is worth 16 percent less than what area hoteliers totaled in 1996.
Doliner s idealized view of beachside dwelling dates to a time before the prevalence of air conditioning, she said. Since then, the quality of beachside housing, especially in the areas nearest the tourism areas, has declined along with the area s business prospects.
Some of the cheapest rents in the county can be found among the older homes that have been subdivided into multi-unit boarding houses. Even the houses that are well-maintained and there are many see their values held down by the flophouses nearby.
Even the voluminous e-zone report paid scant attention to the subject. A ment