Parks need to be landscape maintained, so does new development—-often in very similar ways that a golf course is (water, chemical, maintenance). Unless around you simply doesn’t have the open land space to support the area’s park and development needs, what is actually wasted?
I think folks get caught up on golf course water usage, but every course around me uses reclaimed water. If houses were built there, that would no longer be reclaimed water, but potable water. Also I am convinced that landscape chemical usage would go up as well.
I have close family and friends in the business, I guarantee that huge efforts go into making sure not a single drop of irrigation isn’t used unless it’s needed. I can tell you that my neighbors don’t pay that much attention to their exact irrigation needs—simply watering for as long as they can, when they can. I doubt seriously that replacing a golf course with more homes would net much water savings…at least around me.
I think the point is that you can't ban houses through policy but you can ban golf courses. So like it or not (and I sympathize with your point), the policy knobs that can be used to curb water can only directly influence things like golf courses, but they can indirectly affect home water usage through utility pricing.
Reality is that if you are going to convert 150-200 acres of course space to residential, it’s not going to happen organically. A developer will come in and drop infrastructure and a couple of hundred homes, and then add an active HOA so folks feel good about that nice neighborhood maintaining their property values. That is going to likely demand a level of property maintenance that will work to counter any utility pricing soft control you try to impose.
I think the folks who try this ecological impact argument and want to push homes into that space just don’t think through all the consequences or assume there is a greater landscape effort than it actually takes. It’s a lot of work, but is it less that the combined work of 200 homes? Probably not. A couple of tractors vs 200 mowers? Landscape chemicals on perhaps 20 acres of the 150-200 (tees and greens, spot treat everywhere else) vs 3 homes per acre treating their whole lawn? 300-400 more vehicles driving in and out of the area everyday?
You want to outlaw them and let them go wild, I can accept that argument and can’t counter it but for “golf is fun and people enjoy it.” However if the concept that houses are better ecologically…I think that is a huge stretch.
Public parks directly serve way more people than golf courses and don’t discriminate based on income (or class, ethnicity, etc) to the same degree, if at all.
On any given Saturday the public parks around me (that are free to enter) have far less people than the golf courses around me. So just because it can serve more people, doesn’t mean that it does.
Also, pretty sure you will be hard pressed in 2025 to find courses actively discriminating anyone who has the $$ to spend to play a round. Every course I have played in the last 40 years seems to have all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds, ethnicities, and income.
I think folks get caught up on golf course water usage, but every course around me uses reclaimed water. If houses were built there, that would no longer be reclaimed water, but potable water. Also I am convinced that landscape chemical usage would go up as well.
I have close family and friends in the business, I guarantee that huge efforts go into making sure not a single drop of irrigation isn’t used unless it’s needed. I can tell you that my neighbors don’t pay that much attention to their exact irrigation needs—simply watering for as long as they can, when they can. I doubt seriously that replacing a golf course with more homes would net much water savings…at least around me.