KINGSTON, Jamaica. Golf is usually filed under sport, leisure or tourism. It is better understood as a land use, and one of the largest private land uses in the suburbs of the rich world. In the United States alone, golf facilities occupy about 2.13 million acres, an area equal to roughly four fifths of the whole of Jamaica. Around the world, the game holds land in some of the most valuable places people want to live: the edge of Hong Kong’s New Territories, the coast of Singapore, the hills above Montego Bay and, in Kingston, 128 acres of government land on Constant Spring Road.
That land is now contested almost everywhere. Hong Kong planned 12,000 public flats on 9.5 hectares of its oldest course and has lost twice in court. Singapore is taking back golf leases one by one, for housing, schools and its airport. Since 2006 the United States has lost, net of openings, about 2,200 courses, and many closed sites have been sold for development. Jamaica is taking a different path, preparing to protect its best known urban course as green space.
This investigation sets out how much land golf holds, who owns it, what it does to the value of the homes beside it, and what the world’s fights over fairways mean for a country with 11 courses, a housing shortage and a capital that is short of public green space.
A Country the Size of Most of Jamaica
The most careful count of golf land anywhere comes from the Golf Course Superintendents Association of America, which surveys its members on how they use their property. Its most recent land use report, based on 2021 data and published in 2023, projected that the country’s 13,167 golf facilities covered 2,131,838 acres. That is about 8,630 square kilometres. Jamaica’s total area is 10,991 square kilometres.
The median 18 hole facility in the survey occupied 146 acres, a figure that has not changed since 2005. About 62% of that land is maintained turf; natural areas such as woodland and wetland make up roughly 18%. The industry is shrinking, not growing. Total golf acreage fell 12% from 2,421,605 acres in 2005, and the number of facilities fell from 14,969. Water use has fallen faster: the same association reported in December 2025 that US courses applied a projected 1.63 million acre feet of water in 2024, 31% less than in 2005.
The League Table
The R&A, golf’s governing body outside the United States and Mexico, publishes the only consistent global census. Its 2021 edition of Golf Around the World counted 38,081 courses at the end of 2020, spread across 206 of the world’s 251 countries. The concentration is extreme. The United States had 16,156 courses, 42% of the global total. Japan and the United Kingdom followed with just over 3,100 each. The report described England as the most saturated golf country, with a course for every 22.8 square miles.
| Rank | Country | Courses |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | United States | 16,156 |
| 2 | Japan | 3,140 |
| 3 | United Kingdom | 3,101 |
| 4 | Canada | 2,564 |
| 5 | Australia | 1,584 |
| 6 | Germany | 1,054 |
| 7 | France | 811 |
| 8 | South Korea | 810 |
| 9 | Sweden | 650 |
| 10 | China | 617 |
| 11 | Spain | 493 |
| 12 | South Africa | 477 |
| Jamaica | 11 |
Course counts flatter small countries and hide land. A nine hole course in Sweden and a 7,000 acre resort estate in the Dominican Republic each count once. That is why the land figures matter more than the rankings, and why so few countries can produce them.
Boom, Bust and the Bulldozer
American golf was built in a single generation of optimism. The National Golf Foundation, the industry’s research body, has recorded that the two decades before 2006 added 4,567 courses, measured in 18 hole equivalents, an increase of 44%. Much of that supply was built to sell houses, with fairways threaded through subdivisions as a marketing device.
Then the arithmetic turned. Since 2006 the foundation counts a net loss of about 2,200 18 hole equivalents, roughly 13% of supply, even after more than 550 new openings. In 2020 alone the net decline was 169. Figures from the research firm IBISWorld put closures at nearly 1,500 courses and country clubs since 2014. A closed course near a city is often the largest undeveloped parcel for miles, which is why developers buy them. It is also why neighbours fight them: the original deeds of many golf communities restrict the land to open space, and California’s attempt in 2022 to fund conversions of golf courses into affordable housing, Assembly Bill 1910, which covered publicly owned courses, did not become law.
Elsewhere the retreat has been ordered from above. China banned new golf course construction in 2004, when it had fewer than 200 courses. By 2017 it had 683, and state media reported that 111 had been closed to conserve land and water. In Japan, where courses built during the 1980s bubble outlived their members, operators have converted abandoned layouts into solar farms.
Hong Kong: 12,000 Flats and a Moth Count
No fight over golf land has been more revealing than the one at Fanling. The Hong Kong Golf Club’s course in the northern New Territories covers 172 hectares in a city where public housing applicants wait years for a flat. In 2023 the government took back 32 hectares of it and set aside 9.5 hectares of the Old Course for public housing, enough under its plans for 12,000 flats. The Director of Environmental Protection conditionally approved the environmental impact assessment in May 2023.
