I am not sure how it is in USA but in my country golf courses are abuse of public resources for (almost) private use. For a very few who can lobby enough for renewal of these leases and these are kept out of reach of the normal public, either by rule or by cost, sometimes both. Golf courses are lungs of many of the growing cities, across the world, but I do believe they should not be kept exclusive. Also, this comes directly from feudal/colonial times here. Those also require too much of other natural and public resources to be maintained.
In the USA they are overwhelmingly public and are desperate for customers.
The handful of private ones near me are also desperate for new members, and several country clubs have ended up closing. Considering some of the golf courses that have closed around me ended up being converted into Amazon distribution facilities, I am not terribly excited about the idea of more golf courses closing.
In the USA as elsewhere golf courses are incredible wastes of water and false green spaces that would function better as green spaces were they actually parks open to the public they serve the wealthy. What is different is that in the US there is very little real (operational) worry about waste of water (or other resources) - at least compared to other places - and there is lots of space compared to other places.
The vast majority of the world is nothing like this
From Scotland to Tasmania, most courses congregate around already wet and mostly sand/loamy soil (largely unusable for other purposes without major construction)
I agree with you for artificial American places like TPC Scottsdale or Wolf Creek GC etc
I’m an avid golfer and I live in Scotland. I’m not going to pretend that they’re bastions of sustainability - it’s not rained here in 2 full weeks and my course is watering their greens and fairways. We’re not quite at drought but the UK has a hosepipe ban in place and yet courses are continuing to water and maintain.
On the suitability of the soil, for some courses yeah. For the vast majority - there’s 4 courses within 20 minutes of me in an urban area and they would be developed into property in a heartbeat if they sold. My home course has an apartment block cutting through it.
I don’t think any of that matters though - it’s not like it would be a public park if it wasn’t a golf course. It’s certainly no less resource intensive than the massive concrete jungle of a sports centre with a running track across from me, or a football stadium or any of the numbers of empty buildings in the city centre. It’s an amenity, just like any other, it has a cost and we have to accept that otherwise we might as well just tear it all down.
That is an overly broad generalisation. Where I live, golf courses aren’t irrigated at all - they just rely on rainwater, like every other farm does.
One of the golf courses near me has tee times for $10. I do not consider that something that only “serves the wealthy”. They also periodically close the course and open it up for RC plane enthusiasts.
Another one you can easily go for a walk in - I often do. It is effectively a public space.
Were those private lands/properties? Because in my country a lot (if I can't say 'most') are actually on public land with weird and disgustingly cheap leases which can be closed at a finger snap but somehow very few Govts have tried it because every Govt have ministers (and of course bureaucrats) who are members there or made members there, and then there are their kids and families etc. So no they can't be turned into building constructions really, I mean assuming the limits of corruption in my country. Because technically anything can be sold if we go down that way. Also, my city is reclaiming lakes, demolishing illegal constructions and parks are also being reclaimed and cleaned up etc.
Not perfect, far from it, but it's a start and no, that Amazon Warehouse thing I am not expecting to see here. People are divided strongly on religious and ideological lines here but everyone's tempers run high whenever Govt tries touching a public land, green patch, and now we just take matters into our hands whenever that happens.
In my city (Kraków, Poland) there was attempted to waste enormous amount of public land and turn it into private golf course, funded from public money. It seems it was stopped after protests from citizens.
In some parts of the US it is certainly the case that golf courses are private and as a citizen you notice there are v. Few parks but lots of good courses. Many of the courses pay little in taxes so they’re also feels that there is a disparity between how the rest of society functions and golf courses.
Los Angeles is a v. Good example - huge urban sprawl - poor urban planning - few green spaces - amazing golf courses - as a runner I personally noticed I would be running around golf courses and not have any parks near me
Yeah, I could imagine golf being a sore spot for Indians. I never imagined India would even be a hotspot for golf, but given the amount of corruption going on, it would make sense that golf courses would be foisted upon the public. It’s always discouraging to see the amount of upper class Indians who, despite colonial times being long gone, are still very willing to sell out their countrymen to appease whites or to fit a British/white ideal.
I hope I’m wrong about this impression, and I’m just seeing cherry picked news articles, but your reaction makes me think otherwise….
So, I started https://golfcourse.wiki in 2020, and I see courses that basically only I’ve mapped.
It’s cool, I want it to be public, if you want to work together, do reach out.
