The West has an affordable housing crisis. Can public land help?
As calls to sell off Western public land for housing development increase, examples show it’s no silver bullet
From Senator Mike Lee of Utah to Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo, Western politicians are calling on the federal government to sell off public lands to developers. They say there’s a housing shortage in the West, but the solutions they’re calling for don’t address the real issue: affordability. This affordable housing crisis is real and is caused by a variety of factors, including poorly regulated short-term rentals, restrictive building codes and zoning, and second home-ownership. Simply freeing up public land won’t eliminate the problem, as they claim.
Senator Lee’s HOUSES Act would allow local and state governments to nominate unlimited tracts of unprotected federal public land to be conveyed by the Interior Department to state and local governments, which can then sell the lands to developers. The bill contains a meaningless density requirement (up to half an acre per home) and nothing to ensure affordability. Lee’s bill would encourage suburban sprawl on America’s public lands, while failing to bring down the cost of housing. Meanwhile, Governor Lombardo sent a letter to President Joe Biden in March 2024 calling for the conveyance of 50,000 acres of public land around Las Vegas to Clark County with seemingly no restrictions. These are not the right avenues for addressing the affordable housing crisis in the West and will only lead to more market-rate suburbs in place of nature.
Solving the West’s housing affordability crisis will require first enacting housing policies on both the local and state level that incentivize density, affordability, transit, and give long term renters a leg up over tourists. Public land can also be utilized in a targeted manner to increase the supply of affordable housing. But this must be done thoughtfully. Simply selling off public land to developers without guardrails will lower the quality of life in the West, while doing nothing to solve the affordable housing shortage faced by many Westerners.
There are currently a few ways public land can be used to build housing. The first is through the one-time sale or transfer of a specified parcel of public land to a private developer or local government, as authorized by an individual act of Congress. The second is unique to Clark County, Nevada and involves the ongoing sale or transfer of public land within a specified boundary around Las Vegas, as authorized by Congress in the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act of 1998. A third way — the long-term lease of public land to local governments for publicly-owned workforce housing development — was authorized by Congress in the 2018 Farm Bill, which expired in September 2023. These methods should be viewed as a last resort and used only after local governments have implemented reforms that free up existing housing stock and incentivize dense development.
The three examples below show how these methods work, as well as their drawbacks:
Summit County, Colorado: federal land transfer
Affordable housing is hard to come by in Summit County, Colorado — home to Breckenridge, Keystone, and Copper Mountain ski resorts. Even as far back as 2000, local governments were concerned about finding a way to provide affordable housing to working residents. In 2016, Summit County purchased a nearly 45-acre parcel of public land from the U.S. Forest Service for $1.75 million, following the passage of the Lake Hill Administrative Site Affordable Housing Act in 2014. The project is set to be the largest workforce housing site in Summit County. As of February 2024, the Lake Hill development was planned to consist of up to 825 housing units, including 60 units for senior housing, a 10,000-square-foot child care center, and a community center building. Unfortunately, the development has yet to break ground. This is due to a variety of factors, including delays related to local disagreements over density and concerns about infrastructure capacity, as well as the time it takes to create a plan for a large amount of development on previously public land. This example illustrates the downside of selling public land to local governments without plans for zoning and infrastructure in place.
Summit County, Colorado: federal land lease
The Dillon Ranger District Workforce Housing Administrative Site Lease, also located in Summit County, Colorado, is a first-of-its-kind workforce housing project on land leased to Summit County by the Forest Service. Unlike the Lake Hill project, the Dillon Ranger District project is moving forward with minimal delays. The Forest Service began removing trees from the site in June 2024 in preparation for construction, less than a year after the White River National Forest and Summit County signed a 50-year lease for the 11-acre site in September 2023. The lease was authorized by a program in the 2018 Agriculture Improvement Act, or Farm Bill, that grants the U.S. Forest Service the ability to lease administrative sites (federal land with existing facilities) to local governments. This project is the only one approved under the 2018 Farm Bill program, which expired in 2023. The project is expected to take about two years to complete and will likely include a mix of 162 rental units aimed at residents making between 80 percent and 120 percent of the area median income, which translates to a range of $62,00 to $93,000 for an individual, according to 2023 figures.
