By the FL Innovation News editorial team · Florida Living
When a community course goes dark, homeowners absorb the loss, and Florida has no orderly way to prevent it.
Florida has spent decades building communities around golf courses while acting as though the courses themselves would somehow remain permanent.
They will not.
I own a golf course in Highlands County, and I can say plainly what most owners in my position will only say privately: the math of community golf no longer works, and it has not for a long time. Insurance and fuel costs keep climbing. Labor is more expensive. Infrastructure is aging. Deferred maintenance compounds year over year, and every hurricane adds another round of it. Meanwhile, the land under the course is often worth more cleared than kept as fairway. I am not describing a failure. I am describing the standard condition of an entire category of Florida real estate.
That imbalance is reshaping communities from Pensacola to Naples.
A community golf course is a privately owned public good. It holds up the property values of every home in the community and sets the character of the whole neighborhood. But the cost of keeping it often sits on one private balance sheet: maintenance, capital, insurance, liability, losses, while hundreds, sometimes thousands, of homeowners capture the benefit without carrying any of the risk.
That works only as long as one owner is willing to keep subsidizing everyone else’s equity. Eventually, that owner stops. Sometimes they retire. Sometimes they sell. Sometimes the numbers simply no longer make sense. When that happens, Florida has no orderly process for the community left behind. The land simply converts to its highest private use, and the neighbors who depended on it never get a vote.
The result is the same pattern repeating across the state.
A course closes. Residents panic. Developers circle. Local governments scramble. Lawsuits emerge. And everyone discovers, too late, that the centerpiece of the community was never actually protected in the first place.
This is already happening. Sometimes it works out. In Valrico, the HOA around River Hills Country Club bought the course in 2018 when an outside developer moved in, brought in a skilled team, and saved it, but that took an unusually capable board and a community that understood the stakes. More often, it does not. In Sarasota County, the former Gulf Gate Golf Course became the subject of years of redevelopment fighting before the county moved toward buying the land itself for stormwater and open space. And in West Kendall, the Calusa course that residents had every reason to believe was permanent sat closed for fifteen years before Miami-Dade commissioners, this spring, cleared a developer to build more than 500 homes on it. The protection those homeowners thought they had did not survive the day someone decided the land was worth more as houses.
None of these were isolated neighborhood disputes. They are the same structural problem surfacing in communities across the state.
This reaches well beyond golfers. Industry and appraisal data consistently show that surrounding home values can fall 20 to 30 percent when a centerpiece course shuts down and grows over. Multiply that by a few hundred homes, and the hit runs into the tens of millions of dollars, and the local property tax base that funds schools, roads, and emergency services drops right along with it. The very fiber that defined the community, often for decades, changes almost overnight.
A failed course is not simply a private business issue. It is a public economic event.
At Sebring International Golf Resort, which anchors the Spring Lake community in Highlands County, residents told us where they stand. When I surveyed them, more than nine in ten opposed converting the course to housing and understood that closure would hurt their property values. What many had not fully considered is how little actually stands between “it has always been there” and a redevelopment notice if no sustainable transition structure exists. A commercial developer has already asked to blanket those acres in solar panels.
That gap between assumed permanence and actual protection exists in nearly every golf community in Florida. That is why Florida should stop treating each closure as a surprise.
No, the state does not need to subsidize golf. But it does need a real transition framework, the same kind of proactive planning it already applies to other infrastructure whose failure spills onto the public.
Three things would do most of the work. First, a right of first refusal, so the affected homeowners get a defined, time-limited window to match a redevelopment offer instead of learning the course is gone when the rezoning sign goes up. Second, a standard financing tool a special assessment district or bond mechanism, so a community is not forced to invent its financing from scratch, the way Sarasota and Charlotte counties have had to. Third, a recognized “community recreation asset” land-use designation, so residents can take ownership of a course without paying lawyers to reinvent the structure every time.
Right now, Florida largely operates without any of those tools. Instead, every closure becomes a fire drill. Every community reinvents the process from scratch, and local governments are left reacting after redevelopment plans are already in motion, and the course has gone fallow.
The fairways at Spring Lake are still green. So are the fairways at a lot of Florida courses. But “still open” is not a plan, and it certainly is not permanent.
Florida still has time to build an orderly process before the next wave of closures, but the question is whether the state acts while communities still have options or waits until thousands more discover that one of the largest drivers of their property value was never actually protected at all. The real cost of waiting will not fall on the course owners. It will land on everyone who lives next door.By Joel Schachter | Owner, Sebring International Golf Resort
