{"id":963,"date":"2013-01-13T18:21:22","date_gmt":"2013-01-13T23:21:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnstrawn.com\/?p=963"},"modified":"2013-01-13T18:21:22","modified_gmt":"2013-01-13T23:21:22","slug":"making-golf-part-of-the-walkable-city","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/johnstrawn\/golf\/963\/making-golf-part-of-the-walkable-city","title":{"rendered":"Making Golf Part of the Walkable City"},"content":{"rendered":"

A version of this essay appeared in The Oregonian<\/em>, November 18, 2012.<\/p>\n

What the \u201cWalkable City\u201d Means for Golf.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jeff Speck, Walkable City.\u00a0 How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time<\/em>.\u00a0 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Nov 13, 2012.\u00a0 $27.00.<\/p>\n

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Where Does Golf Fit in the Walkable City?<\/p><\/div>\n

Urban planner Jeff Speck\u2019s Walkable City<\/em> is both a forceful analysis of what\u2019s wrong with most cities and a ten step program for fixing them.\u00a0 Given that 80% of Americans now live in urban areas, anyone interested in improving the quality of city life should read this book and heed its lessons.\u00a0 Walking provides health benefits, too, and people who walk to work (or to public transit as part of their commute), and to shop and visit friends get health benefits in addition to saving money.\u00a0 But the benefits flow from a city or urban area already organized to encourage walking .<\/p>\n

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Part of the reason suburban property values continue to languish, in Portland and elsewhere, while inner city housing prices have largely recovered from the 2008 real estate collapse, is a function of the benefits inherent in living within walking distance of shops, services and public transportation.\u00a0 (If you don\u2019t know your neighborhood\u2019s \u201cwalk score,\u201d I suggest you find it\u2014it may have more impact on your long-term financial health than your 401K.)\u00a0 http:\/\/www.walkscore.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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Christopher B. Leinberger<\/a>, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, is the source of much of Speck\u2019s information about these shifts in real estate values, whose effects were accelerated by the Great Recession.\u00a0 Leinberger, who writes regularly for the OpEd pages of the NY Times, reported some remarkable findings in May, 2012.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur research,\u201d he wrote, \u201cshows that real estate values increase as neighborhoods became more walkable\u2026. There is a five-step \u201cladder\u201d of walkability, from least to most walkable. On average, each step up the walkability ladder adds $9 per square foot to annual office rents, $7 per square foot to retail rents, more than $300 per month to apartment rents and nearly $82 per square foot to home values.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs a neighborhood moves up each step of the five-step walkability ladder, the average household income of those who live there increases some $10,000. People who live in more walkable places tend to earn more, but they also tend to pay a higher percentage of their income for housing.\u201d<\/p>\n

The enemy of the livable city, the destroyer of worlds, was the car<\/strong>.\u00a0 The enormous apparatus of freeways, highways and parking lots built over the last one hundred years, Speck demonstrates with disturbing clarity, destroyed what made city life attractive in the first place to serve the needs of the automobile. \u00a0The tradeoffs were transient.<\/p>\n

Planners succumbed to the car so completely that master-planned suburbs dispensed with sidewalks altogether, and engineered streets for cars alone.\u00a0 (One of the saddest facts Speck adduces is that only 15% of children now walk to school.\u00a0 Walking to school isn\u2019t just good exercise, it\u2019s a powerful socializing instrument, too.)\u00a0 Wherever walking is dangerous, property values fall, commerce ceases, and the quality of life ebbs.\u00a0 \u00a0To reverse that process, you have to figure out how to get people back on their feet.\u00a0\u00a0 Speck\u2019s ten step manifesto points the way forward, with humor and grace and just a soupcon of urban elitist zeal.<\/p>\n

