Why I Am Still Concerned About Municipal Courses During this Golf Boom
The thesis that worries me and that I hope I’m wrong about.
The current golf renaissance is obvious. The post-covid world has seen a huge return to golf with many examples of investment in public and municipal golf courses. The National Links Trust was recently created, in part, to lead on changes like these. This is why I feel quite strange putting forward this thesis at this time.
I recently attended the Alister MacKenzie Tournament To Preserve Sharp Park, a fundraiser put on by the SF Public Golf Alliance. The event was well attended, and there were some surprisingly notable figures there. Everyone seemed pleased to be there to support a good cause. Similar events happened this year in Austin to help preserve Lions Municipal Golf Course. It’s not just Sharp Park and Lions that need to be saved, though: the National Links Trust has an entire “endangered munis” section of their website.
The long-term issue I continue to worry about has nothing to do with growing the game or communicating the game better. The issue I’m most concerned with is boring old American infrastructure. It’s a topic that would never be talked about at fundraisers or on the websites relating to these threatened munis. Still, I think it’s driving the potential demise of more municipal courses and I honestly hope we start talking about it more. The way our cities have grown in the past affects our land use in the future, and a simple change in local land use could wipe away an urban course forever.
The Limits of Easy Growth: Cities Will Want to Convert Their Municipal Courses Into Housing.
Exurbs, commute times, and housing shortages.
Some background: While the Federal Highway Act was passed in 1956, most of its major projects were only completed between the late 1970s and early 1990s. The system is surprisingly young. The original interstate system was built through cities and towns with pre-existing transportation systems. Highway capacity was overbuilt, with room for growth in suburbia. Suburban living is based on comparatively cheap land and housing. However, as suburban development grows, that capacity slowly dries up. Once capacity is reached, there is nowhere else for excess vehicles to go and traffic slowdowns will increase dramatically.
Once a city hits its highway capacity, commute times start running up against Marchetti’s Constant, which is a practical limit on commute times that people are willing to endure. That time is generally set at about a half-hour each way, after which most people will start looking for tradeoffs in living arrangements to reduce their commute. Suddenly, as people see their commute times increase to an hour-and-a-half, land closer to the urban core starts to become much more valuable, and demand for density increases. It’s important to note that as new urban density gets created, the new residents who occupy that housing will still affect commute times in the periphery. Because new residents will likely still drive in the urban core, if the road system is already at capacity, the suburban commute times will keep growing, the areas with reasonable commute times shrink, and the cycle continues.
Street parking, noise, and traffic quickly become urban quality-of-life concerns, and low-density urban land owners see rapidly increasing property values as a huge benefit. Thus, the politics of redevelopment becomes controversial, if not impossible, in many areas. And this, this is the point where we stop talking about automobile infrastructure and start talking about municipal golf.
Public open space is a finite, consumable resource.
Golf courses are large open spaces. They often date to the early days of a city and exist on surprisingly urban plots of land. Without fail, folks will point to these large, mostly empty pieces of land as the place for urban development, instead of their neighborhoods. We have already seen this happen in California, where Assembly Bill 1910 and 627 were both put forward as a bill that literally incentivizes towns and cities to convert municipal golf courses into housing developments, instead of dealing with the density issues sustainably.
It’s the same reason why Austinites might lose access to Lions Muny, because the University of Texas owns the land and needs to build more student housing, but has nowhere to build it. This isn’t to say that housing isn’t needed; it is desperately needed. The issue here is that instead of towns and cities growing slowly and incrementally, where increased residential property values incentivize incremental residential density, the neighborhoods are trying to build all the needed housing, in one spot, at one time.
The only way that is politically feasible is to consume finite public open space. Public open space is a finite, consumable resource, and unless it is actively preserved, it will slowly disappear. This is visible in places like suburban Los Angeles where only 6 in 10 people live a short walk from a park, and huge areas, like the cities between Manhattan Beach and Compton, have effectively no open space left that isn’t a golf course, cemetery, or school. These land-use issues do not bode well for the general golfing public.
In the Bay Area, San Geronimo, Sharp Park, Bennett Valley, Mariners Point, San Jose Muni, Los Lagos, Rancho del Pueblo, and Gleneagles SF have all have faced some form of redevelopment attempt, land-use change, or other threat of closing in the last decade (most in the last few years). Only one of these courses has shuttered, yes, but this housing crisis we live with is not stable, it is accelerating. We should expect these issues to get more difficult until the fundamental problem is addressed, and incremental development is allowed. This isn’t just happening in California and Texas. It is a systemic crisis, rooted in our transportation infrastructure, and it’s not only not going away any time soon, it will probably get worse for the foreseeable future.
What to do?
I’ve laid out a thesis. What can be done about it?
First and foremost, I believe we need to completely rethink how we look at the municipal golf course, and who it serves. I’ve already been writing a series on golf for non-golfers, and I plan on continuing it. Creating value for the general public is key. I’ve written about things as simple as the clubhouse restaurant being visible from the road and staying open for dinner, using the municipal golf course as a refuge for migratory wildlife, and focusing on creating new golfers at munis, rather than expanding services to existing golfers. Because such a relatively small segment of the public plays golf regularly, unless the general public has something to lose, there is little political leverage to preserve these existing municipal courses.
A municipal course that I frequent is at risk of losing its lease. Some of the members there have chosen various political bogeymen as the source of the trouble and target of their anger. I have pushed these members to take a broader view of the situation, to focus on the non-golfer needs and potentially change the course to meet them halfway. For these long-time members (typically homeowners benefiting financially from the housing crisis), the muni is more of a fiefdom than a public good. As they say, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary property value depends upon his not understanding it. Recalcitrance has been effective in some cases here, but has failed in others. At best, it kicks the can another five years down the road, but the next time the course needs funding it will, again, be an existential issue.
Some folks I know have suggested that private clubs are the only model going forward. That I should just throw in the towel, try to find a club that will have me and call it a day. In fact, many of those in the established private system are exactly the same folks fighting incremental development in existing residential neighborhoods. As a staunch public golf advocate, this is deeply depressing for me, but it’s honestly hard to argue against.
No Easy Answers
But there are conversations happening about long-term solutions
If the solution were obvious, I wouldn’t be writing about it in this way. Voicing concerns about a municipal golf crisis that parallels a golf renaissance seems a bit foolish. Still, I follow local and state politics in different regions and I keep seeing it happen. The housing crisis is ever present and spreading across the country, and redevelopment of golf courses keeps being proffered as a politically expedient way to kick the can another half-decade. There are real solutions to the housing crisis, they just take time and aren’t exactly all puppy dogs and ice cream. For those on the political left, I would recommend looking at Ezra Klein’s discussions with CA State Senator Scott Wiener. For those on the political right, Strong Towns is an organization that explains the crisis in terms of long-term fiscal responsibility.
While I hope my concerns are overblown and that I look back on this doomerism during a golf boom as silly, I have watched the housing crisis in California become a nationwide issue and I don’t see us doing much to solve the problem at all. I hope we can preserve the accessible, inexpensive municipal courses that we have, and keep them cheap and accessible for generations to come.