Posted on 01/13/2019 6:34:45 AM PST by dennisw
When Mitch Steller first moved into his house on a lush 117-acre golf course in Southern California, “this was like the Garden of Eden, having a golf course in my backyard,” he said.
Today, his Poway, Calif., home overlooks dry, dead grass in place of a once-verdant fairway. The golf club closed in 2017. “The fairways are brown, the greens are gone, the buildings are being vandalized,” says Mr. Steller, a 70-year-old maritime-management consultant.
Forty years after developers started blanketing the Sunbelt with housing developments built around golf, many courses are closing amid a decline in golf participation, leaving homeowners to grapple with the consequences. People often believe a course will bolster their property values. But many are discovering the opposite can now be true—and legal disputes are erupting as communities fight over how to handle the struggling courses.
“There are hundreds of other communities in this situation, and they’re trapped and they don’t know what to do,” says Peter Nanula, chief executive of Concert Golf Partners, a golf club owner-operator that owns about 20 private clubs across the U.S. One of his current projects is the rehabilitation of a recently acquired club in Florida that had shut one of its three golf courses and sued residents who had stopped paying membership fees.
(Excerpt) Read more at outline.com ...
Oh the horror of it all!
REST OF THE STORY IN FULL >>>>>>> GO HERE>>>>>>> https://outline.com/nzwsWE
And please renew your golf club memberships!!
I’ve never understood the allure of wanting to move to a place where strangers are walking that close to your house all day long, hitting balls through your windows.
So, am I supposed to feel some emotion about this.
Outside of the fact that a gold course is the waste of a perfectly good rifle range, so what?
gold=golf
Or the Bob Newhart routine about Abner Doubleday on the phone with a game making company, trying to deal with the other end of the phone talking about games they want to sell are for 2 couples, that take an hour or less to play to completion. The world has changed, and the dinosaur houses on dinosaur courses have to accept that.
Like many of my generation I tried to take up golf because I was told it would be helpful to my career. I never really cared all that much for it but was I suppose passable on a Par 3. I couldn’t care less about playing golf now and the idea of living on a golf course just seems sort of stupid. The few people of my acquaintance who do have always had issues with strangers wandering around looking for lost balls or even broken windows. I think they should just let it revert back to nature or make a private greenway out of it and tear down the structures pertaining specifically to golf. That or develop it with more houses.
Just set up a migrant camp on the old golf course. Problem solved.
Does this mean public courses are now even more crowded then ever? I haven’t golfed in 20 years, but would like to get back into it now that I’m retired....
I’m the “World’s Worst Golfer”, so I could probably play that course, now that it’s in total ruin.
Don’t leave out the risk of getting hit by a stray ball if you go out in your yard during daylight hours.
Had a guy I worked with that lived on a city owned golf course. The city wanted to sell it and turn the fairways into greenways as they did not promote it.
He and one other guy went to every first and second tier property owner and they turned it into a thriving private club that was owned by the members. The city got more money and their country club and course was revived. The trick was they made appointments and went and talked to every property owner face-to-face.
They should plow up the courses and build Section 8 housing. Problem solved.
That sounds like California in general.
Golf is declining. Tennis long ago lost it’s draw. Swimming pools are liability pits. Football and soccer are too dangerous. Don’t buy near a flood zone...
Were are going to have to build communities around video games.
“Just set up a migrant camp on the old golf course. Problem solved.”
That was the old business model not the new one - use illegal immigrant cheap labor, harvest membership fees in perpetuity.
The bottom line is that socialism never works, and collective ownership of a golf course is just another take on socialism. It might work for a few (just like socialism) but it won’t work for everyone else who are expected to pay and pay.
I have a friend who got even worse treatment. He bought a house on a golf course in South Carolina, and even paid an extra $50.000 for a membership in the club. The developer went bankrupt. The friend not only had a dry ugly brown field in front of his house, he was out the $50 grand. At last check, the disposition of what’s left of the golf course was still in doubt. It could become more houses, further reducing the value of the homes around it.
Retirees continue to buy homes here at Lake of the Ozarks.
Low taxes, low cost of living, no “fees,” turkey, deer in the woods, fish year round if you want to, shoot your gun.
Did I mention low taxes ?
I don't know what any of these people are complaining about. If nothing else, your closed-down 117-acre golf course is 117 acres of real estate that can be sold off for something else. Many of these associations have giant assets on their hands that can make their members a lot of money, if they play their cards right.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.