Many of the suburban \u201ccommunities\u201d suffering from the real estate collapse were built around golf courses, and the golf industry has suffered hugely from the recession (although it\u2019s arguable that the industry\u2019s decline reflects a longer trend).\u00a0\u00a0 Although the National Golf Foundation reported recently that rounds played are up 7.4% this year over last year nationwide, overall participation rates and rounds played have not come close to approaching the peak year of 1999 (the last year of the Clinton expansion, and the preamble to the dot.com bust and the recession of 2001).\u00a0 564 million rounds were played in 1999; last year, it was 463 million.\u00a0 In 1999 there were roughly 14,200 \u201c18 hole equivalent\u201d courses in the US; in 2011, there were about 14,800 courses, which means more courses were chasing fewer rounds.\u00a0 If you were the CEO of a business with this profile, you\u2019d be canned.\u00a0 The collapse of suburban real estate values is tightly yoked to the collapse in golf course evaluations as well.<\/p>\n

Traffic congestion, in a perverse way, has helped restore the walkable urban core.\u00a0 Speck summons convincing evidence that building more freeways exacerbates rather than solves the traffic problem, and pushes affordable housing further away from the city center.\u00a0 Bubble suburbs turned into ghost towns, and golf courses far from city centers were neglected and even abandoned. \u00a0\u00a0Roughly 1,100 golf courses disappeared from the industry census between 2010 and 2011.\u00a0 If the average cost to build those courses was $5,000,000 (a conservative estimate), then the loss was at least 5.5 billion dollars.
\nEric Larsen, who for years designed world-class golf courses as a lead designer and business development executive at Arnold Palmer Design, has been thinking about how to reposition golf courses over the last several years as it became dreadfully clear that the field of dreams strategy the development industry had been following was not yielding dividends.\u00a0\u00a0 Two years ago, Larsen left Palmer Design to start his own consultancy in order to test some ideas he\u2019s been germinating as he watched the golf economy stagnate.<\/p>\n

Was it possible, he wondered, to steer a course somehow between the Scylla of reduced demand and lowered revenues and the Charybdis of plowing under the golf course?\u00a0 Larsen\u2019s first thought was simply to reduce the number of holes, from 18 to 9, but rather than simply abandoning the golf course\u2014which may have been zoned as open or green space\u2014he recommended converting the sixty to eighty acre parcels to mixed use parks.\u00a0 Most of the expensive infrastructure for the golf course\u2014the clubhouse, the pump station, most of the irrigation system\u2014could be preserved, but the remaining land could be soccer pitches, baseball or softball fields, beach volleyball courts, and so on.\u00a0 Dog parks and walking trails could also easily be incorporated, and users of the facilities charged fees, which might also give them access to workout facilities of the clubhouse, if any existed.\u00a0 In other words, create a hybrid mixed-use park system on the footprint of a portion of the golf course.<\/p>\n

The difficulty with this scenario from the golf operations side is that 9-hole courses are regarded as the inferior cousins to full-18 hole courses, even if the individual holes are excellent, as they presumably would be in most cases where qualified golf course design firms did the original layouts.\u00a0\u00a0 Operators typically cannot charge the equivalent of half of an 18-hole green fee for a 9-hole round, or for an 18-hole round that involves two trips around the same 9.\u00a0 The perception that 9-hole courses are not \u201creal\u201d courses persists, even though the very existence of 9-hole course addresses one of the central issues the golf industry faces as rounds decline: that golf is a time bandit, taking five or six hours for an 18-hole round, especially in you factor in travel to and from the course.\u00a0 A 9-hole round makes more sense for most people in the prime of life, when work and families are higher priorities than recreation, even though golf is an excellent form of exercise if players walk.<\/p>\n

Courses that now seem quite urban at one time were in the far distant streetcar suburbs .\u00a0 Portland Golf Club, for example, which hosted the first post-WWII Ryder Cup and is still one of the best private courses in the Pacific Northwest, built dormitories in its clubhouse because members could ride the trolley right to the course, play a round of golf after work during the long days of summer, then spend the night at the clubhouse before heading off to work and then eventually home.\u00a0 That sort of arrangement was common, but the ease of driving and the spread of automobile culture eliminated the need for overnight rooms in a golf course clubhouse.<\/p>\n

