When a golf course sits on valuable land, the question of what happens to that property rarely stays a question about golf for long.
East County confronted that question at Cottonwood Golf Club in Rancho San Diego, near El Cajon, where a proposal would have turned roughly 200 acres of the course into a 10-year sand-mining operation, with reclamation to follow. After months of review and public debate, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors rejected the project unanimously in September 2025. Traffic, noise, air particulates, aesthetics, and fit with the surrounding neighborhood all came up along the way.
Cottonwood is a preview of a question San Diego County will likely keep running into: when a golf course becomes a candidate for something else, how do you weigh what it already provides against what might replace it?
That’s not an abstract question here. The city of San Diego owns 11 golf-course properties. Eight are leased out to private or nonprofit operators, and the city runs the other three itself—Balboa Park, Mission Bay and Torrey Pines.
The leased courses alone take up 868 acres. A City auditor performance audit released in February 2026 found that those courses brought in about $34 million in revenue for their operators in fiscal year 2025, while the city collected roughly $3.7 million in rent. The audit’s conclusion was blunt: the city has room to manage this portfolio better, whether the goal is more revenue or more public benefit.
That number changes the conversation.
A golf course shouldn’t be treated as untouchable just because it’s always been a golf course. But its worth also shouldn’t be reduced to whatever housing, retail, or mining output could theoretically fit on the same acreage instead.
There’s a third question worth asking: what is the property already worth, as it stands right now?
That value shows up in more than one form—recreation, local economic activity, open space, environmental function, public access. When the land is publicly owned, it also shows up as direct revenue.
San Diego’s audit makes that last piece hard to ignore. The city’s golf properties don’t just generate income for the companies operating them—through lease payments, they help fund public safety, parks, streets, and libraries. The same audit projected an average General Fund shortfall of about $108 million a year through fiscal year 2031.
None of this means a golf course has to stay a golf course forever. It means any decision to redevelop one should start with an honest accounting of what’s being given up.
San Diego has already gone down this road once. The former Carmel Mountain Ranch Golf Course was approved for redevelopment into as many as 1,200 multifamily homes, alongside open space, recreation, and community commercial space. City planning documents describe a project that reshapes portions of the old 18-hole course while still preserving open space and recreational amenities elsewhere on the site.
That project is a useful reminder that this doesn’t have to be framed as golf versus housing. Redevelopment can deliver housing and still make room for parks and trails. And a course that stays a course can still deliver more public value—if its lease terms, maintenance obligations, and financial returns are actually structured to do that.
Cottonwood raises the same question from a different angle. There, the proposed replacement wasn’t housing but sand mining. The developer argued that a local sand source could ease housing and infrastructure costs and create jobs; opponents focused on what the project would mean for a residential neighborhood nearby. The county decided the use shouldn’t move forward.
Taken together, these cases point to a more useful question than “should golf courses be preserved or redeveloped?” The real question is whether communities are actually valuing the land properly before deciding what happens to it next.
That means weighing housing needs against recreation. Economic activity against environmental impact. Potential development revenue against the public value a property is already delivering.
And for golf courses the public owns, it means asking a more pointed question: is the return taxpayers are getting from this land today good enough?
Golf courses aren’t just empty acreage sitting around waiting for a better use. But they’re not exempt from scrutiny either.
As San Diego County keeps growing, these land-use fights aren’t going away. The fairest place to start isn’t with an answer about what a golf course should become.
It’s with an honest look at what the property is worth right now—and what the community stands to gain or lose by changing that.
Sean Petersen is the founder of Golf Trip Junkie, a golf travel platform helping golfers plan trips across the country. He brings firsthand insight into golf travel and the economic role golf courses play in local communities.
