The winner ended up just choosing to keep the current employees and keep operating it. Nobody, I mean nobody, wanted the land for development. It was in an era with basically no zoning either.
America is not suffering from too many golf courses being constructed. They are, rather, going extinct, and I don't really think the mass loss of green spaces and third spaces is necessarily a good thing, even though I'm not someone who enjoys playing golf and don't really spend any time at golf courses.
Maybe we could make them public green spaces and third spaces, instead of exclusive clubs?
Many golf courses are really expensive. Golf itself is dying like you said, because it's a very expensive sport
Idk. There's something like 35 golf courses where I live in Calgary and it's a city of less than 2 million people. That seems super unnecessary to me and they don't seem to be going extinct here
According to google AI, the average square footage of a Tim Hortons generally between 1000-2300 square feet, with some older locations taking up 2500 or more.
So let's assume every one of the 132 is an older location taking up 2500 square feet. That's 330,000 square feet, or 7.57 acres
According to the same AI, the smallest golf course in Calgary is:
Lakeview Golf Course: The city's smallest 9-hole executive course covers approximately 60 acres and features mostly par-3 and par-4 holes
60 acres!
Unless my numbers or math are wrong, Literally all of the Tim Hortons in the city can fit into the footprint of the city's SMALLEST golf course
These things aren't equivalent. Come on. We can use the space for golf courses for better things. :/
Edit: That's not even accounting for the fact that a single tim hortons probably serves more people in a couple of hours than many golf courses do in the course of an entire day.
That said, it would be nice if the so called sport didn’t take so much land, water etc. Especially in prime locations
Whether they actually actively oppose those things to the point of impacting building permits, that's a completely different matter. It really doesn't take much legislation to make golf courses economically unviable and force them to close, especially if you've got enough population within 30 minutes to support 22 of them (I speak from experience, I helped write a water reclamation ordinance that shut down at least one in my SoCal city)
If anyone actually bothered to talk to their local reps instead of posting internet comments about how much they "care", they'd get something done. If they don't, their care is just a fart in the wind for all the good it will do.