Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance on Tuesday night reiterated his running mate’s call to ramp up housing development by opening federal lands for home building.
“What Donald Trump has said is that we have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything. They’re not being used for national parks. They’re not being used. And they could be places where we build a lot of housing,” Vance said in response to a moderator’s question at CBS News’ vice presidential debate.
Although Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz pushed back at the idea during the debate, that’s actually one of the few policy areas where the Biden administration — and his running mate, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris — have signaled at least partial agreement with Trump.
Bipartisan members of Congress in Western states — along with state and local leaders — also are eyeing some lands, such as those under the control of the Bureau of Land Management or Forest Service, as places ripe for new housing construction.
The idea has particularly taken hold in the swing state of Nevada, where 85 percent of the state’s land mass is controlled by the federal government. The state’s Republican governor and several Democratic members of Congress have all pushed the federal government to move more quickly to open up land near Las Vegas and statewide for housing development.
During the debate, Walz expressed discomfort with the idea and how it would potentially conflict with the duty to protect sensitive rangelands. He also noted that his home state doesn’t have a lot of federal lands, while many Western states do.
“I think when people hear federal lands, these are really important pieces of land,” said Walz in a somewhat rambling answer where he noted his passion for national parks and similar places, and expressed concern about treating federal lands as “commodities” for money-making developers. “I worry about this as someone who cares deeply about our national parks and our federal lands. Look, [in] Minnesota, we protect these things. We’ve got about 20 percent of the world’s fresh water. These lands protect; they’re there for a reason. They belong to all of us.”
He added: “I think there’s better ways to do this. We’ve seen it in Minnesota. We’re able to refurbish some of these houses. We’re able to make some investments, that gets people in.”
When asked about public lands and housing on Friday, before the vice presidential debate, the Harris campaign pointed to an August “fact sheet” detailing proposals her administration would take in her first 100 days to lower costs on American families, including expanding current efforts to repurpose federal lands for housing. It states Harris would “take action to make certain federal lands eligible to be repurposed for new housing developments that families can afford.”
A Harris campaign spokesperson on Wednesday declined to comment.
Despite these rare kernels of agreement across party lines, many experts warn that selling, leasing or giving away potentially thousands of acres of public lands can’t provide a quick fix to what’s been an intractable problem of rising housing costs, both for renters and homebuyers. Housing experts say the issue is largely one of supply and demand, with just not enough construction happening, particularly since the Great Recession that started in 2008, a problem often exacerbated by restrictive local zoning regulations.
Building homes on federal lands, even in Western states like Nevada, Utah and Wyoming where the federal government owns the majority of the land, won’t solve the housing crunch on its own, experts warn. One problem is that so much of the available land might not be useful, as it’s located in remote areas far removed from jobs, much less water and sewer access, roads and other infrastructure, said Alex Horowitz, director of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Housing Policy Initiative.
“I think using infill federal lands inside existing cities and towns has merit,” Horowitz said. But he added, “Pew’s research has found that the demand for and need for housing is greatest in existing cities and towns. The farther from those that housing is built, the more households’ transportation costs rise because commutes to jobs, schools, and errands can only be accomplished by car and get longer.”
What are the details?
One key open question is the type of housing that would be built on federal land under either a Trump-Vance or Harris-Walz administration. Some experts warn that failing to place specific designations or deed restrictions to ensure that the parcels include housing for middle- and low-income residents will only result in land being turned into luxury or vacation homes that don’t address the housing or affordability issue.
“I think it would be quite unwise to not have some sort of deed restrictions on those properties,” said Megan Lawson, an economist at Bozeman, Montana-based Headwaters Economics. “Because if you’re just building more luxury homes, second homes, vacation properties, it’s just going to contribute to unaffordability in these communities.”
Trump has repeatedly emphasized that he would open up public lands for housing construction with “ultra-low regulations,” as he promised during a Sept. 13 speech in Las Vegas.
Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, offered no more details about this policy suggestion during the Tuesday debate and pivoted to the Trump campaign assertion that deporting undocumented immigrants would free up housing stock.
“I do think that we should be opening up building in this country,” he said during the debate. “We have a lot of land that could be used. We have a lot of Americans that need homes.”
When asked for more information about Trump’s public lands housing strategy, a campaign spokesperson Friday pointed to a Georgia economic development speech Trump gave last week where he touted plans to “set up special zones on federal land, with ultra-low taxes and regulations for American producers” that he said would lure back domestic companies operating in other countries. Trump’s campaign has said national parks and other federally protected landscapes would not be included.
The Biden administration has emphasized addressing affordability.
In July, the Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 63 percent of the 70 million acres in Nevada, authorized the sale of a 20-acre parcel in the Las Vegas Valley at a discount — $100 per acre, well below the land’s market value — to allow Clark County to develop thousands of units that would be sold to first-time homebuyers.
