Daytona Beach, Fla., LPGA Development Gamble Falters.

Byline: Derek Catron

Sep. 28--DAYTONA BEACH, Fla.--Driving through the elegant LPGA development, prospective home buyers see oaks everywhere. The trees are barely tall enough to shade a golf cart, but would-be homeowners are asked to envision the canopy they will form one day.

Much the same can be said for the development.

Local leaders foresaw big things when they lured the Ladies Professional Golf Association to Daytona Beach in 1989. They saw the LPGA headquarters as the catalyst for a project that would carve a new town from the scrub and wetlands on Daytona Beach's western fringe, near the junction of interstates 95 and 4.

Volusia County's premier subdivision would be built around two golf courses and a resort hotel. An annual LPGA tournament would publicize the project, spurring more subdivisions and commercial development to serve these new residents.

It hasn't happened.

Those young trees can't conceal the fact that fewer than 70 houses have been built in the decade since the LPGA announced it would relocate. There's no hotel. The golf courses are open but the local LPGA tournament has struggled to find a sponsor. Even golfers like Karrie Webb, who won the Titleholders Championship at the LPGA International course in 1996, have not helped to attract enough home buyers. As for commercial development, there's now a 7-Eleven at the little-used, $10 million interchange that the state built for the LPGA. In the works is an auto mall -- a …