Ahwatukee's Golf Courses: What Actually Happened to Each One

It closed in 2018 and has been barren ever since. What followed was one of the longest-running property disputes this village has seen.

In December 2021 the Club West Conservancy, a group of homeowners, sued The Edge at Club West and two Shea Homes entities. Their argument was that the recorded declarant rights over the course meant the land could only ever be a golf course or open space.

The Conservancy did not win. Judge Susanna Pineda issued a ten-page ruling dated 15 January 2026, filed on 3 February, denying every claim. The court found the homeowners lacked standing to enforce the governing documents, and that the claims were barred anyway by an earlier suit that had been dismissed with prejudice.

On 13 March 2026 the same judge made it final. The complaint was dismissed with prejudice, the Conservancy was entitled to take nothing, and judgment was entered for The Edge with no further matters pending. Shea Homes had separately been pursuing roughly $507,000 in additional legal fees and dropped that appeal.

The scale of it is worth stating plainly, because it explains why feelings in that community still run high. Fifty-one months. Five different judges. Somewhere around $1.5 million in legal costs.

Not yet, and this is the distinction that matters most if you are buying near it.

The land has an owner, a price and a proposal. It does not have permission.

The current owner is Community Harmony Coalition LLC, a group of fifteen investors, who bought it from The Edge for $2.1 million. The Edge had paid around $750,000 for it in 2019.

DR Horton is the builder proposing development now: 573 homes across roughly 162 to 167 acres at 17th Avenue and Chandler Boulevard.

That plan is not approved. It still needs a General Plan amendment, rezoning and Phoenix City Council approval, and open space, a traffic study and hillside compliance are all outstanding. Any of those is a place where a proposal can change shape or stop.

It is also worth knowing this is not the first attempt. Taylor Morrison put forward a separate plan in 2020 for 164 homes, and residents killed it over mountain views. The current proposal is more than three times that size, which tells you the objections will not be smaller.

If you are weighing a home in Foothills Club West, that is the situation you are buying into: a decided lawsuit, an undecided development, and a neighbourhood that has been arguing about it for eight years.

Yes, and this is the one people are most often wrong about, because they remember the closure and never heard about the return.

The Lakes is a 101-acre executive course that closed in 2013. After more than a decade of litigation it reopened for play, roughly nine years after it went dark.

Reopened is not the same as finished. The clubhouse has been under construction following a fire, with a temporary mobile clubhouse serving players in the meantime, and restoration work has continued on the course itself, including reseeding and Bermuda grass. As of a homeowners meeting in March 2025, points still being negotiated included liquor licensing, additional bathrooms, a maintenance shed and how many trees would be replanted after the course lost hundreds of them.

So if somebody tells you the Lakes is closed, they are describing 2019. If somebody tells you it is fully restored, they may be ahead of where it actually is. Go and look.

It is open, it changed hands, and it has had money spent on it.

Foothills Golf Club sits at 2201 E Clubhouse Drive. It is a par-72 championship course in a links style, designed by Tom Weiskopf and Jay Morrish, which is a more serious pedigree than most people realise about a course inside a residential village.

Ennabe Properties, a California family firm, bought it in late 2022 for $4.7 million. Local reporting at the time described the course as making a big overhaul under the new ownership.

The most visible addition is The Bunker, a 2,100 square foot golf lounge inside the club fitted with golf simulators, food and drink service and lounge seating. That is a genuinely different proposition from a traditional nineteenth hole, and it is the kind of thing that keeps a course busy in July when nobody wants to walk eighteen in the afternoon.

No, and mixing them up is the single most common error in coverage of this subject.

They are two separate courses at two separate addresses. Foothills Golf Club is at 2201 E Clubhouse Drive. Ahwatukee Country Club is at 12432 S 48th Street, built in 1974 to a John Bulla design, and it is a different course with a different history.

The confusion is understandable. Both are in Ahwatukee, both have "Ahwatukee" or "Foothills" attached to them in various listings, and the ownership groups around these courses overlap in ways that are genuinely difficult to follow from the outside.

I mention it because it matters when you are reading about a course near a house you are considering. An article about one is not an article about the other, and a change of ownership at one tells you nothing about the other.

Three worth knowing, and one of them is close enough to feel local.

Arizona Grand Golf Course, at 8000 S Arizona Grand Parkway, is a par-71 layout of about 6,300 yards designed by Forrest Richardson. It starts as resort golf with water on the opening holes, moves into desert target golf, and finishes up against South Mountain Park with real elevation change. Anyone who likes the mountain will recognise why that back nine is the reason to play it.

Whirlwind Golf Club at Wild Horse Pass sits just beyond Chandler and runs two eighteen-hole courses.

Ocotillo Golf Club in Chandler has 27 holes, a Golf Digest four-and-a-half-star rating, and has hosted PGA Tour events.

If golf is genuinely part of why you are moving here, those three widen the picture considerably beyond what is inside the village boundary.

Four things, and none of them takes long.

Find out which course it is. Not "the golf course", but the name and the address. Given how easily two of these get confused, a seller or a listing describing a home as being on a course is not enough on its own.

Find out whether that course is operating. Barren land, land under restoration, and a playing course are three different things to live beside, and only one of them is what most people picture.

If there is a development proposal, find out what stage it is at. Proposed, submitted, approved and permitted are four different answers. Club West is a useful reminder that a proposal can sit unresolved for years.

Read your governing documents. The Club West case turned on what recorded declarant rights did and did not allow, and on who had standing to enforce them. That is not an abstraction; it is the paperwork attached to the house. If you are unsure what governs a specific address, how Ahwatukee homeowners associations are actually structured covers why it is rarely one document.

None of the above tells you whether a particular house is a good buy. It tells you which questions to ask about it, which is the part most people skip and then regret.

If you are looking at a home that backs onto grass, or onto land that used to be grass, send me the address. I will tell you which course it is, what state that course is in, and what the paperwork attached to that specific property says. That is a phone call, not an engagement. Get in touch with Savvy Realty Group.

If you are earlier than that and still working out where in the village to look, the Ahwatukee area guide is the wider picture, and how I run a purchase covers what happens once you have found one.

This describes publicly reported facts as of August 2026 and is not legal advice. Court records, City of Phoenix planning files and the courses themselves are the primary sources, and all of them are open to you.