The golf course is pretty good and there are some good holes, but I'm not sure there's quite the market for a club/course like this in the Lake City area. They currently want 12,500 for initiation and 100 bucks a month in dues (according to the website) and that's a lot of money for that part of Minnesota. They never went completely private as they had hoped, but it's 60 bucks to walk on the weekend and 76 to ride. I think it's tough to convince somebody from the Twin Cities to spend just as much as they would at a good public course near their house and spend more than three hours in a car.
It's a rural area. To put it into perspective, the Lake City Golf Club is less than $1,200 for the year with no initiation fee. Up the road in Red Wing, it's pretty much the same deal. Down Highway 61 to the south, the Winona Golf Club switched from private to semi-private.
According to Yahoo maps, it's 1hr, 43min from downtown Minneapolis to Lake City. That's largely because there's no real good way to get there. Because of that, I don't know where they are going to get members from. I guess they want people to build homes on the lots there, but where will these people work?
Another thing that has hurt is the timing. It opened about a year after Somerby in Byron, Minn. (just outside of Rochester). Somerby is a better course, it's easier to get to and they have a much better membership deal for somebody in the Twin Cities (I know a couple of guys who are members there). Plus there are IBM and Mayo Clinic jobs just eight miles down the road from Somerby.
I think the Jewel is a decent course, but in the end, I think it was a problem of location, location, location.