I would also say what you are doing is almost certainly opening you up to liability if you are just scraping other sites and republishing their data. One paper town that you published and you might have a lawsuit on your hands.
Nice! Someone shared thAT wiki with me recently on reddit. I had not been aware of it before. Great stuff!
I'm not a lawyer but my stack is clean. My base layer is OSM, which is licensed for exactly this stuff (and attributed). On top of that I used golfcourseapi.com which i also recommend (affordable, and fairly reliable so far, but not always current). Then community notes etc.
I cross reference against other sources but I am only publishing facts, which are not copyrightable in the US.
Would love to touch base one day and compare notes. I work in the golf industry so mostly just made this for myself. But after sharing with some friends and co workers i thought the wider golf community might appreciate it
Sounds good, and it would make sense that OSM and I have some crossover at this point. Now that I've had more time, I can see that the extremely obscure courses are not in your dataset (Like Ulukhaktok GC: https://golfcourse.wiki/course/ulukhaktok_golf_course-ulukha...). Unfortunately, I didn't have a lot of time to look through your site when I saw this post, so I’m sorry about that.
Just so we're clear, I'm effectively fine with sharing my data via Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses (say, CC BY-NC 4.0). Much of my site depends on fair use and not being for profit anyway. I'm actively losing money on the site every month (ha!).
---
One personal note...
It looks like you're not using referral advertising by linking to Golf Now. I would say -- golf nut to golf nut -- as someone who cares about small, mom-and-pop golf courses, Golf Now can be incredibly bad for those courses. I understand that might just be Pollyanna-ish given "the internet," but I've talked to folks who operate small courses who feel forced give a big portion of their margin to those middlemen (even losing money sometimes). I actively avoided linking to them. My partner works in hospitality, and it's the same for sites like booking.com (if you can book through the business's website, your probably should).
I'm entirely happy to collaborate on this, I really just care about someone mapping all the golf courses even if it's not me. I'm happy to collaborate even if we're trying to build different things. Feel free to reach to me here, on GolfCourse.Wiki, or via the blog (for some reason most people contact me through the blog): https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/
I'd like to to the same with my data (allow a download of all the course pages) eventually. I'm only publishing facts at the moment but would love to support other features (local ratings, reviews, etc)
It turns out people have even mapped individual greens, fairways, bunkers, etc on OpenStreetMap! So you can use that data to generate a yardage book for each course: https://npilk.github.io/openyardage-web/
Nice job! When I zoom in on Google earth you can easily see if it’s actually a golf course or not, would been interesting to use this to draw up the areas with polygons and some more details.
Then you could start providing a lot more details about each one automatically.
yeah i am pulling from OSM. I can probably draw those polygons. It;s been an OK source for number of holes etc but I need to cross reference to get other detailed info
Possible bug: Went scrolling way East on the map for kicks and was surprised to find 14 courses on Guam, but also that the data don't repopulate as you make it back around the globe a second time. This seems to happen in both directions—eg Guam doesn't populate at all if you scroll West.
This is supercool. But I have a tangential question. I see projects like this built on top of OSM for different use cases. Does this data gets contributed back to OSM. A lot of them seems hobby projects, so it's hard to maintain long term, but the data is quite useful and could be used beyond the lifetime of these projects if they can be contributed back to OSM somehow.
OSM probably has the best data on golf courses because for many courses, people have mapped each 'golf=hole' as a way, and mapped other golf course features such as 'golf=bunker', 'golf=green', etc.
OSM knows of almost 40k golf courses around the world.[2] This compares to 38k golf courses known to the R&A Golf Around the World Fourth Edition (2021) report and 37.6k courses listed in the NGF course database as of July 2024. It's likely OSM knows of 99.99..% of all active golf courses and also still retains tags for closed/unused golf courses too. So if OSM were to be inaccurate, it'd likely be inaccurate for whether a golf course is open or closed, rather than OSM not knowing about a golf course existing.
I wonder whether an OSM tile server / custom style sheet for golfers would be easiest and most useful/comprehensive way to keep track of golf courses?
As I recall, OSM already tends to have many golf courses mapped in extreme detail, because there’s a game that lets you play OSM golf courses on your golf simulator.
This sometimes leads to conflict between the game’s passionate users and OSM, when they map every road around a golf course as a cart path, because that’s the only thing the game imports.
Golf is a sport I never tried but really want to. Also from the outside it looks both fun and relaxing to be outside in the nature. But I’m in the wrong country for that currently lol, golf is a niche here in Eastern Europe
It definitely can be enjoyed, but does it beat a walk in the forest? Not necessarily.
