Dyker Beach Golf Course: surrounded by single family homes and duplexes.
dyker beach is ~`5 min walk to the nearest subway station. id consider that being connected to mass transit esp in the context of other NYC courses and their proximity to the nearest train station, be it subway LIRR or metro north.
I certainly do not disagree with you here, it's one of the closest to transit of the entire muni golf system. That said, it's still an unsustainable policy even if it were only targeting transit rich corridors.
My main concern here is about housing
policy and how it is disconnected with the politics of housing development. Here I am all too familiar with the terms Bruce brings up, though I would say that it's important to draw a distinction between capital-"A" "Affordable" housing, which is really just subsidized housing, and affordable housing (now called "attainable" housing) which is housing that, at market rates, can be afforded by someone at or near median income.
The reason why I think people in the golf industry (especially the muni golf industry) need to understand the housing trap we are in, is exactly that "Affordable" housing projects will continue to target golf course exactly because the incentives of this development pattern usually need green field development (e.g. golf courses) for the projects to make sense. The reason why is that to get the Affordable units to pencil, the price of the market rate units need to be higher than they otherwise would be, which is all well and good for the folks that
literally win the lottery for the Affordable units, but it doesn't even begin to address general housing affordability because the market rates units are subsidizing the Affordable units... not the general public.
Here we see that this isn't even a policy that actually deals with the underlying cost of developing housing
for most people, and thus the underlying housing crisis, yet the entire program is built on consuming the finite, effectively non-renewable resource that is urban green space.
We need only to look at the
zoning map of NYC to see what is the real problem. At Dyker Beach we see only R4, R5, and the ridiculous R3 zoning that somehow exists literally walking distance from public transit. This pales in comparison to the absurdity that is the R1 zoning that somehow exist in NYC, adjacent to Pelham Bay & Split Rock GC or La Tourette. Because of these arbitrary lines, this means the best you can do in the area, an area where houses regularly sell for $2M+,
if you can get permission, is some low-rise row housing, which is effectively already built out where it's legal. It's
trivially obvious that the market would be able to handle upzoning (incremental or otherwise), but rather than deal with the root problem, that any kind of mechanism to have supply meet demand exist, most folks would simply consume the existing public good so that no physical structure can ever change.
This is all well and good for folks who don't actually give a shit about the younger generations being able to build a life for themselves, but it is
very, very bad for golf, which is why we should care. I don't care if your preferred solutions are of the more aggressive YIMBY variety (see: Nolan Gray's
Arbitrary Lines), or if you share an incrementalist approach like I do (see: Strong Towns'
Escaping the Housing Trap), or a mix of the two (see:
CA YIMBY's Nolan Gray and Strong Towns' founder Chuck Marohn discussing their policy differences), the fact of the matter is that these neighborhoods
must be allowed to grow naturally or golf courses and golf culture is going to disappear in these areas. And if that happens, the political animosity toward private clubs will grow dramatically. Generally speaking, people in the golf industry would do well do have a deep understanding of municipal finance, housing policy, and land use policy if they work in urban or suburban parts of America, because we're living through is non-trivial upheaval in the development paradigm, and it's going to have a material effect on the golf industry.