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The case for turning golf courses into affordable housing

A major housing project in Nevada used to be a fairway. Other states should take a swing.

Maybe it was never a great idea to build so many golf courses in the desert. But in the 1990s, when Tiger Woods mania was at its peak, Las Vegas went on a fairway construction spree, dotting the city with dozens of pristine, water-gobbling green oases, most woven around upscale master-planned suburbs.

One of those new fairways was the privately owned Badlands Golf Club, whose name now evokes huffs of frustration and wistful what-ifs from Las Vegans in the know. Opened in 1995 about 15 miles west of the Strip, the luxury course once wound its way around some of the city’s most opulent mansions and gated communities.

An old golf course in Las Vegas is about to be transformed into the largest affordable housing complex in Nevada’s history.

If all 16,000 golf courses in America were turned into such housing, we’d have 22 million more affordable homes.

NIMBY urges can make such projects difficult, but the housing crisis makes it important to consider them.

By the time Woods crashed his car into a fire hydrant in 2009, the golf industry was in a crisis of its own. Many Americans had lost their appetite for the sport, which began hemorrhaging millions of players during the Great Recession and Woods’s fall from grace. Thousands of golf courses built during boom times shut down as a result — Badlands Golf Club among them.

Meanwhile, Las Vegas, like many American cities, needed more homes to help alleviate its brutally high housing costs. These days, Nevada needs 120,000 additional affordable homes, but it is running out of places to build them, in part because about 85 percent of the state is federally owned, meaning there’s little room left for its cities to grow or sprawl. Shuttered golf courses — which often had the advantage of being tied into existing urban infrastructure, unlike more undeveloped land — presented ideal spots for relatively low-cost development.

Not everyone was happy about the idea. To the ire of its affluent neighbors, the precious real estate of the Badlands Golf Club was slated for a new housing development in 2015. What came next was one of the worst land disputes in Nevada history, a decade-long legal tussle waged by the city of Las Vegas at the behest of wealthy locals. Las Vegas was forced to fork over $286 million to a developer last year — one of the largest such settlements in history, and more than the city’s entire annual municipal culture and recreation budget — for illegally denying applications and permits to build atop the Badlands, which by then sat empty, an abandoned eyesore. Eleven years after the fiasco started, a new developer finally began clearing the site for a new luxury housing complex earlier this year, while Las Vegas has had to enact hiring freezes and delay municipal projects to pay off its hefty bill.

In cities where space is tight, underused golf courses are, in theory, ideal canvases for new housing. These huge, repurposed tracts of land can fit thousands of new units — ideally, affordable ones — alongside other amenities like parks or basketball courts smack in the middle of some of the country’s most desirable and well-connected neighborhoods. This makes such developments much cheaper to build than creating a new suburb with all new roads and power lines from scratch.

Not every attempt to turn golf courses into housing lands is destined for financial calamity. Just last year, the city of Las Vegas........

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