Golf is a social marker in Anglo-Saxon countries. Only the highest classes used to be able to afford it. In America they built a lot of courses because they have the space, and there was demand, obviously because lower classes wanted to feel like they’ve made it. Kind of like wearing tuxedos (or owning a Mercedes Benz in Eastern Europe).
Obviously the higher classes just got more exclusive markers (particular clubs, private jets, islands, etc.), but America is left with all that land converted into courses which apparently aren’t even used that much nowadays. Turns out it can get boring quickly.
Do you plan to contribute the data back into OSM? That would be the nice way to go to share with the community and allow you to have better data in the future with less maintenance work.
This is fascinating not because I’m interested in visiting any of these. But to see the communities in Alaska with courses, or to look at the most concentrated places and wonder what so many people in Florida get out of having a fairway and one hole right in their backyard..
In a lot of places, that golf course is the most beautiful piece of land around you, not just well maintained but lot of wildlife, birds, deer etc. so having that right on your backyard whether you golf or do not golf is a great attraction
Yep, old people in Florida love to golf and really love it when they can drive their golf cart from their garage straight to the clubhouse, finish a round of golf, and ride it right back to their garage only ever having to get out to hit the ball.
You have hidden greens in Solon springs Wisconsin but you have it on the wrong side of the lake. It's like a 25-minute drive around the lake to get to it.
I think you must only have the village name for the address and not the street address. You can see the golf course in the map image on the other side of the lake.
Somehow it disturbs me that we have access to a far-away, tropical island and use the very limited space there for not just one, but eight golf courses
That seems slightly pointless no? I mean Singapore is small enough already, there probably is 10 courses maximum. The one I've seen is the Changi course, and I don't think it can compare to the average course size in the States
you can fill out missing info right on the site. There is a buttons for missing/ correcting data and you can fill out any info. Appreciate any that do!
Yes. You can report any missing or bad info right in the course info drawer that pops up when selecting one. There is a button for sending corrections with a few fields but you can also just make a comment.
Well, golf fields are not as bad for environment as datac... I mean mines and factories.
Really, golf courses are taxed much lower usually, as they go as green open spaces (similar to protected forest areas), and also their assessed land value does not account for neighboring residential prices, so their tax is based on lower value than land can be sold at.
Golf courses in USA use half a trillion gallons of fresh water annually.
All data centers use less than 0.2 (of which only less than 0.02 is used for cooling the servers, the rest is just electricity generation, which can and should be replaced with solar).
There's no replacement for water usage for golf courses and even half a trillion number is after recent 30% reduction of usage from what it was before.
probably and old site that now redirects.. you can report issues right on the site. community reports are going to be the most reliable for me over time.
The amount of water used is somewhat less important than what the source of the water is.
And it's important to understand that "using water" isn't like "using coal". In other words, while coal can be burned once, water is in a cycle that means water can be "used" infinitly.
But back to the source. A golf course near me takes effluent water (ie treated sewerage) destined for pumping out to sea. They spread it over a large piece of land. What is not consumed by plants, or evaporation, ends up in an underground aquifer.
So it "uses" a lot of water. But it's not using tap water.
Obviously this is not true for all courses. Hence the issue of "source", not "quantity" is material.
"The amount of water used is somewhat less important than what the source of the water is."
Where I live, the golf courses are the largest and often only consumers of recycled water — in a water stressed city. This directly subsidises indigent water use.
It doesn't stop the easily-offended from agitating to convert them into low-cost housing.
“easily-offended / agitating”? Hmm. There’s lots of good reasons to convert golf courses to low-cost housing, or use the recycled water for something else. Expand irrigation of parks, recharge groundwater, create wetlands, create dual plumbing networks to use the recycled water for toilet flushing etc.
There will of course always be different potential uses for land. And there are up and down sides to every argument.
It's easy though to dismiss options which don't benefit me personally. If I don't cycle then money spent on cycle tracks is wasted. If I don't golf then I'll lean towards non-golf options.
Incidentally it's very seldom local users who are lobbying for more local low-cost housing. That typically reduces neighborhood property values.
Equally having green spaces is something that drives up property values etc.
And yes, creative use of effluent would be nice. We should be able to recycle grey water into toilets etc. But that is an infrastructure change, so not easy to implement.
Yes we need public green spaces. And yes we need sports fields and golf courses and so on. It's not necessarily an either/or situation.
