What happened at Walden Lake Golf Community in Plant City?

Walden Lake was a 36 hole country club in Plant City, started in the 1970s and built homes up through the 2000s. Had olympic sized pool, tons of tennis courts, nice restaurant (for Plant City at least), and a very interesting golf course.

Anyways, the Country Club was its own separate business from the community which is not uncommon, and ran into major financial problems in 2013 and was going under.

The homeowner’s association held a meeting and the basic proposition was (this is from my memory), ‘if everyone chips in $20 / month we can revitalize and save the country club’. To which the response was “I don’t chase a little white ball around a field so I ain’t doing it.’

So the golf course closed, the weeds grew up to waist and shoulder heights, and property values lost about $30,000 – $50,000 in just a few months.

Since then, the country club and course has changed hands between developers, some of which have gone bankrupt and then had to go to auction, the city had to step in and mow the fields to keep the rodent population under control and fined the developer for codes violations for not maintaining for YEARS, the clubhouse was demolished, and the pool is a algae ladened mosquito pit. And much of this is visible from the primary road in and out of the neighborhood because, well, golf courses sell the neighborhood.

Oh and the plans of the developers aren’t to rebuild the golf course. It’s to build more houses and commercial shopping….. which the residents have been fighting tooth and nail to prevent.

So anyways, for $20 a month all of that could have been avoided, and they could have maintained the primary feature that drew the owners there in the first place.

There’s a similar situation playing out at Pebble Creek in New Tampa, where a course was bought by Ace Golf and sold off in chunks (they sold the driving range 10 years ago or so FFS), neglected for years (tee boxes were literally sand), and now it’s been sold to a developer wanting to turn it into houses.