The Vancouver Board of Parks and Recreation has shot down the idea using municipal golf course land to build more housing amid the city’s accommodations crisis.
Commissioners approved a Golf Services Plan framework Monday that expressly states it will “not consider redeveloping golf lands for non-park use.” Rather, the framework directs staff to resume capital and maintenance golf improvement projects.
“As the city builds out to higher densities, these golf courses are critical large green space reserves for generations to come,” states the report to the board.
“With increased land values, the ability to acquire new parkland is diminishing, which means that these golf course lands will be even more relevant as future green spaces to meet park and recreation needs, and to work towards the long-term vision to restore Vancouver’s ecological network.”
In an interview Tuesday, Comm. Brennan Bastyovanszky said simply, “The park board voted to invest in golf.”
“One of the golf courses we’re looking at improving — the driving range has kind of fallen apart. The other one, Langara, which is is close to new development, they want to upgrade their clubhouse so it can be more like a local sports bar … even increase capacity to be able to host things like weddings and stuff like that.”
Using golf course land to build housing is an idea that has been discussed around the world in places experiencing a housing squeeze, including in Washington, California, and Hong Kong.
Earlier this month, an urban planner and professor in the University of British Columbia’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, propped up the idea for Vancouver, stating that housing affordability crisis is linked to the cost of land and what are considered “reasonable development densities.”
Patrick Condon suggested 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,” Condon told Global News.
He and another urban planner, Scot Hein, proposed that 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 Park Board’s golf courses are Fraserview, Langara and McCleery.
According to Monday’s report, all of the board’s golf assets — including three pitch and putt courses — represent 15 per cent of all the areas it manages. Between 2021 and 2022, the number of rounds played at these spaces increased 30 per cent over 2019 numbers, with golf gross revenue rising 40 per cent to more than $14 million last year.
That made golf the highest-revenue generation activity for the park board, representing 17.6 per cent of total revenues, followed by recreation admissions at 17.4 per cent. It contributed more than $5.75 million to the 2022 operating budget.
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Bastyovanszky said academics who suggest Langara is prime housing real estate “don’t know what they’re talking about.”
“The reality is, it’s a green space. There’s no plumbing, there’s no sewer, there’s no power there,” he said. “When they’re talking about addressing the housing issue, there’s a reason why the park board and council are separate. Park board has always been set up to protect the green spaces.”
Commissioner Tom Digby has previously said that while he acknowledges the urgency of Vancouver’s housing crisis, golf courses aren’t the right place to build homes.
“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 in an Oct. 4 interview.
“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.”
Speaking at the legislature on Tuesday, Housing Minister Ravi Kahlon said creative options for housing shouldn’t be ruled out.
“We are in a housing crisis and you can build housing with green space that community can have access to at the same time,” he told Global News.
“We are engaged with local governments across the province looking for any opportunities to build more housing and certainly we’d be open to a conversation if this is something that Vancouver wants to pursue.”
Kahlon said the ministry is actively engaged with the park board, municipality and the school board to discuss land-use. There has not been any conversation to date, he added, specifically about using golf course land for housing.
Vancouver expects to add some 260,000 more people to its population by 2050, according to the 2050 Vancouver Plan.
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