A Bill Misses the Mark.
The Reaction Misses the Opportunity.
There is an irony to the California bill proposing to help convert municipal golf courses into low-income housing.
In 2021, California state Assemblymember Cristina Garcia proposed Assembly Bill 672, which would create a program to support local governments converting publicly owned golf courses into low-income housing. The bill, which is scheduled for hearing on January 12 in the California Assembly’s Local Government Committee, is seen by local politicos as having no realistic chance of passage (“more likely than not that the bill will not gain traction,” the Southern California Golf Association’s director of governmental affairs told the Palm Springs Desert Sun in 2021). But that has not stopped many golf journalists from doing what they do best, which is providing unserious analysis and overreacting.
The bill would not require any local government to convert its municipal golf course to low-income housing; it would merely set aside grant money to support local governments that want to convert their municipal golf courses. Doubtlessly, if the bill were enacted, the program would get some takers: out of California’s 1,100 golf courses, some 250 are municipally owned; it seems unlikely that none of them would want out of the golf business, given the chance.
And yet, the reporting around the bill has been universally hysterical.
“Could all California municipal golf courses be converted to housing? A new bill proposes just that,” reads an ominous Golfweek headline (the bill does not, in fact, propose that). “California's Public Golf Courses to be Converted to Public Housing in Latest Progressive Initiative,” laments (incorrectly) a California newspaper headline. Just as monolithically, coverage of the bill has ignored the human cost underlying the bill’s proposal: California’s housing crisis has pushed the cost of living far out of reach for an untold number of families. Something must be done.
That’s not to say that this bill is the solution. But it should open the golf world’s eyes to the very real threats presented by its decades of apathy toward the game’s widespread public disapproval.
Therein lie two ironies.
First: though the bill doubtlessly targets golf courses (in part) because of the sport’s elitist and exclusionary reputation, that reputation is for the most part a product of private golf clubs. In contrast, municipal golf courses are America’s most democratic, accessible golf courses — the closest our nation has ever come to duplicating the community-based experience that pervades the country of golf’s birth. Yet if Assemblymember Garcia’s bill passes, the people who would pay most dearly are Californians who rely on municipal golf; those chiefly responsible for the game’s sad reputation would pay no cost at all. That is unfair.
Second: rather than acknowledging the sport’s public disapproval (well earned, for the most part), the golf world has reacted by fomenting unfounded panic. This episode should be a learning opportunity for golf — a chance to rededicate itself to changing its elitist practices (and, in turn, the reputation), if only out of the self-interest that the California bill exposes. More likely, though, the bill will fail, and the sport’s thinkers and doers will continue on as if none of this had ever happened. That would be foolish and short-sighted. But it wouldn’t be the first time golf has chosen such a path.
Thirty years ago, in Anatomy of a Golf Course, Tom Doak warned against this very thing. Why should the public support a game, Doak wondered, that they see taking far more than it gives, and in which most people have no stake?
Those chickens have come home to roost.
There is an opportunity to ward off future incarnations of Assemblywoman Garcia’s proposal. But it must begin by resisting the temptation that elites often indulge: to shut themselves away behind strong walls, and to assume therein their safety.
The California bill shows that tendency’s fallacy: the public is at the walls. We can either invite them in, or wait for them to tear down the walls on their terms.
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