Let's also get rid of golf courses in arid deserts in the midst of droughts
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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You had me at "Let’s get rid of golf courses"
You're probably not going to save 95% of the trees given the major earthworks likely needed for managing sewage, stormwater, and other utilities. You'll probably save most of them, though.
40k looks pretty optimistic for the size and number of buildings, too.
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.
But that runs counter to my need as a developer to bulldoze the entire area, build mcmansions 6 inches apart from eachother and at the barest mimimum of code (and perhaps even lower with a $$friendly$$ inspector), and then plant like a grand total of 5 trees that wont survive the first year.
Oh, and also pave everything over. Gotta pave everything over. No one wants green space! /s
When I was first committing to my no automobile lifestyle, one of the first things that struck me was the pavement. Fucking everywhere.
Next time your about town , take a mental picture. Then subtract the parking lots. The huge road. Put the buildings closer together. Make a nice bikelane, something just wide enough to get a fire engine down. Plant some trees. Pretty nice right?
Instead we have salted earth. It really is just rude to the earth. Fuck your car!
Now add in mixed use zoning, and affordable housing units and this could be a winner
I work at a golf course and I'd rather be doing something meaningful like building homes so this post speaks to me directly.
Unfortunately the big thing lately is we've been dropping a bunch of trees.
Plus you can live in a pentagon! Just not the Pentagon.
Golf courses aren't inherently bad, but I think just about every one out there is weirdly exclusive and definitely wastes water.
Disc golf is a good example of a sport that doesn't monopolize space. It's built into existing trails. Generally speaking the public can't walk on golf cart trails (I'm sure there are exceptions)
There are city-owned golf course around me that I presume aren't that exclusive (I dunno, I don't play). That said, they're also implicated in draining all sorts of toxins into the local waterways.
I think they are inherently bad. They waste water, their turf needs constant care that puts nasty stuff into the rest of the water supply, and the space can't be used for anything else. It's not merely a game, either; it's the defacto way for rich people to network and talk about how they're fucking the rest of us.
Disc golf is just sticking a few goals into otherwise typical park. You are gently tossing a soft disc over maybe 60-90 meters so you don't need to be extra careful to make the way clear.
Golf by its nature demands huge amounts of space for few people to enjoy. Further the landscaping and irrigation demands on a golf course are immense. You can't have too many things on a course or people walking around, because a pretty hard ball comes flying from 200 meters away.
Correction: The discs are not soft. They are hard and can be sharp-edged as well. Keeping throws away from walking and bike paths is super critical.
There isn’t any context on where this is, but:
- there aren’t enough golf courses to really impact housing supply
- parks and recreational facilities also serve a societal good assuming they’re accessible and serve the community as a whole
- golf courses aren’t usually located along transit
1 and 3 are not good reasons not to try something like this. 2 feels like bad faith because this isn't either of those things, it's a golf course. Less than a quarter of golf courses in the US are freely open to the public, and a quarter of them are members only. That's thousands of golf courses that are taking up space/land and water and returning next to nothing of value to the community or the environment, or worse than nothing in many cases.
Source for numbers: https://mygolfspy.com/news-opinion/study-percentage-of-public-vs-private-courses-in-the-us/
BuT wHeRe WouLd i PaRk mY cAr?!?!!?
That's the neat part, you don't.
car
car go
car go bye
cargo bike
Why building something on it instead of converting it into a park? People love green stuff, you know.
Why does it need to be a dedicated park? They're not proposing getting rid of all the green stuff. Even better than having green stuff some distance away is living in the middle of the green stuff.
This is literally how ussr built things
Micro-Districts are a solid idea. While the USSR had many problems, this was not one of them.
The best part about this is that this will give blackrock more homes to purchase with cash to the rent out to people at ridiculous prices. /s
Sorry, I've become way to cynical these days about virtually everything, I need to go touch grass.
We need to go touch pitchforks.
Keeping all of the trees while also building a 40,000 unit apartment building on the same lot is gonna be a bit of a trick. Unless the building is 30 stories high. That might be normal in New York, but that’s not something you’re gonna see very much outside of the city.
I’m all for vertical city building, but keep in mind what is likely to happen in your local community.
I'm pretty sure you've misunderstood the idea here in a couple of ways
No, I get it. I was just trying to make a joke.
Apparently, it wasn’t very funny.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