Grabbing public land in the name of housing
Have politicians finally found a way to take public land out of the public’s hands?
In the late 1970s, a group of Western Republican congressmen launched the League for the Advancement of States’ Equal Rights, the legislative arm of the Sagebrush Rebellion. LASER, as they called it, was an industry-backed reaction to increased environmental protections on federal land. The group’s solution: Simply convey those federal lands to the states in which they were located, at which point they could be sold off to the highest bidder.
LASER and the Sagebrush Rebellion were hardly the first — or last — attempts to abolish federal land. Similar efforts first emerged in the late 1800s and early 1900s, and the Rebellion’s ideological descendants have rekindled the campaign several times in the last four decades. It has failed each time, for the simple reason that most Americans don’t want to hand their land over to counties, oil and gas companies, real estate developers or livestock operations. Apparently, they would much rather the public lands remained in the public’s hands.
But now, the entire nation is facing a housing affordability crisis — one that happens to be most severe in Western states with lots of public land. And so, modern-day Sagebrush Rebels are being joined by other Republicans and even some Western Democrats in yet another push to transfer public lands to private hands, only this time they are marketing it not as an anti-federal land-management fight, but as a way to solve the housing crisis.
The Republican Party’s platform, adopted and endorsed by former President Donald Trump earlier this month, offers this proposal (with weird capitalization and all): "To help new home buyers, Republicans will … open limited portions of Federal Lands to allow for new home construction … and cut unnecessary Regulations that raise housing costs."
Platforms are by their nature short on details, so to get a little more insight into what they might intend, we can look to legislation proposed by Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican. Under his Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter — or HOUSES Act — state and local governments would be able to nominate tracts of "underutilized" (meaning not actively being drilled or grazed to death) public land for purchase. That land could then be sold to developers and, presumably, everyone would live happily ever after.
The bill — which has not yet made it very far — would require that at least 85% of the land be used for residential development, open/green space or "community amenities" such as schools, churches, fire stations or grocery stores. And the parcels would have to be developed with at least four residences per acre, apparently to satisfy Lee’s idea of density, even though that still falls well within the parameters of sprawl — the Las Vegas metro area has about 6.7 homes per acre, for example. Notably, there is no affordability mandate of any sort, meaning that a developer could cover the former public land with cookie-cutter McMansions and sell them at market rate for a fat profit, which is no help to the average working-class family.
Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo, R, has proposed a similar approach. In a March letter, he called on the Bureau of Land Management to convey 50,000 acres of public land to Clark County, home of Las Vegas, to "double the land available for development, which is currently slated to run out by 2032" and "provide for the potential construction of up to 335,000 new homes."
On average, Las Vegas-area households each consume about 130,000 gallons of water per year, meaning those 300,000-plus new homes collectively would slurp up about 43.5 billion gallons annually. Lombardo may not be aware that the Colorado River is shrinking, or that his state has already maxed out its allocation.
The Las Vegas area has already received about 30,000 acres of public land for housing and other uses under the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act (SNPLMA), a 1998 law that allowed the BLM to sell federal land around Las Vegas. Later, a provision was added allowing the BLM to sell land to local governments and public-housing authorities at below-market value to be used exclusively for affordable housing, and earlier this year the Biden administration streamlined that process — though so far, it has only disposed of about 30 acres for this purpose. Another 26,807 acres remain to be conveyed, auctioned or sold under the law.
Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Nevada Democrat, is trying to more or less duplicate the SNPLMA in the Reno area. Her bill would make nearly 16,000 acres of federal land available to be sold at fair market value, with no requirement that the housing be affordable — though some of the land —a mere 30 acres — would be made available at below-market value for affordable development.
All these initiatives are fueled by the notion that housing markets rigidly obey the laws of supply and demand. Increase the supply of land and of housing, the theory goes, and the inventory will soon surpass demand, bringing prices down. It’s a nice theory that would make sense if a home was a simple commodity, like a bushel of wheat or a pound of copper. But houses are not simple commodities, especially in the West.
While the laws of supply and demand do play a role in housing prices, this does not account for the unique dynamics of housing markets in amenities communities, or for the vagaries of human behavior, especially of those fortunate enough to have disposable cash. Nor does it account for the second-, third- and fourth-home owners, or for billion-dollar investment firms looking to profit from housing scarcity. In these places, the lack of inventory is certainly a factor in high home prices, but it’s only a minor one. The big driver is wealth inequality, which manifests as some folks’ willingness and ability to spend gobs of money to buy their own little — or gigantic — piece of Jackson, Aspen, Moab, Durango — or even Denver or Reno — versus everyone else’s inability to do the same. The problem, then, is not a lack of housing, but rather a lack of affordable housing.
Trump, Lee, Lombardo and other proponents of these efforts believe that removing public land from federal oversight and putting it into private hands will allow the invisible hand of the free market to take care of the crisis. But making housing affordable will actually require more government involvement, funding and regulation, not less.
The land-sale proposals could go a long way toward achieving the stated objective by simply adding a clause saying the land in question could be used only for affordable housing, and that the proceeds of the land sales would go to help pay for it. Yet they refuse to do that, which suggests that their campaigns are driven less by the desire to solve the housing crisis than by the even stronger desire to line industry’s pockets, just as land-transfer movements have always endeavored to do. Selling public land to developers without any restrictions will only result more market-rate sprawl, something neither the working class nor the planet nor the region’s limited water supplies can afford.
Earlier this month, I was initially dismayed to learn that the BLM was looking to sell off 20 acres in the greater Las Vegas area for more housing. Then I noted that the agency would sell the land, at well below market value, to the Clark County Department of Social Services, which would only be allowed to use it to for housing that would be affordable to those making less than 80% of the region’s median income. Plus, the plot of land is not located on the edge of the city, where more development would further expand the sprawling suburban ooze; rather, it’s actually a public inholding of sorts, surrounded on all sides by existing housing developments. If we are going to transfer public lands, this is the way it should be done. Otherwise, it’s just the Sagebrush Rebellion all over again, and we’ve already sat through more than enough sequels.
