Rancho Park Golf Course is an 18-hole, par 71 municipal golf course in the affluent Cheviot Hills neighborhood near Century City, west of LA. The greens used to be the domain of a private club, but they became part of a Los Angeles city park after World War II. It’s the former home of PGA’s Los Angeles Open and home to a handful of golf’s memorable milestones, including, in 1969, the second tour win for Charlie Siffords, the first African American professional to play on the PGA tour.
“It’s a really nice park,” says Dermot Connell, a Los Angeles-based golfer who is heavily involved with the city’s municipal circuit and serves as a council member for Rancho Park. “From almost every point in Rancho, you can get a perspective of the city. It is unique in the sense that you are in the middle of a large metropolitan area – yet there you are, walking along the tree line in a small oasis of solitude. “
However, the course looks a bit different from Daniel Dunham, a designer at Koning Eizenberg Architecture in Santa Monica. For him, Rancho Park would be the perfect place to build affordable housing.
Dunham estimates that one could hold 15,000 units – homes for around 50,000 people – on the 200-acre site, which is also within walking distance of both the upcoming Purple Line extension and a station on the Expo Metro Line. And Rancho is just one of 19 courses available to LA duffers – the city operates the largest public golf system in the United States.
“It’s just such extensive land use that I find it quite unforgivable in dense urban areas,” Dunham says.
It has some numbers: Urban golf courses take up an average of around 120 acres of land each. This is about 2,300 acres of land occupied by fields in the city of LA alone. But there are 68 other golf courses – 12 public, 20 private and 36 municipal – within 20 miles of Los Angeles, the list of coursesGolf Link says, bringing the total number of courses in the area to 87. It matters and Greater LA is dedicating more than 10,000 acres to the game of golf.
Dunham assembled this napkin estimate to illustrate the amount of frozen real estate in the game, even as Los Angeles continues to struggle with an affordable housing crisis. Current house prices in LA are on average 7.3 times higher than median income, and racial disparities mean that nearly 40% of black residents spend half their income on rent. The coronavirus is further exacerbating the crisis: in May, economists felt a peak of 20% of homelessness in Los Angeles alone.
But in Los Angeles, as in so many other cities, efforts to build more housing often face community resistance, a phenomenon Dunham often sees from his perspective as a designer of multi-family housing projects. In 2017, Dunham worked on an affordable five-story housing development in Santa Monica that faced community backlash and residents’ concerns about low-income renters bringing crime to the neighborhood. However, the development has been in operation since 2018, hosting people with an income between 30% and 60% of the average income of the area.
“People tend to be very supportive of affordable housing in Los Angeles, but what people tend to oppose is the project itself,” Dunham says. “Once they see the proposal and it’s a big building in their neighborhood, suddenly it’s not good enough or not right for the neighborhood.”
Efforts to build thousands of units of new housing for the city’s growing homeless population: atarget of 2016 bond measure Proposition HHH – were much lower, partly due to community resistance, litigation delays and stratospheric construction costs. The city’s latest audit revealed that the average cost to build a single unit was $ 531,000, likethe Los Angeles Times recently reported and only a small part of the planned projects have been completed.
The clear solution, according to Dunham, is to tap into LA’s vast reserve of municipal golf courses. He chose Rancho Park for its strategic location and for its size. “The site is so huge that you could build a factory there, build the units on site and place them with the crane,” he says. “If you can get something like 15,000 units in one place, that opens up a lot of opportunities for innovation and efficiency.”
Just by playing Dunham’s numbers game, a housing development in Rancho Park could house most of Los Angeles’ nearly 60,000 homeless people.
The idea is not new. As thethe popularity of the sport fades (between 2002 and 2016, the number of players in the United States decreased by about 10 million people), proposals forredeveloping the hundreds of closed and underutilized links are multiplying nationwide, eAround the world. More than 200 golf courses closed in 2017 alone, according to the National Golf Foundation, a trend that some conservationists celebrate and that developers have tried to exploit. Denver struggled with a 2017 proposal to turn a 155-acre golf course into affordable housing units. In Kansas City, the local planning committee voted to approve a $ 105 million development on a vacant municipal field. The New Jersey Joint Planning Board approved 249 new homes on a portion of a 160-acre suburban course. And in Pennsylvania, a real estate developer attempted to build 336 new family row homes on part of a distressed plot of land.
In all of these cases, however, the proposals met with stiff resistance, as residents opposed a potential increase in traffic and the loss of green space. If Los Angeles attempted to reuse one of its public courses, the opposition would be no less busy, local players say.
Connell, for example, isn’t thrilled with Dunham’s idea of building affordable housing units on the land now occupied by Rancho Park. “While I recognize that the homeless problem is real and that it is a huge burden on the city of Los Angeles, I personally would be very disappointed if they somehow manage to build in Rancho Park, or one of the camps in the city where I play, for this is important, “he says. Losing the course would have removed a valuable community social center, and predicted nearby residents would wrap any such plan in years of scrambling for approval.
“I’m glad people are thinking about how to solve this problem,” Connell says. “I’d like them to find other solutions than taking down Rancho Park. I just don’t think it’s practical. “
Marc Dauber, another club member, also reacted strongly to the idea of redeveloping his local greens. Municipal courses such as Rancho Park are an affordable option for less affluent golfers. “To join a private club in West Los Angeles, the cost is no less than an entry fee of $ 225,000 with monthly dues of probably $ 1,500 per month.” he says. “This obviously costs a few people.”
By comparison, a weekend round at the Rancho costs $ 45.50, though Dauber admits it’s not as well-maintained as some of the private clubs.
Cost isn’t the only difference between country clubs and municipal golf. In this predominantly white sport, city public courses tend to be enclaves of relative racial and gender diversity, as a member of Denver’s City Park Players Club told Denver Post in 2015. And they gained new value as safe sites for outdoor recreation during the coronavirus pandemic, which at least temporarily gave the pastime a boost in popularity.
When the Dunham housing unit estimate was presented to Dauber, he told me his immediate reaction was to present his middle finger and then suggested that other solutions be found.
“I would like to use the acreage as a last resort,” he says. “I think there are other opportunities where they could find space. I would also say that the land is worth so much, that I just can’t see it being used for affordable housing. I prefer to see them have a higher density in different places “.
But Dunham points out that building housing everywhere will not solve the problem. “You know, LA has a lot of low-density areas that are very close to these trains,” he says. “We are building these new lines which are terribly expensive, so you should want to be efficient with that money. It is counterproductive not to put homes and offices adjacent to those lines. “
Dunham isn’t suggesting that redeveloping a golf course will be easy, even in a city that’s 19. But to him, the objections raised by the golfing community sound all too familiar.
“Sure, the neighbors will sue. They will say that the traffic changes, which affects the value of the property. They will do whatever they can, “he says.” And these kinds of people are very good at appropriating the language of social justice movements, and they will argue that this is gentrification, or that this is displacement, that they are real problems, but not so much. in Cheviot Hills “.
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