... It was designed by Clyde Johnston ...

There's the first problem.

Wow. I didn't know that it closed.
I used to play quite a bit out there.  But you are right, it isn't easy to get to and the last time I went out there the prices were really starting to get up there.  
I loved those last 3 holes along the lake. I had my lowest round ever at Southerness.  Too bad.  

wow, I got lost on the way back to Atlanta from cuscowilla looking at courses and stumbled by it. I did not try to play due to time contraints. I wish I had stopped by now.

I remember reading about this course but never played it during my visits to Atlanta. Was this the course with wicker baskets a la Merion instead of flags?

Steve

Urban sprawl continues unabated.  Just like a number of the in-town clubs sold off and moved out in the 60's and 70's (Atlanta Athletic Club, Standard Club, etc.), many courses that were built just outside the Perimeter in the 80's and 90's have now been bypassed by newer swim/tennis/golf communities even further out that have extended Atlanta's suburbs nearly to the Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina borders.

A few in-town clubs are holding the line.  The East Lake renovation has of course received a lot of attention.  Druid Hills Golf Club has just completed a major course renovation by Bob Cupp.  The few remaining private clubs are prohibitively expensive, leaving few choices for in-town resident golfers like me.  You can either play the munis like Brown's Mill, or drive well outside the Perimeter to find decent daily fee courses.  I just played Hidden Hills last Friday, and it's going down the tubes.  If some major money isn't put into bringing this course back, it's going to go the way of Southerness, Metropolitan, and Centennial (all of which I used to play).

As urban sprawl continues, land closer to the city certainly increases in value.  Another part of the equation would seem to be though, what value the residents/members place on the golf.

The land that Druid Hills Golf Club sits on has to be worth a fortune - I can imagine developers looking at this gorgeous property in the middle of Atlanta and seeing nothing but hundreds of million-dollar McMansions.  Yet the members were willing to invest significant funds to maintain and improve their course and facilities.

Hidden Hills appears to have been in a death spiral for the last 10 years.  When the residents and members don't value the golf enough to maintain the membership, it starts to slide towards that tipping point - where the "value" of the golf is exceeded by the value of developing that land.  When I first moved to Atlanta, Hidden Hills was private and was thought of as a good club in good housing development.  Since then, membership has declined dramatically, and the club shifted to semi-private, now public/daily fee.  They have declined to the point that last Friday afternoon, when it was 60 degrees and sunny, I played for $25 - and we saw maybe 4 other groups on the course.

Mike;

On top of your Standard Club comments.........that club is currently closed and under a "complete renovation"......more and more of these "cookie cutter" courses from the late 80's and early 90's are going to be disappearing over the next several years....land has gone way up in value, and these courses, they are finding in many instances, were poorly constructed, and now, when major repaproblems arise, as in with the need for total green reconstruction, as was the case at St Ives, the builder/developer apparently burried massive amounts of fallen trees and "other" debris under the green complexes, likely to "build up the height" of the greens, and drainage issues that force re-routing of holes, as was the case at several "other" courses in Atlanta, it becomes a question of, hey, if we can get this land rezoned, sell it for 3 times what we paid for it, and not have to dump 1M+ into to get it ready for our members/daily fee folks..........well, enough said