New York and San Francisco are the only cities I know of where golfers routinely take public transportation to the golf course, although some of Chicago\u2019s munis encourage golfers to take the bus. New York is the beau ideal <\/em>of the walkable city in America, according to Speck.\u00a0 Only 45% of New Yorkers own cars, and only 30% of those car owners use them to commute to work.\u00a0\u00a0 Portland is trying to emulate New York, but without the public transportation infrastructure.\u00a0 Still, it would be possible to take public transportation to at least two of Portland\u2019s munis, Eastmoreland and Heron Lakes.\u00a0 Portland\u2019s light rail Max line has a station next to the Expo Center, which is just under a mile and a half from the Heron Lakes clubhouse.\u00a0 A free shuttle during peak hours might encourage golfers to at least consider taking the train to the links.\u00a0 Binding the city\u2019s golf courses more tightly to public transportation might reintegrate golf into Portland\u2019s civic life, where it was once firmly entrenched.<\/p>\n

The accidental experiment in freeway removal conducted in San Francisco when the Embarcadero Freeway collapsed in the 1989 earthquake showed that getting rid of the freeway enhanced San Francisco\u2019s already appealing urban texture in numerous measurable ways, such as attracting shops and apartments and providing higher tax revenues.\u00a0 \u00a0People found safer ways to travel on \u201csurface streets,\u201d but they also used public transportation and sought housing closer to work.\u00a0\u00a0 Cities in the East Bay suffered the most in the financial meltdown<\/p>\n

Portland is a paragon among American cities, Speck argues, because its politicians, planners and citizens understand the broader benefits of policies that encourage walking.\u00a0 \u00a0Portlanders pay attention to trees, to bike lanes, and to public transit.\u00a0\u00a0 It\u2019s relatively easy to live comfortably here and not own a car.\u00a0 Portland\u2019s not New York, but its ambiance is closer to Copenhagen\u2019s or Amsterdam\u2019s than it is to Detroit\u2019s or, heaven forbid, Beijing\u2019s.\u00a0 Mayor-elect Charlie Hales is among the enlightened walking advocates quoted by Speck.\u00a0 There are also numerous tips of the hat in Walkable City<\/em> to The Oregonian\u2019s Jeff Mapes, author of Pedaling Revolution<\/em>, which Speck calls \u201cthe seminal book on urban cycling.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Biking works best in tandem (so-to-speak) with walking, not as a separate realm.<\/p>\n

Walmart may get blamed for destroying the commercial cores of small towns, but Speck\u2019s analysis suggests that the enthusiasm of traffic engineers for speeding motorists through downtowns was the real killer.\u00a0 Thoroughfares that once welcomed shoppers with curbside parking and pleasant sidewalks under a shaded canopy were converted, in Speck\u2019s stinging phrase, into \u201cautomotive sewers.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 They welcomed cars, not shoppers.\u00a0 Restoring walkability is the antidote to the dull, eviscerated cores left over from failed experiments with pedestrian malls, one-way grids, and elevated freeways.<\/p>\n

The crucial insight into what makes a city safe to drive, cycle and walk in at the same time came from a counter-intuitive Dutch traffic engineer named Hans Monderman.\u00a0\u00a0 We\u2019ve all experienced the effect of a power-outage on traffic.\u00a0 During blackouts drivers creep towards intersections, and watch other cars carefully before proceeding.\u00a0\u00a0 Monderman built this into a theory based, as Speck notes, on two \u201cinterrelated concepts: naked streets <\/em>and shared space.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 The naked street has no stop signs, signals or stripes\u2014it announces to every driver, pedestrian and cyclist: watch out.\u00a0 \u201cShared space\u201d is a complement of the \u201cnaked street\u201d\u2014it eliminates all curbs, sidewalks, and barriers.\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThe goal,\u201d Speck writes, \u201cis to create an environment of such utter ambiguity that cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians all come together in one big mixing bowl of humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

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