The club went to court. On 2 December 2024 Mr Justice Russel Coleman quashed the approval in a 218 page judgment. The club had argued that the assessment recorded one species of bat where there should have been 15, and 38 species of moth where there were at least 729. The judge’s decisive finding was procedural: the public had been consulted on only part of the final report, which breached the Environmental Impact Assessment Ordinance. On 31 August 2026 the Court of Appeal dismissed the government’s appeal. On 24 September the government said it would not take the case further and would review the project’s scale and timetable.
The government’s case was simple: 9.5 hectares is about 5.5% of the course, in a city short of land for homes. The club’s case was that the site is ecologically rich, that the assessment was deficient and that the course underpins Hong Kong’s place in international sport. The club won in court. The government still holds the land and says it is assessing how the ruling affects the project’s scale and timetable.
Singapore Takes Its Land Back
Singapore has avoided Hong Kong’s courtroom battles by relying on a tool Jamaica also has: the state owns the land and leases it. When a lease expires, the government simply declines to renew it. The National University of Singapore counts 22 golf courses in the city state in 2001; the Ministry of Law said in July 2025 that 16 remained. The 48 hectare Keppel Club site, whose lease ran out at the end of 2021 with a short extension to 2023, is being redeveloped with about 9,000 public and private homes.
More are scheduled. Mandai Executive Golf Course’s tenancy ends on 31 December 2026 and its land goes to the Ministry of Education. The leases of Warren Golf and Country Club and Orchid Country Club expire in 2030, and both sites are earmarked for housing. Tanah Merah Country Club’s Garden course follows in 2035, for uses supporting Changi Airport. Marina Bay Golf Course closed in June 2024. Twelve courses will remain.
The densities differ enormously. Fanling’s plan worked out at about 1,260 flats per hectare; Keppel’s at under 190. In California, the Irvine Company’s plan to replace the Oak Creek golf course with 3,100 homes was revised in January 2026 to fewer homes plus a 50 acre nature park. Residents had already begun a citizen initiative to protect the city’s open space, and the company stresses that the course is private land.
What a Fairway Is Worth to the House Next Door
Developers build golf communities because buyers pay for the view. The best known study, by Sarah Nicholls of Michigan State University and John Crompton of Texas A&M University, published in the Journal of Sport Management in 2007, examined 305 sales in the Pebble Creek subdivision of College Station, Texas. Homes on the course sold for about 26% more than comparable homes away from it, and prices fell by roughly $8 to $9 for every foot of distance from the club entrance.
The same study carries a warning. Real estate marketing often claims golf frontage adds 40% to 75% to a home’s value; the authors traced those figures to a single study. Peer reviewed estimates cluster far lower, and none of them is Jamaican. A premium also depends on the course staying open. When a course closes, the premium can turn into a fight over what replaces it.
Myth Check: Does England Give More Land to Golf Than to Homes?
Few housing statistics have travelled as far as the claim that golf takes up more of England than housing does. In January 2014 a golf trade publication reported that courses cover about 2% of England, some 270,000 hectares, roughly twice the 1.1% that official figures attribute to domestic buildings. The calculations were by the housing commentator Colin Wiles, whose earlier estimate had been taken up by the charity Shelter.
The number does not survive arithmetic. Two thousand courses at 110 acres each come to about 0.68% of England, a point a reader made under the original article. In June 2014 the BBC Radio 4 programme More or Less concluded that Shelter had overestimated by a factor of two and that England used about twice as much land for housing as for golf. Shelter accepted that its estimate was imperfect but pointed out that the BBC’s map data were themselves incomplete, and that the deeper problem was the absence of any public register of who uses land for what. Both points stand. Golf uses a great deal of land, but on the best available evidence not more than England’s homes.
The Caribbean Course Map
In the Caribbean, golf is rarely a suburban amenity. It is resort real estate. The R&A counted 35 courses in the Dominican Republic, 22 in Puerto Rico, 13 in the Bahamas and 11 in Jamaica. The best known example is Casa de Campo at La Romana, a 7,000 acre resort whose Teeth of the Dog course, designed by Pete Dye, opened in 1971 on land that grew out of the sugar economy.
Jamaica follows the same pattern. Rose Hall Developments, the company built by the late American entrepreneur John Rollins, who bought the Rose Hall plantation in the 1960s, controls about 7,000 acres and owns the Cinnamon Hill course, opened in 1969, and the White Witch course. When it launched its Founders Village homesites, lots of three to four acres overlooking the course were marketed at an average of US$500,000 an acre. The Tryall Club in Hanover spreads over 2,200 acres, with nine of its 18 holes beside the sea. Half Moon began in 1954 with 35 acres of Rose Hall shoreline and grew to about 400, with a course by Robert Trent Jones Sr. In each case the course is the centrepiece of a land holding many times its size.
