An urban planner and University of British Columbia professor is swinging big, advocating for the conversion of some public golf courses into land for housing developments.
According to Patrick Condon, who teaches in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, the housing affordability crisis is linked to the cost of land and what are considered “reasonable development densities.” He suggests that if a four-storey building went up on Vancouver’s Langara Golf Course, for example, the value of the land on which the housing sits would far exceed the per-acre rate that the golf course is currently assessed at.
“So the idea here is that it may be propitious for the city to consider capitalizing on that value that is currently used by a couple of hundred golfers — God love them,” Cordon told Global News.
He and another urban planner, Scot Hein, have proposed that the City of Vancouver could use one large parcel of golf course for housing and another as a public park. Like False Creek South, he suggested it could contain one-third social housing, one-third middle class housing and one-third market housing.
“With the money that the city would gain from using one-third of that remaining land for market housing, that would provide sufficient funds to build the other third of social housing … in the midst of this housing crisis, you could generate thousands of affordable units by means that are otherwise not available.”
The Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation’s golf courses are Fraserview, Langara and McCleery.
While he recognized the urgency of the city’s housing crisis, Comm. Tom Digby said he opposes the notion that land on any one of the courses be used for housing.
“There’s really a diverse community using them, but more importantly than that, is that these golf courses are sources of biodiversity in the city,” he said.
“They are huge assets and either places where birds can migrate through — we can have pollinator corridors, there’s ponds, there’s forests, all the trees — it’s extremely valuable to have golf courses in our city, so it’s not the best place to go looking for housing.”
Many Vancouver neighbourhoods are currently undergoing rapid and dense development, he added, which makes the preservation of those green spaces even more important.
Condon said his “heart bleeds” on the green space issue, but reiterated that public golf courses are used by a “relatively small number of Vancouver residents.” Private golf courses are available for use as well, he added.
“There’s insufficient park space in that part of the city, so giving over half of that site to actual parks that are available to everybody in the area … seems to make a certain amount of logical sense,” Condon said, referring to Langara again.
“That has been quite commonly done when cities end up feeling that a golf course is not an appropriate use given other demands.”
The planner admitted, he has “taken a lot of heat” for his views, including from friends.
“All the other things that we’re doing on the housing crisis, in my view, are not working. Incentivizing developers to create more market rate housing is not helping the situation.”
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