Weeds engulf the fairways. Branches break through the clubhouse windows. And buyers pass on the chance to own a home near the sixth hole.
The Crickentree golf course closed last July here in the booming northern suburbs of Columbia. Now dozens of neighbors regularly attend county meetings, wearing red shirts to show solidarity and asking officials not to grant a developer’s request to build hundreds of homes where there has been open space for decades.
“I beg you to put yourself in my shoes,” Michy Kelly recently said to the Richland County planning board, explaining why she and her husband bought their house there in 2013. “We were buying so much more than a home. We were buying peace and quiet and serenity.”
Ms. Kelly said afterward that she loves living along the fairway, though she isn’t sure which one as she has never golfed.
“It never occurred to me that people would stop doing it,” she said, “because I never understood why they did it in the first place.”
County commissioners have asked neighbors and the course’s owners to sign off on a plan for Crickentree that both sides can live with by September, when it expects to take a final vote on the rezoning. Both sides have said litigation is an option if the county decides against them.
The decline in the popularity of golf is having ripple effects in suburbs across the Sun Belt, as nearly 200 courses closed last year, according to the National Golf Foundation. Communities are left with empty courses because of overbuilding during the housing boom, compounded by a 20% decline in the number of golfers since 2003, according to the trade group.
The options range from allowing the development of new neighborhoods to turning courses into public parks. It commonly takes years to sort through legal battles over zoning, obligations between the course owners and homeowners and other political fallout. In Phoenix, ongoing legal disputes have left the Ahwatukee Lakes Golf Course surrounded by a chain-link fence and overgrown with sagebrush for the better part of five years.
Local officials must parse through the impact of building homes in the center of an existing subdivision and potentially overtaxing schools and roads in already booming areas. Property values for nearby homes typically fall about 25% when a course fails, said Blake Plumley, an Orlando, Fla.-based golf development consultant. They can fall more than 40% if a dispute ends up in court, he said.
Here in Richland County, ECapital Management, a Fort Worth, Texas-based firm, bought the Crickentree course out of bankruptcy last year and intends to sell to a developer. It originally proposed building as many as 450 homes. Neighbors fought back with radio ads, yard signs and crowded public meetings. (...)
Crickentree homeowner Michael Koska said his 5,200-square-foot home on what was once the fifth tee box has lost at least a third of its value, based on the list prices of Crickentree homes and sales patterns for homes on other failed courses. He built the house for $565,000 in 2005 and it was appraised at $710,000 a decade ago.
“That’s life-changing kind of money, that’s ‘your kid doesn’t get to go to college, you don’t get to retire early kind of money,’ ” Mr. Koska said.
He wished he had read his neighborhood’s agreement with the course owners more closely when he built the house 14 years ago, he said. “The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.”
Crickentree is one of at least 33 courses in South Carolina that have failed since 2012, according to Kelly Cederberg, a landscape architect and professor at the University of Arizona.
“The people who were building golf courses were not thinking about how many people were out there playing golf,” she said. “They built them to sell homes.”
by Valerie Bauerlein, WSJ | Read more:
Image: NASA/Google Earth
[ed. See also: There Aren't Enough Golfers To Keep All Of The U.S. Courses In Business (NPR); and Not All Golf Course Closures Are Failures (NGF - Q).]
The Crickentree golf course closed last July here in the booming northern suburbs of Columbia. Now dozens of neighbors regularly attend county meetings, wearing red shirts to show solidarity and asking officials not to grant a developer’s request to build hundreds of homes where there has been open space for decades.
“I beg you to put yourself in my shoes,” Michy Kelly recently said to the Richland County planning board, explaining why she and her husband bought their house there in 2013. “We were buying so much more than a home. We were buying peace and quiet and serenity.”
Ms. Kelly said afterward that she loves living along the fairway, though she isn’t sure which one as she has never golfed.“It never occurred to me that people would stop doing it,” she said, “because I never understood why they did it in the first place.”
County commissioners have asked neighbors and the course’s owners to sign off on a plan for Crickentree that both sides can live with by September, when it expects to take a final vote on the rezoning. Both sides have said litigation is an option if the county decides against them.
The decline in the popularity of golf is having ripple effects in suburbs across the Sun Belt, as nearly 200 courses closed last year, according to the National Golf Foundation. Communities are left with empty courses because of overbuilding during the housing boom, compounded by a 20% decline in the number of golfers since 2003, according to the trade group.
The options range from allowing the development of new neighborhoods to turning courses into public parks. It commonly takes years to sort through legal battles over zoning, obligations between the course owners and homeowners and other political fallout. In Phoenix, ongoing legal disputes have left the Ahwatukee Lakes Golf Course surrounded by a chain-link fence and overgrown with sagebrush for the better part of five years.
Local officials must parse through the impact of building homes in the center of an existing subdivision and potentially overtaxing schools and roads in already booming areas. Property values for nearby homes typically fall about 25% when a course fails, said Blake Plumley, an Orlando, Fla.-based golf development consultant. They can fall more than 40% if a dispute ends up in court, he said.
Here in Richland County, ECapital Management, a Fort Worth, Texas-based firm, bought the Crickentree course out of bankruptcy last year and intends to sell to a developer. It originally proposed building as many as 450 homes. Neighbors fought back with radio ads, yard signs and crowded public meetings. (...)
Crickentree homeowner Michael Koska said his 5,200-square-foot home on what was once the fifth tee box has lost at least a third of its value, based on the list prices of Crickentree homes and sales patterns for homes on other failed courses. He built the house for $565,000 in 2005 and it was appraised at $710,000 a decade ago.
“That’s life-changing kind of money, that’s ‘your kid doesn’t get to go to college, you don’t get to retire early kind of money,’ ” Mr. Koska said.
He wished he had read his neighborhood’s agreement with the course owners more closely when he built the house 14 years ago, he said. “The big print giveth and the small print taketh away.”
Crickentree is one of at least 33 courses in South Carolina that have failed since 2012, according to Kelly Cederberg, a landscape architect and professor at the University of Arizona.
“The people who were building golf courses were not thinking about how many people were out there playing golf,” she said. “They built them to sell homes.”
by Valerie Bauerlein, WSJ | Read more:
Image: NASA/Google Earth
[ed. See also: There Aren't Enough Golfers To Keep All Of The U.S. Courses In Business (NPR); and Not All Golf Course Closures Are Failures (NGF - Q).]
