this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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Not sure how it works in the US but here in Oz (where water scarcity is always present in our collective psyche) golf courses are usually placed on flood plains where it would be dangerous/too expensive to build housing. In addition most allow people to walk through them and many even allow dog walkers so they have quite a lot of public amenity.
I would still prefer if they were just designated as public parks rather than having huge swathes of grass that needed frequent watering, but they're not nearly as bad as most make them out to be.
Public golf courses are one of the best things about Oz. They provide a forest island for birds and mammals among the suburbs. Many golf courses have large swathes of natural bushland around them. They are often run by the local council, and are hence not for profit, and generally they are very cheap to play.
They make most of their money via selling beer and expensive golf clubs.
Turn them over to property developers, and they'll pave it with cheaply built single dwelling houses and flog them for way too much money resulting in just more urban desert and padded the obese wallets of billionaires.
That's if they are even build able. Some areas on floodplains and marshes that serve as a local soak for stormwater, hence the water hazards. Some are built on landfills that contain mu icipal waste or even asbestos, hence you can't risk putting houses on them where someone might dig up the asbestos or waste. Turning them into a revenue-generating forest parkland is one of the few good things you can do with that land.
The revenue earned by the golf course that is used to offset local parks and recs costs would otherwise be gained by taxing the local residents through land rates.
I used to hate on them a lot before I learned that the economics of public courses is way different to that of private ones. There are still some private courses, and I wouldn't be opposed to these being taken back into public hands and/or converted into affordable housing. To the gallows with the greedy exclusive fucktillionaires.
Yeah, here in the US, golf courses can be extremely wasteful. There's two golf courses on my drive into the city, one is on a river floodplain, the other is a HOA golf course full of sprinklers that could absolutely be more housing. If I go the other way, there's another HOA golf course that could be housing too. So, to start with, there's three golf courses in a 15km radius.
One of the HOA ones is exclusive access to the surrounding retirement community, the other HOA one doesn't have a fence or anything, but idk if they chase people off. The one on the floodplain you have to pay to access the grounds.
In Germany most courses only have a few public walkways and if you leave them security will escort you right out