I'm not a big fan of living in Daytona, even though my parents love the place and would probably try to move there if they didn't have decent jobs in
South Florida. It's a part of
North Florida that's firmly locked in the deathgrip of
The South. If you like
down home kinds of people, then Daytona might be your paradise. Otherwise, it'll get on your nerves pretty quickly.
That said, one thing I do like about Daytona is the beach itself. Daytona Beach's sandbars are ridiculously wide, and so firmly packed that you can actually drive on them as if they were pavement. In Hallandale Beach, my sort-of hometown, all the high-rise developments on the coast have basically eaten away the shoreline, to the point where the beach itself is only a few yards wide in some places... and that sort of thing happens all over South Florida. Daytona actually had foresight, and enacted zoning codes to cut off high-rise development within a certain distance of the water (a mile, iirc), so that the hotels and condos you see on the shore there are only a few stories high: hardly enough to lead to large-scale erosion.
The water's warm, and the sand's wide. Now that's what Florida's all about.