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When Golf Courses Go Wild

October 26, 2024 Josh Kozelj, The Tyee. , , , ,
In the fields beside a suburban lake on Vancouver Island, relics from a past life are hidden in plain sight. The land, formerly the home of a nine-hole golf course for more than 50 years, is no longer doused with water every day or mowed at 4 a.m. — yet remnants of its former state still exist. A sand trap now serves as a children’s play pit, littered with Tonka trucks and toys. The fairway, once cut to under an inch, has grass up to shin height and rows of flowers. Old golf greens have been turned into campgrounds. The transformation is par for the course, says Jason Cole, co-CEO of Power to Be, a registered charity that took over the property in Saanich, B.C., seven years ago from a couple who wanted to lease their roughly 80 acres of land.

‘Business Improvement Districts’ Privatize Policing Of Public Space

October 12, 2021 Tyler Walicek, Truthout. , , ,
Woven into the municipal fabric of the U.S. is a little-known mechanism of privatization and corporate control: the Business Improvement District (BID). In hundreds of urban centers, invisible borders designate zones wherein local governments have granted control of the commons to private interests. Within the bounds of a BID, its corporate operators are empowered to contract for-profit companies to clean streets, make aesthetic and tourism upgrades and, more insidiously, enforce “security” in collaboration with police. In practice, this often results in the exclusion and harassment of populations that businesses find “undesirable” — anyone that is perceived as a threat to consumer activity and profit, and especially the unhoused.

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