In May 2026, members of the Los Angeles City Council introduced a proposal that would create a substantial annual parcel tax on certain nonprofit private country and golf clubs. The proposal was originally intended for possible placement before voters in November, although the city’s official council file currently shows the matter still pending, with no Council vote recorded. Supporters have framed the proposal around taxation, land value, and public revenue, while the clubs and their advocates have raised questions about the consequences for institutions occupying some of the city’s largest remaining private green spaces.
Those questions will ultimately be considered through the political and fiscal processes appropriate to Los Angeles. There are legitimate issues involving taxation, equity, public access, land use, and the competing demands placed on valuable urban property, and none of them disappears simply because the property happens to be a golf course.
The debate does, however, raise a broader institutional question that extends well beyond Los Angeles: How do we measure the value of an institution?
Public policy is necessarily good at measuring things that can be counted. Property values can be assessed, tax revenue projected, development capacity estimated, and economic activity modeled. Those measurements are useful precisely because they allow governments and communities to compare competing priorities in a common language.
Institutions create other forms of value that are much harder to place into the same equation.
Land can provide open space as well as economic value. A longstanding organization can create relationships as well as revenue. A golf course can function simultaneously as recreational property, managed landscape, habitat, stormwater infrastructure, and a physical buffer within a dense urban environment. Depending on how a course is designed and managed, research has found that golf properties can provide urban cooling, pollinator habitat, stormwater retention, and other ecosystem services, although those benefits vary and do not make golf courses environmentally equivalent to unmanaged natural areas or public parks.
The difficulty is that many of these contributions become most visible only when the underlying land use changes.
The Value of What Remains
Golf courses are often discussed primarily in terms of the game played on them. Recreation, competition, tradition, and enjoyment are certainly part of their purpose, but they do not describe everything that exists within the boundaries of the property.
A golf course is also a large landscape maintained over a long period of time. In a dense metropolitan area, the absence of buildings across that landscape has consequences of its own. Grass, trees, ponds, wetlands, and other planted areas can absorb and slow rainfall, provide habitat, influence local temperature, and interrupt the continuity of pavement and development. Research comparing golf courses with more intensive urban land uses has found measurable differences in several of these ecosystem services. At the same time, the environmental value of any particular course depends heavily on water use, chemical inputs, landscape practices, habitat management, and what alternative use is being considered.
That qualification matters because stewardship should not become a romantic term that exempts an institution from scrutiny. The existence of green space alone does not answer every land-use question, just as high assessed land value alone does not describe everything a piece of property contributes to its surroundings.
The more interesting point is that land can carry several kinds of value simultaneously.
Once that is understood, the conversation becomes more complicated than asking what the acreage could be worth under another use. It also becomes possible to ask what currently exists because the land has remained substantially open for decades, what functions would disappear if that changed, and whether those functions have value that conventional property calculations capture adequately.
That is not an argument against development. It is an argument for understanding the full nature of what is being compared.
The Social Architecture Around the Land
The same complexity exists inside the institution itself.
Private clubs are sometimes described simply as exclusive recreational organizations, and access is an entirely legitimate part of any public discussion about their place within a community. But internally, member-owned clubs also operate as long-lived social institutions. People join committees, volunteer for boards, form friendships across generations, introduce new residents to an established community, gather repeatedly around traditions, and take collective responsibility for facilities and organizations they expect other people to inherit later.
The value created by those relationships is difficult to represent on a balance sheet.
A dining room can be appraised. The relationships formed there cannot. A golf course has a land value, but the Saturday group that has played together for twenty years does not. A clubhouse can be renovated or replaced, while the traditions associated with it develop slowly through repetition and shared experience.
None of this makes private clubs unique among institutions. Churches, civic organizations, neighborhood associations, libraries, schools, fraternal groups, sports leagues, and many other organizations also create forms of social connection that exceed the economic value of their physical property.
What makes private clubs interesting in this discussion is the degree to which the physical place and the social institution reinforce one another. Members return to the same landscape, the same rooms, the same annual events, and many of the same people over long periods of time. The repetition is part of what creates meaning.
In an increasingly digital culture, there is something significant about institutions that continue to organize regular, in-person human contact. That significance is difficult to quantify precisely, and it should not be exaggerated into a claim that private clubs somehow solve the broader problem of social isolation. It is simply worth recognizing that sustained communities create value partly through relationships, and relationships resist the kinds of measurements most easily used in land-use and fiscal debates.
Health, Recreation, and the Accumulation of Small Benefits
Golf also illustrates how institutional value can accumulate through ordinary experiences rather than dramatic outcomes. For golfers who walk, a round involves several hours of physical activity spread across a large landscape. Controlled research has found meaningful fitness and health improvements from regularly walking a golf course, while other studies have explored golf as a form of physical and social activity for older adults.
Again, those benefits do not settle questions of taxation or public policy. Many forms of recreation provide exercise, and private golf is accessible only to the people permitted to use the property.
The point is narrower.
When the value of an institution is considered only through the easiest quantities to measure, many of the smaller benefits accumulated over years can disappear from the analysis. Recreation, open space, social connection, volunteer governance, tradition, and physical activity may each seem secondary when considered separately. Together, they begin to explain why people become attached to institutions in ways that cannot be understood simply by examining the underlying real estate.
This is also why discussions about longstanding institutions become so difficult when economic pressure increases. The tangible value of land is immediate and visible. Institutional value is often diffuse, shared unevenly, and accumulated across time. One can be calculated relatively quickly. The other often becomes obvious only after the conditions that created it have changed.
Stewardship and Public Scrutiny
None of this suggests that private clubs should exist outside legitimate public scrutiny. Institutions that occupy substantial acreage within major cities exist within a larger civic environment. Communities are entitled to debate taxation, land use, public access, housing needs, environmental effects, and whether longstanding arrangements still make sense under present conditions.
Private clubs should be capable of participating in those conversations without assuming that history alone provides the answer.
But communities also benefit when those debates begin with a complete description of what is actually being evaluated.
Stewardship is one part of that description.
At its best, stewardship means that temporary owners, leaders, or members recognize responsibilities extending beyond their immediate use of an asset. In a private club, that may mean caring for a landscape over generations, maintaining architectural or cultural traditions, supporting a community of members, and making decisions with the understanding that future members will inherit their consequences.
Those contributions are not automatically more important than the public interests on the other side of a policy debate. They are simply real forms of institutional value, and they deserve to be considered alongside the values that are easier to express in dollars per square foot.
Closing Reflection
The Los Angeles discussion is ultimately local, and the people responsible for that community will determine how they weigh its competing fiscal, social, environmental, and land-use considerations.
The broader question is not local at all.
Every community eventually decides, formally or informally, what kinds of institutions are worth preserving and what kinds of value count when those institutions come under pressure. Economic productivity is one measure. Tax contribution is another. Public access, housing, environmental performance, cultural continuity, recreation, and community connection may also belong somewhere in the calculation.
The difficulty is that these measures do not fit neatly together.
That is why stewardship deserves a place in the conversation. It asks us to consider not only what a property produces today or what it could produce under a different use, but what has been accumulated there over time and whether any of that value would be difficult to recreate once it is gone.
Enduring institutions often derive much of their significance from what they quietly maintain: land that remains open, relationships that deepen through repetition, traditions that survive individual participants, and structures of continuity that allow one generation to hand something recognizable to the next.
Those things may be difficult to quantify.
That does not make them valueless.
It simply means that measuring an institution requires a wider lens than measuring the property beneath it.
Markus Van Meter is a Brand Architect for private golf clubs, specializing in governance alignment, institutional identity, and long-term institutional architecture.