By the time Woods crashed his car into a fire hydrant in 2009, the golf industry was in a crisis of its own. Many Americans had lost their appetite for the sport, which began hemorrhaging millions of players<\/a> during the Great Recession and Woods\u2019s fall from grace. Thousands of golf courses built during boom times shut down<\/a> as a result \u2014 Badlands Golf Club among them.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Las Vegas, like many American cities, needed more homes to help alleviate its brutally high housing costs<\/a>. These days, Nevada needs 120,000 additional affordable homes<\/a>, but it is running out of places to build them, in part because about 85 percent of the state is federally owned, meaning there\u2019s little room left for its cities to grow or sprawl. Shuttered golf courses \u2014 which often had the advantage of being tied into existing urban infrastructure, unlike more undeveloped land \u2014 presented ideal spots for relatively low-cost development.<\/p>\n Not everyone was happy about the idea. To the ire of its affluent neighbors, the precious real estate of the Badlands Golf Club was slated for a new housing development in 2015. What came next was one of the worst land disputes in Nevada history, a decade-long legal tussle waged by the city of Las Vegas at the behest of wealthy locals. Las Vegas was forced to fork over $286 million to a developer last year \u2014 one of the largest such settlements in history, and more than the city\u2019s entire annual municipal culture and recreation budget<\/a> \u2014 for illegally denying applications and permits to build atop the Badlands, which by then sat empty, an abandoned<\/a> eyesore<\/a>. Eleven years after the fiasco started, a new developer finally began clearing the site for a new luxury housing complex<\/a> earlier this year, while Las Vegas has had to enact hiring freezes and delay municipal projects to pay off its hefty bill<\/a>.<\/p>\n Tiger Woods won his first professional golf tournament in Las Vegas in 1996. JD Cuban\/Allsport\/Getty Images<\/p>\n In cities where space is tight, underused golf courses are, in theory, ideal canvases for new housing. These huge, repurposed tracts of land can fit thousands of new units \u2014 ideally, affordable ones \u2014 alongside other amenities like parks or basketball courts smack in the middle of some of the country\u2019s most desirable and well-connected neighborhoods. This makes such developments much cheaper to build than creating a new suburb with all new roads and power lines from scratch.<\/p>\n Not every attempt to turn golf courses into housing lands is destined for financial calamity. Just last year, the city of Las Vegas approved a plan to convert a separate golf course<\/a>, the city-owned Desert Pines Golf Club, into a 1,500-unit housing complex, the largest affordable housing project<\/a> in Nevada history and a public-private partnership between the city, the Nevada State Infrastructure Bank, a private developer, and nonprofit partners. The project is a rare win for these kinds of developments, and may offer a blueprint for how they can be accomplished in the future. But even there, the challenges are still real.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone wants more housing at a regional level. Everyone acknowledges that we need more housing,\u201d said Nicholas Irwin, research director at the Lied Center for Real Estate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. \u201cBut no one wants it near them, and that\u2019s the tricky part.\u201d<\/p>\n How to turn a golf course into housing<\/p>\n Desert Pines Golf Club opened in the heart of East Las Vegas in 1996, a lush, manicured 18-hole course, peppered with over 4,000 imported pine trees<\/a>. Like nearly one in five fairways nationwide, Desert Pines was municipally owned, its pricey water needs<\/a> subsidized by Vegas taxpayers.<\/p>\n With its rolling green hills, Desert Pines was, by far, the largest contiguous green space in the mostly working-class neighborhood that surrounds it. But while golfers flocked to the course, many local residents barely even knew it was there or likely assumed it was out of their price range, said \u00c1ngeles Ramos, a local organizer with the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road Nevada. \u201cOnly the wealthy wanted it for their own purposes,\u201d she told me in Spanish, but \u201cwhat we want, what we urgently need, is more affordable housing.\u201d<\/p>\n Estimates show Las Vegas could run out of new land for development by 2032. Justin Sullivan\/Getty Images<\/p>\n There was a time when \u201cwe could just build anywhere and everywhere because the valley was underdeveloped,\u201d Irwin said, but \u201cnow, we\u2019re buttoned up against it. We are incredibly dense, because we\u2019ve basically filled up the land we have.\u201d Much of Nevada is undevelopable because the federal government has set it aside<\/a> for other purposes like recreation, which explains the state\u2019s bevy of tourist attractions like Lake Tahoe or Red Rock Canyon. But it also leaves the city with little space to build.<\/p>\n If all 16,000 golf courses in America turned all of their land \u2014 about 2.3 million acres<\/a> \u2014 into housing with the same density as Desert Pines, it would be enough space to build 22 million homes. If you applied that approach to only those courses that are, like Desert Pines was, municipally owned, then you could still build 4.3 million affordable homes, which would make an enormous dent in the nation\u2019s current shortage of about 7.2 million affordable homes<\/a>.