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Trump golf course locations5/18/2023 Joseph Bartholomew, a talented African-American golf course planner, could not play on the very courses he designed.īlack people were often groundskeepers, club chefs and caddies. This is the case even though George Franklin Grant, the first African-American professor at Harvard, invented the golf tee. To make matters worse, golf courses are not a true commons, because, historically, not everyone has had access to them. The space could be put to better use – that could benefit the broader community – like affordable housing, parks, solar or wind farms, camping sites, playgrounds, public pools or urban farming. There are also opportunity costs to tying so much land up in golf courses. In Seattle, two private courses are reportedly valued at roughly 5% of the valuation of neighbouring properties per square foot, meaning the city forgoes millions of dollars in taxes each year on account of this differential tax treatment for golf courses. Private courses also get gigantic tax windfalls in many states and communities.Ĭalifornia law shields many courses in that state from having to pay millions of dollars in taxes each year. Many municipal golf courses operate at a loss, meaning those within a community who do not use those courses are underwriting the play of those who do. Hardin’s chilling words on his theory? “Freedom in an unmanaged commons brings ruin to all”.īut arguably more egregious are the costs to local communities from the presence of golf courses. The concept of the tragedy of the commons – developed by Garrett Hardin – is often used to describe situations in which individual residents of a community might extract all the benefits from a common resource, causing resource depletion and often pushing the burdens and costs of that exploitation onto others. Those harms are imposed almost exclusively on those who do not use golf courses, while those who do use them reap all the benefits of their existence. Not only is their operation alone costly and environmentally tolling, but they also do affirmative harm to the communities in which they’re housed, in myriad ways. A ‘Trump’ helicopter sits near a putting green during a ribbon cutting event for a new clubhouse at Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point, in the Bronx borough of New York City. Golf courses – those rolling green hills on which elites spend American taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars – occupy roughly 3,500 square miles of land in the US, a land mass larger than the states of Rhode Island and Delaware.
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