Deltona Lakes

Deltona Lakes was launched on November 18, 1962, the creation of the Mackle Brothers — Frank, Elliott, and Robert Mackle — working through their development arm, the Deltona Corporation. The Mackle family had already built Port St. Lucie and Cape Coral by mail-order land sales, and with Deltona they assembled approximately 15,000 acres of Volusia County scrub and lakeland between the cities of DeLand and Daytona Beach. The name Deltona itself was coined by combining 'DeLand' and 'Daytona,' reflecting the community's geographic pivot point between both cities. Within the first decade, tens of thousands of lots were sold, many to northern buyers who had never visited Florida, drawn by direct-mail advertising campaigns promising affordable lakeside living just off a new interstate highway.

The Deltona Corporation platted the community into dozens of numbered units and sections, each with its own recorded plat, and built out the basic infrastructure of streets, utilities, and lakeside parks before home construction began in earnest. By the 1970s and 1980s, Deltona Lakes had grown into one of the largest residential communities in Florida, with ranch-style concrete block homes filling its winding streets. The community's development continued through the 1990s and early 2000s as later-developing sections and infill lots were built out by a range of local and regional builders. In 1995, Deltona was incorporated as a city — making it Florida's newest city at the time and, with a population now exceeding 90,000, one of the largest cities in Volusia County.

The community's lakeside character has endured through six decades of growth. The system of interconnected lakes — including Lake Angela, Lake Theresa, Lake McGarity, Clear Lake, and dozens of smaller bodies — that the Mackle Brothers originally marketed as Deltona's defining amenity remains the community's most distinctive physical feature. City parks were built at the water's edge, and the mature tree canopy that has grown up along the original street grid gives Deltona Lakes a settled, established quality unusual for Florida communities of comparable affordability.