The handful of private ones near me are also desperate for new members, and several country clubs have ended up closing. Considering some of the golf courses that have closed around me ended up being converted into Amazon distribution facilities, I am not terribly excited about the idea of more golf courses closing.
The vast majority of the world is nothing like this
From Scotland to Tasmania, most courses congregate around already wet and mostly sand/loamy soil (largely unusable for other purposes without major construction)
I agree with you for artificial American places like TPC Scottsdale or Wolf Creek GC etc
On the suitability of the soil, for some courses yeah. For the vast majority - there’s 4 courses within 20 minutes of me in an urban area and they would be developed into property in a heartbeat if they sold. My home course has an apartment block cutting through it.
I don’t think any of that matters though - it’s not like it would be a public park if it wasn’t a golf course. It’s certainly no less resource intensive than the massive concrete jungle of a sports centre with a running track across from me, or a football stadium or any of the numbers of empty buildings in the city centre. It’s an amenity, just like any other, it has a cost and we have to accept that otherwise we might as well just tear it all down.
One of the golf courses near me has tee times for $10. I do not consider that something that only “serves the wealthy”. They also periodically close the course and open it up for RC plane enthusiasts.
Another one you can easily go for a walk in - I often do. It is effectively a public space.
https://houseofsaud.com/travel/saudi-golf-courses/
>Avoid: June–September — temperatures regularly exceed 45°C (113°F), making outdoor play dangerous
Not perfect, far from it, but it's a start and no, that Amazon Warehouse thing I am not expecting to see here. People are divided strongly on religious and ideological lines here but everyone's tempers run high whenever Govt tries touching a public land, green patch, and now we just take matters into our hands whenever that happens.
There are a handful of government owned golf courses (sort of like parks that have tennis courts), but they are not common.
In my city (Kraków, Poland) there was attempted to waste enormous amount of public land and turn it into private golf course, funded from public money. It seems it was stopped after protests from citizens.
https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/revisionist-history/a-good-w...
In some parts of the US it is certainly the case that golf courses are private and as a citizen you notice there are v. Few parks but lots of good courses. Many of the courses pay little in taxes so they’re also feels that there is a disparity between how the rest of society functions and golf courses.
Los Angeles is a v. Good example - huge urban sprawl - poor urban planning - few green spaces - amazing golf courses - as a runner I personally noticed I would be running around golf courses and not have any parks near me
Many new courses in the US are also built on non-developable land like former landfills.
Not trying to defend all courses, but at least in the US it’s not just uniformly bad.
What? Why and how? And why wouldn't leaving a patch of forest there be way more efficient?
It’s cool, I want it to be public, if you want to work together, do reach out.
I would also say what you are doing is almost certainly opening you up to liability if you are just scraping other sites and republishing their data. One paper town that you published and you might have a lawsuit on your hands.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_settlement
I'm not a lawyer but my stack is clean. My base layer is OSM, which is licensed for exactly this stuff (and attributed). On top of that I used golfcourseapi.com which i also recommend (affordable, and fairly reliable so far, but not always current). Then community notes etc.
I cross reference against other sources but I am only publishing facts, which are not copyrightable in the US.
Would love to touch base one day and compare notes. I work in the golf industry so mostly just made this for myself. But after sharing with some friends and co workers i thought the wider golf community might appreciate it
Just so we're clear, I'm effectively fine with sharing my data via Creative Commons Non-Commercial licenses (say, CC BY-NC 4.0). Much of my site depends on fair use and not being for profit anyway. I'm actively losing money on the site every month (ha!).
---
One personal note...
It looks like you're not using referral advertising by linking to Golf Now. I would say -- golf nut to golf nut -- as someone who cares about small, mom-and-pop golf courses, Golf Now can be incredibly bad for those courses. I understand that might just be Pollyanna-ish given "the internet," but I've talked to folks who operate small courses who feel forced give a big portion of their margin to those middlemen (even losing money sometimes). I actively avoided linking to them. My partner works in hospitality, and it's the same for sites like booking.com (if you can book through the business's website, your probably should).
I'm entirely happy to collaborate on this, I really just care about someone mapping all the golf courses even if it's not me. I'm happy to collaborate even if we're trying to build different things. Feel free to reach to me here, on GolfCourse.Wiki, or via the blog (for some reason most people contact me through the blog): https://golfcoursewiki.substack.com/
Is a running gag in the area where I grew up, and made it on this list somehow. So that's weird.
The search by city, state doesn't seem to work.
