a huge swath of the bay area is also golf courses, right where the beach and erosions are too.
this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2025
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This topic is one of the things that brings up how people are emotional first, and sometimes only.
Like, I'll point out all the problems with golf, and all the better things we could use the space and resources for, and the pro-golf person will respond with "but i like it" as if that means a fucking damn thing.
The fact that some people "like" golf is not enough to justify the poor use and allocation of resources.
(Yes, I realize I'm holding onto a years old argument I had with a peer and that's not especially healthy. But I feel like this argument comes up all the time. I'll be like "We can't keep building for cars-first. It's bad for the environment, bad for the neighborhoods, bad for the economy, bad for the people in the cars" and they'll just go "But I like my car" as if that refutes anything at all)
Golf sucks, we should eliminate it. Recycle the land into multiple uses, e.g. housing, green/park space (which it currently isn't), commercial space, and if the course is located in such a place where it makes sense to put a solar farm (not too close to dense housing), solar. It need not all be one thing. Realistically, this won't happen in most places without a lot of other stuff happening first. But if we see it, that would be frickin' awesome. For normal people, just start to de-normalize it as a pass time, disk golf is a good alternative that requires less space and usually coexists with nature.
I'd suggest returning some of that space back to nature if possible and designating it as a protected zone.
In places where the golf is on the edges of cities, absolutely. It just depends on where the course is and what's surrounding it. Obviously not all courses are in places where all (or even most) uses make sense. I feel there's a lot of debate here on what exactly the best use to replace golf with would be, and the answer is always that it depends on location and surrounding context. I think the vast majority of us agree that golf is a waste of space, energy, and water, which serves an almost entirely exclusionary function, and all most of us disagree on is what the best use is to replace it.
Since before we use it for other purposes we need to reclaim it from golf, I think almost everyone in this thread agrees on all policies (about this matter) relevant for essentially the entirety of the foreseeable future, which I think sometimes gets lost in this conversation (and others.)
I've been saying this for ages. Golf courses need to go the way of the dodo.
I get the "sport" but if you ever go over some places on google earth, they stand out like a sore thumb.
There is barely any affordable housing, but sure, lets keep our neighborhood-sized opulence "parks", that a few rich people can take advantage of sometimes.
Get fucked by a cactus.
The detestable decadence that is golf just needs to fucking die already
I like golf, get outside spend time in nature. Basically a big park with trees and water.
Let's compare land use of car parks to solar or wind.
The elitist community of golf can fuck off though.
Let me have my beers and my hitting sticks
Nothing about golf can be called nature.
Maybe where you are and how you play.
Where i am I'm amongst trees in lakes and water fighting tree roots etc
Not all of us can keep it on the fairway
Same man, same.
I was once playing a scramble with a low handicap golfer and he said: "Wow, you got really well out of the woods" ...yeah dude, I spend most of my time there
The town i used to live in, population 180,000, has a big park right outside the centre. It's got a lake, open grass, a small wood. It's a very nice park. Always busy.
The west edge is bordered by a 7ft wire fence and beyond it is a golf course 2.5x larger than the park. At a glance it looks very similar except this land is reserved for the exclusive use of ~500 members.
A park with very limited capacity and that almost always requires the destruction of the natural landscape.
Golf is elitist by nature as the courses require a ton of maintenance to keep them from going to there natural state, which costs money, and that cost is split among a small amount of people that can occupy the course at any given time without causing traffic. Combine that with the equipment costs and that filters out most lower income people.
If courses were turned into parks and left to nature far more people could enjoy them as they wouldn't have to pay or worry about getting hit with a ball because they set there picnic up in the wrong meadow.
Sure but that’s a local issue, many communities have parks and golf courses… This article is arguing to remove golf courses in favor of solar or wind farms because they use a lot of space. It doesn’t even examine the impacts of putting a utility grade power farm in the middle of a community because the argument would breakdown immediately.
Parks and golf courses are all world of difference lol.
Parka have tons of trees, different species of geasses big and small, some open areas, playground for kids, small fields for football or something. Open to the public, 3rd spaces for kids and teens, people exercising and running and walking through it.
Golf courses you have to pay to get in, not open to the public, a monoculture of imported grass, maybe some trees on the edges or between holes, kids and teens are not allowed, uses more space that the community isn't allowed in, etc..
We come put windfarms on golf courses
not the same thing but similar: Bromma airport in Stockholm is basically completely dead at this point, no one except the right wing parties want to keep it, so while they cope and seethe the rest of the government is talking about turning the airport into a new district much like what is shown here!
It really should be the obvious choice because it's a super central area and there's already a tramway going through it!
https://www.mp.se/sites/default/files/bromma_parkstad_-_rapport.pdf
Or just make it into a park. We're not so desperate for space we need to build on what little urban greenery we have left...
Seattle is pretty desperate for housing. 40k new units, especially municipal owned one since this is a city golf course, would be a huge stride forward. Seattle also just passed a ballot measure for city to build low income/mixed income housing directly, so this would line up incredibly well for that.
There are talks to convert this into a beautiful park too, but the city government is not interested.
I'm pretty sure Seattle has an ordinance making changing a park to something else very challenging to impossible. Technically golf courses are parks, though I'd argue terrible ones, making it a much smaller lift to turn them into better (actual) parks and let the golfers go out of town.
40k on 160 acres is more density than any city that currently exists...
True because cities have parks, roads, rivers, business, industrial or municipal areas that can't or shouldn't be used for housing. But there are neighborhoods almost as dense. Yorkville in NYC has more than 60.000 inhabitants per square kilometer. 160 acres is about 0.65 square kilometers.
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I stole the image from fuckcars so yeah. Its a no roads kinda deal.
It is even substantially higher than Manhattan (~27000 people/km²)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Manhattan
Manhattan has a lot of Office Buildings which brings down the average, people commute in their from over 100 miles away so you can have a lot of office workers in a space with a permanent population that's much lower
Abolish golf. ⛳️
Close them down and solarise them.
Because unlike solar, the math for golf actually checks out
edit: Nvm did the math, solar produces more energy than I thought
Certainly more than golf.
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