Residents against golf course redevelopment plans

Millcroft and Glen Abbey should be preserved as green spaces that add to quality of life

The conversion of privately owned golf courses into lucrative housing developments has become a tempting business enterprise for golf course owners turned land developers.

That’s because an urban or suburban golf course occupies prime real estate land whose transmutation into housing can yield a quicker and heftier profit than the slow grind of running a golf course business.

As a result of this profit-maximizing trend, the open spaces of golf courses have become an endangered recreational and environmental species of land.

Here in Ontario, two developers have targeted the golf courses they respectively own for partial or full demolition so they can be repurposed for residential use.

One developer is Millcroft Greens, which applied to the City of Burlington in 2021 for amendments to land-use regulations that would allow the developer to construct housing on five parcels of open spaces by reshaping the 18-hole Millcroft golf course. But some residents suspect this action represents the opening gambit of a longterm game plan to demolish the whole golf course.

The other developer is ClubLink Corp., which applied to the Town of Oakville in 2015 for amendments that would enable it to demolish the whole Glen Abbey golf course so it can build a massive mixed-use residential and commercial development.

Research indicates that communities need to protect and preserve green open spaces because they provide many benefits. For example, trees and plants mitigate the harmful effects of climate change by generating oxygen and by reducing air and water pollution. And the soil permeability of green spaces helps stormwater management by absorbing heavy precipitation that would otherwise overwhelm drainage systems and cause extensive area flooding.

Green open spaces also enhance a community’s quality of life by promoting healthful recreational activities, by supporting a biodiverse environment that connects people to nature’s ecosystems and wildlife habitats, and by providing psychological relief from stress and from the claustrophobia of housing densification. Naturally, Millcroft and Glen Abbey residents don’t want to lose all these benefits.

But residents have other justifications for their vehement opposition to these development proposals. One is that the areas where the golf courses are situated are not presently designated for residential use. Another is that the infilling of open spaces with housing typically degrades a community’s quality of life and property values. Lastly, residents don’t want their tranquil neighbourhoods disrupted by the nuisances of housing construction that will take months or years to complete.

In contention in this battle over the fate of the open spaces of these two golf courses are the ownership rights of demolitionist developers and the community rights of conservationist residents. Which rights and interests should prevail when developers attempt to enrich themselves by inflicting environmental, infrastructural, ecological, economic and recreational harm to a community?

Long ago, American Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously asserted that a person’s right to swing a fist ends where another person’s nose begins. Accordingly, a developer’s right to swing the fist of ownership rights should end where the harm to a community’s rights and welfare begins.

Currently, the fate of the Millcroft golf course’s open spaces rests with the municipality of Burlington, which will take several months to review all relevant input and reach a decision.

Contrastingly, after court jousts between the municipality and ClubLink, the fate of the Glen Abbey golf course — which the municipality had designated as a cultural heritage landscape — now rests with Ontario’s Local Planning Appeal Tribunal (LPAT) at a hearing that will start this August.

The Millcroft golf course is not as famous as the iconic Glen Abbey, which is a source of Canadian pride as a world-class course that has hosted 30 Canadian Open tournaments and has associations with legendary golfers such as Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods.

But Millcroft and Glen Abbey residents ardently view their respective golf courses as treasured amenities whose identities and fates are inextricably linked with their communities.

Consequently, these residents regard the demolition and loss of their open spaces as existential threats to the welfare of their communities.

Some Millcroft residents appear hopeful that the municipality of Burlington will reject Millcroft Greens’ development application. But some Glen Abbey residents seem apprehensive about the upcoming LPAT hearing, fearing that its outcome will be determined by narrow legal issues that will favour the developer’s ownership rights to the detriment of community rights and municipal designations.

This distrust of LPAT has galvanized a public appeal to Premier Doug Ford’s government to intervene and quash the upcoming LPAT hearing by using a Minister’s Zoning Order to protect and save the golf course from demolition.

But will Premier Ford authorize such an order, champion community and municipal rights, and rescue the Glen Abbey golf course from the jaws of extinction?

Tony Lo Presti is a former educator and a Millcroft resident.