The Los Angeles Country Club Is Henry George's Worst Nightmare

The county should seize it and turn it into a public park.

The U.S. Open (golf) began yesterday in Los Angeles. The venue is the most expensive piece of privately-held undeveloped land in the United States. That would be the Los Angeles Country Club, whose 313 acres straddle Beverly Hills and Holmby Hills. It didn’t admit Jews until the late 1970s, didn’t admit Blacks until the 1990s, and didn’t admit anybody in show business until the last few years.

The Los Angeles Country Club was founded in 1897, when Los Angeles was a backwater of about 100,000 people that was just starting to attract the attention of oil speculators. The first motion picture studio, the Nestor Motion Picture Company (pictured above), arrived on the corner of Sunset and Gower in the same year, 1911, that the L.A. Country Club situated itself in its present location. The following year the Nestor Motion Picture Company merged with Carl Laemmle’s Universal Film Manufacturing Company, which later of course became Universal Pictures. The rest, as they say, is history.

West Los Angeles grew up around the L.A. Country Club, which in the ordinary course of events would have either been purchased by L.A. County and turned into a park or developed into high-density office or apartment space. That’s because it wouldn’t have been able to afford the property taxes, which are usually assessed based on “highest and best use,” i.e., the most financially practical use of the land given its size and location. (The 19th century reformer Henry George took this principle so far as to argue that the state should tax back the full value of land because land, as opposed to whatever improvements were made to it, belonged to the public.) But in 1960 Bob Hope pushed through Proposition 6, an amendment to California’s state constitution that barred the state from assessing golf courses based on their use as anything other than golf courses. This was sold as a way to preserve green spaces for the public. Never mind that Jews, Blacks, and women (not to mention Bob Hope) couldn’t become members of the L.A. Country Club at the time, and that today you still need to cough up a $300,000 to $500,000 initiation fee. I’d like to see the place turned into a public park. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.