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not to say that every golf course in every land-constrained city ought to be bulldozed to make way for new apartment buildings. Golfing, for the record, has made a bit of a comeback lately, much like its most famous star<\/a>. And even if fairways were still closing at the rate they were a few years ago, there\u2019s no way that they could solve Nevada\u2019s housing gap alone, much less overcome the shortage nationwide. But they can still help close the gap.<\/p>\n Ramos, who is among the local leaders organizing community meetings around the Desert Pines redevelopment, believes it could be transformative for the community over time. She says that in her neighborhood it\u2019s become a luxury for many families just to live alone with their spouse and kids, rather than doubling up in cramped apartments, pooling together money each month to keep up with rising costs.<\/p>\n When the Desert Pines redevelopment opens about a decade from now, it will include not just 1,500 housing units, but also a soccer pitch, walking trails, and a job training center. In East Las Vegas, the temperature often feels more than five degrees hotter<\/a> than it does in the Badlands\u2019 affluent suburbs, where residents enjoy over nine times as much<\/a> parkland per person.<\/p>\n \u201cThis project brings a lot of hope,\u201d said Ramos, who\u2019s especially excited about the prospect of more accessible, kid-friendly green spaces. \u201cWe\u2019re all human. We need equity, respect, and to live with dignity, and that\u2019s why we urgently need trees too.\u201d<\/p>\n As it turns out, you can do a lot with an old fairway. Even with all of those bells and whistles, the new development will still likely use less water<\/a> than the golf course did. And, because the plot of land is already enmeshed within the community of East Las Vegas \u2014 close to existing sewer, water, and electricity lines \u2014 it will be much cheaper to build there than it would be to try doing so on the outskirts of the city, said Antonio Berm\u00fadez, vice president of McCormack Baron Salazar, the developer working with the city and state government on the proposal.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I\u2019ve seen so far in the state of Nevada is that the political will is there,\u201d he said, though the question is, \u201chow do we make this happen not just in Nevada and the city of Las Vegas, but everywhere else where affordable housing is needed.\u201d<\/p>\n If the Badlands has become a brutal fable of bad governance and highly charged NIMBYism, then Desert Pines may prove to be the model of a golf course-to-housing project gone right.<\/p>\n It also enjoyed the privilege of being located in a welcoming neighborhood, filled with renters who could personally benefit from the project. By contrast, many other golf courses were instead built as a luxury perk embedded in master-planned communities, meaning they\u2019re surrounded by homeowners who fear that losing a recreational amenity \u2014 especially if it\u2019s replaced by less upscale housing \u2014 could affect their property value.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone wants more housing at a regional level. Everyone acknowledges that we need more housing. But no one wants it near them, and that\u2019s the tricky part.\u201d <\/p>\n \u2014 Nicholas Irwin, research director, Lied Center for Real Estate<\/p>\n Just across the street from the Badlands is another golf course, Angel Park Golf Club, built on federal land granted to the city of Las Vegas. If the city ever tried to build an affordable housing complex like the one it\u2019s planning in Desert Pines, it would almost certainly fail given the outrage with which the surrounding community reacted to a proposal for other high-end housing in their backyard.<\/p>\n Victoria Seaman, a former Las Vegas City council member, was elected in 2019 to represent the district that includes the Badlands, mid-lawsuit. Even the \u201cbig, beautiful two-acre lots\u201d the developer originally envisioned for the site, she said, were not good enough for Queensbridge, an ultra-luxury gated community abutting the course that acted as a powerful lobbying bloc during the decade-long process<\/a>, influencing the city\u2019s illegal decision to block the original property owner from breaking ground.<\/p>\n The city of Las Vegas is still paying off the total $286 million settlement it<\/a> made over its obstruction of the Badlands project, in part through funding cuts<\/a> to projects like the Desert Pines redevelopment in East Las Vegas.<\/p>\n \u201cThese were expensive homes with beautiful planning,\u201d Seaman said of the project planned for the former golf course, and yet somehow, \u201cthese very big donors in Queensbridge convinced the entire [homeowners association] that the developer would ruin the neighborhood.\u201d<\/p>\n The fight over fairways is really a fight over who gets to live where<\/p>\n The Badlands example is particularly dramatic, but it also gets at the challenges faced by similar projects across the country. Even a decade after many fairways fell into decline<\/a>, there are few other examples quite like Desert Pines, and certainly none as large. While dozens of cities \u2014 including Denver<\/a>, New York<\/a>, and Virginia Beach<\/a> \u2014 have made overtures to turn golf courses into housing in recent years, almost all such projects have been met with upheaval and fierce resistance from locals.<\/p>\n![\"Tiger](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/golf\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/gettyimages-2204707060.jpg\"\/)
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