Clark County, Nevada: ongoing federal land transfer
Nevada is the state with the highest percentage of public land within its borders, and the state’s two largest cities are surrounded by public land. Las Vegas officials began to see this as a hindrance to population growth in the 1990s and lobbied their federal representatives to pass the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act of 1998. SNPLMA allows the BLM to sell public lands within a set boundary surrounding the city, with the majority of the proceeds of land sales going toward landscape conservation and restoration. Over the past two decades, the law has facilitated the transfer of over 30,000 acres of public land for development surrounding Las Vegas. Unfortunately, the law has generated far more sprawling, suburban communities than it has affordable housing.
As Governor Lombardo mentions in his letter to President Biden, Southern Nevada is facing an affordable housing crisis. To help address this issue, the federal departments of Housing and Urban Development and Interior announced in August 2023 that they established a process to make eligible public lands available for $100 an acre for the construction of affordable housing developments in Southern Nevada. Projects are defined as affordable housing and eligible for the discounted rate if they serve families who earn below 80 percent of the area median income, about $60,000 as of 2021. The agreement also intends to streamline the process by which the state, Clark County, or other government entities can purchase land.
The Bureau of Land Management announced in July 2024 that it is moving ahead with a plan to sell 20 acres of national public land near Las Vegas to the Clark County Department of Social Services for an affordable housing development. The proposal is the first under the HUD/DOI agreement that allows for the targeted sale of federal parcels to create affordable housing. The 20 acres in Nevada would be sold for a below-market value of $100 per acre, as provided by the HUD/DOI agreement and the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act of 1998.
What these examples tell us
Currently, the framework that SNPLMA provides for Nevada is the most expedient way to build truly affordable housing on public land, but it has incentivized sprawl and resulted in the construction of mainly market-rate housing. The recently-established affordable housing discount program helps address this, but the law still allows for the development of luxury suburbs, which is not a good use of public land that is owned by all Americans. The Lake Hill Administrative Site Affordable Housing Act illustrates the issues associated with selling public land to local governments for large scale housing development. Additionally, requiring standalone legislation to transfer individual parcels to local governments for housing is not an efficient solution.
The 2018 Farm Bill provision that allowed for the lease of land in Summit County for the Dillon Ranger District project is a much better solution, but it expired in September 2023. Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado introduced legislation in 2023 that would create a similar program, called the Forest Service Flexible Housing Partnerships Act. This bill would responsibly address the affordable housing shortage in the West by allowing workforce housing projects to be built quickly on previously disturbed land, while allowing the American public to maintain ownership of the land. This provision could be passed as standalone legislation or included in the upcoming reauthorization of the Farm Bill.
Senator Jacky Rosen of Nevada introduced a bill in January 2024 that mirrors SNPLMA but would apply to the area surrounding Reno. The Truckee Meadows Public Lands Management Act would convey almost 16,000 acres of public land for development. Some of that land would be sold at auction to housing developers. An additional 3,400 acres are designated for specific purposes, including roadway expansions, regional parks and K-12 school sites. Similar to SNPLMA, the proceeds from the sales would remain in Nevada, with the majority going to environmentally-focused projects in Washoe County. The bill would also create nearly 950,000 acres of new national conservation and wilderness areas, balancing new development with the protection of nature. Unfortunately, the bill does not include strong affordability requirements and would allow land to be sold to developers for market-rate housing.
Not a silver bullet
While buildable land is part of the affordable housing equation, experts say the bigger factors that determine affordability are public funding and changes to zoning laws. “At the end of the day, what makes affordable housing affordable is the financing,” Wally Swenson, the vice president of nonprofit developer Nevada HAND, told the Nevada Current. These funds could come from a number of sources, from federal allocations to local taxes, like a progressive real estate transfer tax on luxury property sales. Local governments also need to get rid of exclusionary zoning that limits the density of housing developments. Dense housing is more affordable both to build and live in, since it reduces transportation costs. It is also what’s best for the environment, since it reduces greenhouse gas emissions.
Taken together, these examples and facts show that public lands are not a silver bullet for fixing housing affordability. Projects that involve guardrails to ensure that the housing built actually goes to those in need often involve more red tape and take longer than those developed at market-rate by private developers. But market-rate suburban housing does nothing to solve the affordable housing crisis, while exacerbating the climate crisis by increasing sprawl and destroying ecosystems. Because of this lose-lose situation, building on public land should be a limited last resort, not a first stop, on the road to housing affordability.
Editor’s note: A previous version of this post misstated that DOI conveyed public land to Clark County in April 2023 for housing under a new program for affordable housing construction created by a 2023 DOI and HUD agreement. The first land conveyance under this program was actually announced in July 2024.
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