Jamaica’s Public Fairways
The less familiar story is that some of Jamaica’s best known courses sit on public land. The Constant Spring Golf Club occupies 128 acres of government owned land in St Andrew under a lease dating from 1920, which requires the club to pay the property tax. In 2021 the Gleaner reported that the club owed about J$22 million in arrears for the seven years to 2017. The Land Taxation Relief Board had granted a 50% waiver, and its order cited 2017 unimproved values of J$210 million and J$4 billion for the land. Tax Administration Jamaica sued, and in 2021 a Parish Court ordered payments of about J$4.6 million and J$4.9 million over 36 months. The Court of Appeal allowed the club’s appeal in September 2022, set those orders aside and sent the matter back to the Parish Court on a narrower question; its written reasons followed in March 2023.
In 2025 the Government announced a different kind of decision. On 27 May 2025 Matthew Samuda, then the minister with responsibility for the environment, told the House of Representatives that the course would be declared a Forest Management Area and kept as green space whether or not it remains in golf. On 29 April 2026, as Minister of Water, Environment and Climate Change, he said the declaration was well advanced and the order was at the printing office awaiting gazetting.
Across the Rio Cobre plain, the Caymanas Golf and Country Club sits on about 141 acres owned by the Urban Development Corporation. In 2017 the state agency, after running the club itself for 19 years, leased it for ten years to Caymanas Acquisition Group, whose directors were listed as Peter Chin and Robert Chin, at a reported rent of $12 million a year and with $30 million in promised upgrades. The operator has since added a wedding venue and a cheaper membership option as its members age, and faces a lease review with the corporation on 1 April 2027. The surrounding Caymanas Estate is one of the most active development zones in the country. The 18 hole course at Runaway Bay is also government owned and was leased to the hotel beside it.
Jamaica’s golf history runs deep. The Manchester Club in Mandeville, founded in 1865 and now home to a nine hole course, is believed by the Jamaica National Heritage Trust to be the oldest surviving club in the western hemisphere. The Jamaica Golf Association marked its centenary in 2025.
Why There Is No Honest Count of Jamaica’s Golf Land
No Jamaican agency publishes the total area under golf. Course acreage appears only in scattered places: a newspaper report on a lease, a tax dispute, a resort’s marketing. Many courses sit inside larger holdings, so the land counted depends on where the fairway ends and the villa lots begin.
A rough estimate is possible. Applying the American median of 146 acres for an 18 hole facility to the R&A’s count of 11 Jamaican courses gives about 1,600 acres, or about 6.5 square kilometres, which is about 0.06% of the island. The two Kingston area courses with published figures, at 128 and 141 acres, are consistent with that order of magnitude. This is an estimate, not a measurement. It excludes the estates around the courses, which are far larger, and it treats the nine hole Manchester course as if it were full size.
What This Means for Jamaica
The comparison with Asia is instructive because the scales are so different. Jamaica’s golf land is small. Its significance lies in location. Constant Spring’s 128 acres are in the corporate area, where developable land is scarce and expensive. Purely as arithmetic, at Keppel Club’s density the site would hold roughly 9,700 homes. That is not a proposal anyone has made, and it is the option the Government is moving to close off.
There is a serious case for that choice. Kingston has few large green spaces; Hope Gardens, among the largest, covers about 200 acres. A course protected as forest would keep trees, absorb rainfall in a city that floods, and stay open land for future generations, which is the argument the minister made. The counter argument is about who benefits. A members’ club on public land serves a small number of people, and a Forest Management Area does not by itself make it a public park. The club, for its part, has argued that falling membership and the pandemic strained its finances, and it secured a partial tax waiver and won a procedural appeal. The question for the declaration is whether it will widen public access or simply preserve the present arrangement.
For Caymanas the decision point is closer. The 2027 lease review will determine whether the land stays in golf, how much the state earns from it and whether part of it is drawn into the estate’s wider development. For buyers, the lessons are practical. A golf view can add value, but international evidence suggests far less than marketing claims, and it is worth checking who owns the course, how long its lease runs and whether the deed protects the land as open space.
The Long View
Golf courses look permanent. They are not. In Singapore they last as long as their leases, in China as long as the state allows, and in the United States as long as their members pay. Hong Kong has shown that even a government with a housing crisis cannot simply build over a fairway without doing the environmental work properly. Jamaica has taken a different path, moving to protect its most valuable urban course as green space rather than build on it.
A fairway is land waiting for a decision. Jamaica has signalled its decision at Constant Spring, though the order is not yet gazetted. The harder question is whether that green space will one day be open to the city that owns it.
Visit our YouTube Community ↗