Housing

Why Won’t Millennials Join Country Clubs?

Golf-centric clubs are on the wane, even as private membership organizations for Millennials are re-emerging in urban areas.
Couples dance at a country club in Ossining, New York, in 1956. Bettman/Getty

“Country Clubs Sell a New Image,” the New York Times announced in 1979. Below this headline, an article described a young woman showing up to a country club dressed in jeans (and on a motorcycle!) as a reflection of changing times. “[C]ountry clubs must accommodate [a new generation] in order to survive,” the paper noted, “and the accommodations—lower dues and special dances for younger members, for example—are only some of the changes being made.”

Almost 40 years later, a young woman riding her motorcycle to the country club would still be an outlier. Millennials who are burdened with loan debt often can’t buy homes, much less drop thousands of dollars on club initiation fees and dues. (Annual country-club dues run several thousand dollars on average, plus an initiation fee that’s usually no less than $5,000.)