Quote:
Originally Posted by someone123
Municipal politics often get weird around green space and recreation. Another area is hockey rinks and the idea that it's a core job of municipalities to provide ice time for amateur and/or professional hockey teams. I think that municipalities should try to provide greenspace and recreational opportunities for residents but the costs of the activities and their popularity should be taken into account. If golf requires 100x more land than say basketball then maybe golf isn't a good activity for high land value areas. It's unreasonable to demand certain amenities in a vacuum without regard for costs and demand.
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It's hard to draw the line on where government should provide opportunities for parks and recreation, but it's like the old saying about pornography - you'll know it when you see it.
The way I see it is that a publicly-funded recreational facility should have at least one "yes" answer to the following three questions:
1. Will it be used by a large cross-section of the population?
2. Does it require significant maintenance and upkeep costs?
3. Could that space be put to more productive uses?
I'm being loose with the term productive - it could anything from monetary revenue to non-monetary benefits like ecosystem services to people's enjoyment (golf making a very small number of people very happy, instead of a lot of people somewhat happy).
Almost no recreational facility will pass all three questions, but golf fails all three.
Even if you ignore all those things and just focus on golf being run as a business that has nothing to do with the land it occupies,
2/3 of all public golf courses don't even break even. If that's the case, it might as well just be vacant land.