As of 2023, there are 13 private golf courses and three public golf courses in Singapore, taking up about 1,456 ha or about 2 per cent of the total land area.
While an additional 356ha of golf course land will be taken back for redevelopment by 2030, including the Marina Bay Golf Course, there are still sizeable swathes of land left being used for golf courses.
Based on the Singapore Golf Industry Report, about 80,000 residents in Singapore play golf. This means that only about 1.4 per cent of people living in Singapore occasionally use these facilities. The other 98.6 per cent of the people are excluded from using or even taking a stroll on these sites because they are private properties.
Since golf courses take up significant amount of useable land and they are inaccessible to a large majority of the population, such land could be put to better uses, such as for housing, schools, healthcare and other amenities to serve the people.
The land currently occupied by the golf courses could yield about 250,000 to 300,000 HDB flats, even after allocating part of the land to build schools, retail premises, parks, roads and other infrastructure. The number of flats that could potentially be developed on these golf courses could provide about 12 to 16 years of public housing supply.
There are also large tracts of land in Singapore that are zoned as Reserve Sites. These include reclaimed land and other state land in various parts of Singapore. If one were to view the online Singapore Master Plan on the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) website, these Reserve land parcels are in yellow on the online map. The Reserve land is part of the government’s land bank, and can be rezoned for other uses in the future.