Sigh...
No reasonable person would try to convert the green space in a city they live in. In a healthy city, you'll start to see large buildings overlooking the parks and golf courses. The cities that consider building on the golf course have, in every case, made those larger buildings literally illegal to build. There are two entire generations in most of the UK and US suffering greatly because of our housing shortages born out of restrictive zoning and naivete. It's even worse in Canada.
La Tourette Golf Course: completely surrounded by single family homes, with no connection to transit.
Dyker Beach Golf Course: surrounded by single family homes and duplexes.
Pelham Bay and Split Rock Golf Courses: the course is on a peninsula with only single family homes on the north edge. Zero connection to public transit even though the site is on the Amtrak line.
Mosholu Golf Course: A bit more complicated, there are 1-story units next to the course, but tenements on the south side. The course is connected to the larger Van Cortland Park, which is surrounded on three sides by single family homes.
Eliminating all these courses would permanently destroy extremely valuable open space, to build inefficient housing that the market would, in all likelihood, build itself if it were just legal to do so. If we don't want golf courses, by all means, make them public parks, but don't remove green space in the densest city in America. We keep pretending that we need more land, when really we need to just relegalize organic urban development.