If you enter something like "los angeles, ca" it returns no results.
zip code search works fine.
Then you could start providing a lot more details about each one automatically.
OSM knows of almost 40k golf courses around the world.[2] This compares to 38k golf courses known to the R&A Golf Around the World Fourth Edition (2021) report and 37.6k courses listed in the NGF course database as of July 2024. It's likely OSM knows of 99.99..% of all active golf courses and also still retains tags for closed/unused golf courses too. So if OSM were to be inaccurate, it'd likely be inaccurate for whether a golf course is open or closed, rather than OSM not knowing about a golf course existing.
I wonder whether an OSM tile server / custom style sheet for golfers would be easiest and most useful/comprehensive way to keep track of golf courses?
[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:golf%3Dhole
[2] https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/leisure=golf_course#o...
[3] https://assets.randa.org/c42c7bf4-dca7-00ea-4f2e-373223f80f7...
[4] https://thegolfwire.com/worldwide-golf-course-development-re...
This sometimes leads to conflict between the game’s passionate users and OSM, when they map every road around a golf course as a cart path, because that’s the only thing the game imports.
Golf is a social marker in Anglo-Saxon countries. Only the highest classes used to be able to afford it. In America they built a lot of courses because they have the space, and there was demand, obviously because lower classes wanted to feel like they’ve made it. Kind of like wearing tuxedos (or owning a Mercedes Benz in Eastern Europe).
Obviously the higher classes just got more exclusive markers (particular clubs, private jets, islands, etc.), but America is left with all that land converted into courses which apparently aren’t even used that much nowadays. Turns out it can get boring quickly.
https://www.ngf.org/short-game/golfs-growth-era-the-road-to-...
https://www.pga.com/play/ny/rome/mohawk-glen-golf-course/033...
Now add mini golf courses.
I think you must only have the village name for the address and not the street address. You can see the golf course in the map image on the other side of the lake.
https://www.uofmgolf.com/teetime
the tee time link is dead and google reports as permanently closed. However if its open i'd love to know!
https://nwhickoryplayers.org/2015/08/ccs/
Believe it is only open for residents in that area
Near my area, there is a driving range and a simulator place as pins. both nice but not courses. Do you want reports on that?
It will take some time i'm just doing this in spare time.
Really, golf courses are taxed much lower usually, as they go as green open spaces (similar to protected forest areas), and also their assessed land value does not account for neighboring residential prices, so their tax is based on lower value than land can be sold at.
That does not seem allright. A forest has lot's of ecodiversity, but a low cut golf course?
But sure, it is still green and somewhat alive.
All data centers use less than 0.2 (of which only less than 0.02 is used for cooling the servers, the rest is just electricity generation, which can and should be replaced with solar).
There's no replacement for water usage for golf courses and even half a trillion number is after recent 30% reduction of usage from what it was before.
2101 Sneath Ln, San Bruno, CA 94066, United States
https://i.imgur.com/DP6SOtr.jpeg
And it's important to understand that "using water" isn't like "using coal". In other words, while coal can be burned once, water is in a cycle that means water can be "used" infinitly.
But back to the source. A golf course near me takes effluent water (ie treated sewerage) destined for pumping out to sea. They spread it over a large piece of land. What is not consumed by plants, or evaporation, ends up in an underground aquifer.
So it "uses" a lot of water. But it's not using tap water.
Obviously this is not true for all courses. Hence the issue of "source", not "quantity" is material.
Where I live, the golf courses are the largest and often only consumers of recycled water — in a water stressed city. This directly subsidises indigent water use.
It doesn't stop the easily-offended from agitating to convert them into low-cost housing.
It's easy though to dismiss options which don't benefit me personally. If I don't cycle then money spent on cycle tracks is wasted. If I don't golf then I'll lean towards non-golf options.
Incidentally it's very seldom local users who are lobbying for more local low-cost housing. That typically reduces neighborhood property values.
Equally having green spaces is something that drives up property values etc.
And yes, creative use of effluent would be nice. We should be able to recycle grey water into toilets etc. But that is an infrastructure change, so not easy to implement.
Yes we need public green spaces. And yes we need sports fields and golf courses and so on. It's not necessarily an either/or situation.
And even then, a broad generalisation
It’s $10 USD/round in my area, cheaper than bowling by a mile
https://www.apdaparkinson.org/article/the-relationship-betwe...
That is what OP was trying to say I assume
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Overpass_API/Overpass_QL