Illinois
Golfing in Illinois
Today’s story is the answer to the August 2024 puzzler.
The suburbs north and west of Chicago contain golf courses—lots of them. At least ten courses dot the landscape in the Landsat 8 image above, captured by the OLI (Operational Land Imager) on June 14, 2024. The image below shows a broader view of the same image, with dozens of courses visible.
The short grasses in the fairways appear as the caterpillar-shaped light-green features flanked by the darker greens of the rough—often tall fescue or other grass varieties that are allowed to grow to a greater height. In satellite imagery, many courses are speckled with bright and dark patches, the water and sand hazards that golfers avoid.
Despite the large number of golf courses in this part of Cook County and in the region more broadly, other U.S. metro areas have an even higher density of courses per capita. The Naples-Immokalee-Marco Island area in southwestern Florida ranks especially high, according to one analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data. Florida is also the state with the most golf courses in total (1,262), according to the National Golf Foundation. That’s 31 percent more than California, the state with the second-most courses. Outside the U.S., only three countries have more than the state of Florida: Japan, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
But there’s one other way this part of Illinois stands out that golfers will appreciate. It’s home to the village of Golf, a small community of 160 households west of Glen View Club, one of the oldest 18-hole courses in the United States. The local train station—and later the village—were named Golf, in part because Albert Earling, a member of Glen View Club and the president of the Chicago, Milwaukee, and St. Paul Railroad company, had the company establish a special train station where he could unhitch his private train car from trains going north before hitting the greens, according to Golf Magazine.
Though numbers have declined in recent decades, the U.S. still had around 16,000 golf courses as of 2024, or about 42 percent of the world’s total. The game requires a large amount of space compared to other sports—about five times more per player than doubles tennis and 37 times more per player than basketball.
All those golf courses cover about 2 million acres, or less than 0.1 percent of the U.S. land surface area. That’s still an area larger than the state of Delaware and more than all the land used to raise Christmas trees, according to an analysis of U.S. land use conducted by Bloomberg. For comparison, the amount of land devoted to feeding livestock, the largest use of land in the U.S., spanned 781 million acres, or 41 percent of the contiguous U.S., the analysis concluded. The analysis was based, in part, on the National Land Cover Database, which is built on satellite observations from the Landsat program, a series of Earth-observing missions jointly managed by NASA and the U.S. Geological Survey.
NASA and the sport of golf have intersected in intriguing ways over the decades. NASA’s honing of an innovative type of threading technology in the 1980s to make screws on the International Space Station extra resistant to vibration eventually led to a sporting goods company achieving the lowest-ever center of gravity in a golf club, NASA Spinoff reported.
A famous connection to the game came in 1971, when astronaut Alan Shepherd attached a 6-iron head to a tool designed to pick up lunar rock samples and hit two golf balls from the surface of the Moon. Shepherd shanked the first shot into a nearby crater but hit the second ball more solidly, propelling it “miles and miles and miles,” the astronaut joked at the time. Three decades later, image restoration by science writer Andy Saunders worked out the exact distances that each of Shepherd’s “moon shots” flew: 24 yards (22 meters) for ball number 1 and 40 yards (37 meters) for ball number 2, Saunders reported in a story for the United States Golf Association.
How far could a golfer theoretically hit a golf ball on the Moon if they were unencumbered by a space suit, like Shepherd was? “If 2016 PGA champion and space enthusiast Jimmy Walker replicated his Earthbound ball speed of 185 miles per hour on the Moon, and used a club that would ensure a 45 degree launch angle, it would travel 2.62 miles (4,611 yards) and stay in the air for more than one minute,” Saunders wrote. “Literally, ‘miles and miles and miles…’.”
NASA Earth Observatory images by Wanmei Liang, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Story by Adam Voiland.
Is housing discrimination illegal even if the action wasn’t intended?
According to the Fair Housing Act, yes.
Should the federal government go after errant housing providers in those scenarios? Well, that depends on the president.
In 2013, Barack Obama codified what’s known as the “disparate impact” rule, in other words, recognizing discriminatory practices not motivated by discriminatory intent. The Biden administration reinstated the rule. Now President Donald Trump seeks to roll it back by preventing agencies from investigating housing discrimination complaints.
Still, the disparate impact remains legal — federally and locally. And Illinois ensured extra protections by codifying disparate impact into state law. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has reduced the workforce in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and is antagonistic toward fair housing.
Let’s go back to the legal origins. In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. spent time in the city for the Chicago Freedom Movement, which protested housing segregation and slums. Part of that campaign sent Black people to real estate offices, and agents told them they had no listings. Soon after, the campaign sent white people to the same offices, and agents gave them listings. After King’s assassination in 1968, Congress quickly passed the Fair Housing Act. The civil rights law prohibited discrimination against people trying to rent or buy a home. Race, sex and national origin are among the protected classes.
Today that King campaign is called “testing,” and fair housing organizations continue the practice. They send two people — one pair Black and one pair white — with otherwise similar profiles to visit the same housing provider. The volunteers are trained to see how they are treated and report back if discrimination occurs. State and local fair housing centers do a variety of education and fight discrimination — to the chagrin of the Trump administration, which has also sought to gut their funding. To advance fair housing, HUD is a primary source of financing. Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul, along with other states, filed a lawsuit to challenge the attacks. Some contracts have been reinstated, but not every center received back money.
“A lot of our worst fears have kind of already happened. We know that it’s going to take at least a decade to rebuild the federal infrastructure to what it was before with the number of federal workers,” said Emily Coffey of the Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights. “What we had a couple of years ago was never enough. We are still one of the most segregated cities in the country. What worries me the most is that we won’t be able to sustain what we have, and rebuilding that is so much more challenging than just weathering a storm.”
To counter the political climate, fair housing groups have formed the Illinois Housing Equity Collective, which seeks $5 million from the state for fair housing enforcement. So far philanthropy has contributed to the collective.
Michael Chavarria leads HOPE Fair Housing Center, which serves DuPage and Kane counties and parts of Northern Illinois. The mixed messaging from the federal government has prevented growth and also caused rearranging their budget while waiting on reimbursements. He doesn’t want to tap into reserves to cover a bill when the federal government promised that money.
“Just last year we held over 40 events that were targeted at training individuals, be it housing seekers, housing providers, local government. We reached about 3,500 people through our online educational campaigns. We reached almost 750,000 people across Illinois. So we really aim to prevent discrimination by making sure everyone knows their rights and responsibilities. We do not want to have to sue people,” Chavarria said.
Illinois finds itself once again on the front lines of protecting residents — see reproductive, immigration or First Amendment rights. And now must add fair housing, which Trump pushed against just last week by refusing to sign a bipartisan housing affordability bill.
The reason? He first wants Congress to approve the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility, or SAVE America Act — legislation designed to create more inequity and burn democracy to the ground.
Natalie Y. Moore is a senior lecturer at Northwestern University.
A major overhaul to the Illinois justice system could be officially underway.
House Bill 3363 lays the foundation for a brand new agency, the state public defender office.
The goal is to bring more consistent legal representation for Illinois residents who can’t afford an attorney.
Joining us now to discuss the rolled-out timeline is the bill’s sponsor, State representative Dave Vella, who actually started his legal career as a public defender, before heading to Springfield.
Illinois
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