No, selling public lands won’t solve America’s affordable housing crisis

Zealots have spent decades trying to take away America’s public lands to make a buck. Now, they are betting that exploiting the nation’s critical need for affordable housing will finally do the trick. 

It’s a sucker bet, so don’t fall for it. The odds against the nonsensical plan are huge, but if it is successfully sold as a housing “solution,” the owners of those lands — the people of the United States — will lose. Access to precious public lands is part of our history and culture, and it must be defended.

It should be no surprise to Wyoming voters that the three members of the state’s congressional delegation are all-in on this dangerous gamble. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis and Rep. Harriet Hageman have never seen a plan to sell off federal public lands they wouldn’t support.

Yes, the country has a housing crisis. But the most effective ways for states to make more affordable housing available is to create new dedicated funding for local and state housing trust funds, and to pass tax increment financing legislation to make it less expensive to develop affordable housing in blighted areas. Cities can pass new zoning ordinances that don’t restrict multi-family residences. 

The idea that the problem can be fixed by selling or leasing hundreds of millions of acres of federal lands to developers not only isn’t feasible, it’s a dishonest scheme to win congressional and public support to strip away our Western heritage.

The attack is being waged on multiple fronts. Earlier this month, Barrasso and Lummis helped defeat a Senate budget amendment that would have blocked using public land sales to balance the nation’s books.

It’s part of a new Republican initiative to have Congress study selling public land for affordable housing, using money from the sales to help the Trump administration pay for providing tax breaks for the wealthy. The American Enterprise Institute claimed selling off public lands could generate $100 billion in federal revenue.

Last year, Barrasso and Lummis co-sponsored a bill authored by a leader of the anti-public lands movement, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah. It’s called the Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter (HOUSES) Act.

Lee’s bill lacks accountability for new owners of public land to use it for affordable housing. It calls for the lands to be sold for below market value — how far below is a question the bill doesn’t answer.

Hageman may be even more rabid about getting rid of public lands than Wyoming’s two senators. She was a strong backer of Utah’s lawsuit last year that sought to turn over 18 million acres of federal land to the state. Hageman signed a friend of the court brief on behalf of Utah, but it apparently didn’t sway the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled against the misguided land grab.

Hageman hopped on the far-right Republican bandwagon early to work for the transfer of federal lands to state and local governments as a way to ease the affordable housing crisis. In January 2023, Wyoming’s new congressperson told a Jackson Hole town hall that affordability and inequality issues will always exist if the community remains “landlocked,” and suggested the town look at nearby federal lands as a possible solution.

A new analysis of the HOUSES Act by the Center for American Progress is a damning indictment of a bill that ignores the inherent flaws obvious to anyone who lives in the West and knows anything about the housing crisis.

The center noted that the 10 Western states with the most Bureau of Land Management property — including Wyoming, with 18 million acres — have “much less than 1%” located within 10 miles of the states’ significant population centers. That’s even before considering whether those lands are appropriate for sale and suitable for development. 

For public land far from developed areas, there’s no existing infrastructure that’s necessary for housing development, like roads, water, sewage systems and power. It’s ludicrous to believe developers with historically tight profit margins, and who aren’t building affordable houses now because of the high cost of infrastructure, would take on such projects in extremely remote locations.

Yet that’s the sales pitch behind another ploy to use public lands for affordable housing recently unveiled by the Trump administration. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner announced an initiative for a task force to inventory “underutilized federal lands” in places with the largest housing needs.

Politico reported the officials told a whopper when they claimed “much of” the more than 500 million acres of public lands managed by the Interior Department is suitable for residential use. That’s simply not the reality of where these lands are located.

Burgum and Turner promised their departments will focus on housing affordability, and it won’t be a “free-for-all to build on federal lands.”

But it’s difficult to take this effort seriously when the Trump administration has stalled at least $60 million of HUD funding earmarked for affordable housing development, and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency reportedly has plans to slash 80% of the staff of HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development. 

Environmental groups have properly panned the plan.

“Trump’s latest gambit to privatize our cherished public lands is faker than his spray tan,” the Center for Biological Diversity’s Randi Spivak told the AZcentral news website in Arizona. “This ill-conceived plan will do nothing to comprehensively address affordable housing needs in this country. Instead, it’ll encourage exurban sprawl and destroy the open spaces that belong to every American.”

Meanwhile, the Center for American Progress painted a disturbing picture of what the HOUSES Act may do if it passes. The group said unique public lands in areas with high scenic or recreational value (Jackson Hole springs to mind) would be very attractive to developers of vacation properties.

“The result would be a system where treasured public lands could be privatized and developed into second or third homes for the wealthy, pricey short-term rentals, or other housing developments, with almost no guardrails,” the center predicted. Of course, the residents of those new developments would inevitably bombard the Wyoming Legislature with complaints about high property taxes on vastly discounted land.

But an even worse possibility was raised by the organization, which pointed out the bill would allow investors “to scoop up valuable lands under the pretense of developing housing, sit on them for 15 years, then sell them off for any use … private golf courses, members-only fishing clubs, or industrial mining operations.”

There are ways the federal government can judiciously use federal land for real affordable housing projects. Last October, former President Joe Biden’s administration sold 20 acres of federal land at $100 per acre near Las Vegas for an affordable housing project. Clark County will develop the land into 215 single-family homes to be provided for households that make no more than $70,000 a year. And none of the $2,000 the feds reaped from that productive sale went to tax breaks for the rich.

Whatever happened to seeing the value of public lands for hunting, fishing and recreation, and keeping natural landscapes intact to safeguard clean air, water and wildlife habitat? Public lands are the backbone of Wyoming’s tourism economy, which generated an estimated $4.8 billion in 2023. We can and should solve the affordable housing crisis, but there are more sensible and effective solutions than selling a critical shared resource to the highest bidder.