At the same time, the White House outlined a broader strategy that included directing BLM and other federal agencies to determine whether they have “surplus” lands “that can be repurposed to build more affordable housing across the country.”
Kate Groetzinger, communications director for the Center for Western Priorities, said the conservation group supports the development of federal lands in targeted cases for middle- and low-income homebuyers, with an emphasis on high-density, multi-family housing.
Determining which federal parcels are suitable for affordable housing should be done on a case-by-case basis, she said. Groetzinger emphasized that she expected that this would involve evaluating “five or ten acres at a time, not tens or hundreds of thousands of acres at once.”
But Nevada Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo wants to see a more aggressive approach.
Lombardo is pushing the Biden administration to convey 50,000 acres of public land around Las Vegas to Clark County — presumably parcels already authorized by BLM for disposal through the land-use planning process — to allow for the construction of more housing. Lombardo has said that doing so could result in up to 335,000 new houses.
Nicholas Irwin, the research director at the University of Nevada Las Vegas’ Lied Center for Real Estate, noted housing costs there are on the rise.
“This is a big issue all over the state,” Irwin said, pointing to research by the university that shows all but three of Nevada’s 17 counties have seen a 50 percent increase in house prices since 2018.
But it’s particularly concerning in Clark County, home to the Las Vegas metropolitan area. Nearly 90 percent of Clark County is federally owned land, mostly overseen by BLM.
Unless the federal government is willing to part with some of this land, the state is literally land locked. Irwin and other researchers estimate that Clark County will run out of land to build homes, commercial structures or anything else within the next eight years. That kind of constraint could further jack up prices.
“The issues that we face on housing and affordability are no different than the issues that California faces,” Irwin said. “It’s just that we have this added federal lands component that makes it much worse.”
Pressure on Congress
While presidential candidates talk about housing on public land, Congress has the primary authority to authorize federal parcels to be sold or conveyed to states, local governments, private developers and other non-federal owners.
There are scores of pending bills active in the current Congress — from such politically diverse sources as Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee to Sen. Jacky Rosen, a Democrat from Nevada — to open tens of thousands of acres of federal land.
Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nev.), who has her own legislation, said there’s pressure on lawmakers to take action.
“I have spoken with countless residents in my district about the housing crisis,” Lee said in an email.
Lee and almost every member of Nevada’s congressional legislation has sponsored legislation to either ease restrictions, speed the process, or allow for the conveyance or sale of specific parcels of federal land for a variety of public purposes, including construction of affordable housing.
Sen. Jacky Rosen’s S. 3593 would open 15,860 acres around the Reno-Sparks area in northern Nevada, primarily to build more housing.
Lee’s H.R. 5443, which the full House approved in July, is meant to address a shortfall in qualified appraisers that has slowed federal land sales and transfers. An appraisal is necessary before any Interior Department parcel can be sold and conveyed.
Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez-Masto of Nevada has sponsored a companion bill, S. 3079, which has yet to receive a vote.
“Southern Nevada is facing a housing crisis that has been caused in part by a decline in housing inventory,” Lee said. She added her bill “would streamline public land transactions without spending any additional taxpayer dollars so we can speed up housing projects to help lower costs.”
Lombardo endorsed Lee’s bill in a July letter to President Joe Biden in which he urged the White House to open more federal lands in his state for housing.
Groetzinger said those efforts have merit.
But to date, Groetzinger laments, “most of the proposals from Western lawmakers don’t include safeguards to ensure the housing that is developed is actually affordable and doesn’t lead to trophy homes and suburban sprawl.”
Congress has approved legislation authorizing BLM to sell or transfer public lands to local governments or private developers. The best known example is the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act of 1998, which allows the bureau to sell lands in the Las Vegas metropolitan area deemed eligible for disposal and use the proceeds from the sales for a host of projects, including recreation, conservation and housing.
However, that process to sell or convey federal lands is slow. In nearly 30 years, BLM has used the Southern Nevada law to sell or transfer about 44,000 acres of federal land in the Las Vegas Valley; roughly 27,000 acres of land is still open for sales, leases and transfers, according to the bureau.
Before BLM authorizes a competitive auction or conveyance of land under the law, it must complete cultural and boundary surveys, appraisals and other steps. The process can take as long as 18 months to complete.
“We’re looking probably five years from BLM deciding on a parcel to sell, to all the reviews coming in, all the exchanges, the developer getting it, and the developer building on it,” said Irwin, the UNLV researcher. “By the time we actually have a house, it’s about a five-year process right now.”
As such, using federal lands for housing “is not going to have an immediate effect” on Nevada’s housing crunch, he said.
