As America grapples with an affordable housing crisis, some lawmakers are eyeing public lands in the West as potential housing developments, and they’re looking for ways to make it easier to put those public lands into private hands. These ideas aren’t new, but some proposals are now resurfacing in the halls of Congress as well as in state governments. The Biden Administration also signaled in July that it is open to repurposing public land as affordable housing under the right circumstances.
In a broad sense, the amount of bipartisan support for these ideas should concern public land advocates, along with anyone who hunts, fishes, or recreates on federally owned land in the West. These proposals aren’t a cure-all solution to the crisis at hand, and they won’t be able to fully address the real problem, which is the lack of affordability caused by several economic forces.
The lack of available housing units is certainly a factor here. But Americans are also facing sky-high interest rates and untenable rent structures. At the same time, many local governments have zoning laws that don’t do enough to accommodate affordable housing or incentivize developers to serve low-income buyers.
On a local level, there are specific instances where developing small tracts of public land with the right safeguards can help relieve the country’s housing crisis. An example is the Bureau of Land Management’s move to transfer 20 acres of BLM land in Clark County, Nevada, to be used for an affordable housing development near Las Vegas. It’s a relatively targeted approach that relies on existing state law to guarantee that the roughly 150 homes being built will be affordable, according to the state’s definition, and it focuses on a small parcel in an already urban area that provides limited recreation opportunities to the public.
We should remain cautious, however, of any sweeping legislative changes that seek to streamline the disposal of large tracts of public lands, says Kaden McArthur, the government relations manager for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. McArthur points to another proposal in Clark County that was made in March by the Nevada governor, and which would transfer 50,000 acres of federal land to the county. In a letter to President Biden, Gov. Lombardo said this transfer would benefit local communities, and he complained that the current process of privatizing federally owned land for development is too slow and overly complicated.
“BHA is concerned about the notion of large-scale transfers of public lands out of public hands, and this is something that we’ve seen in some form or another for a long time,” McArthur tells Outdoor Life. “There are certainly some ardent opponents to public lands [behind this], but there are also folks that I think have a genuine interest in finding ways to develop housing in a part of the country where it seems to be lacking and causing affordability issues. There’s just a lot of contrast in the ways that this idea has been approached.”
The most extreme approach, McArthur explains, is a familiar Senate bill known as the HOUSES Act that was reintroduced by Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) in 2023 after it failed to gain traction in 2022. Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah) also introduced a companion bill in the House of Representatives in February. The bill seeks to streamline the transfer of public lands to state and local governments, which could then use those lands to develop affordable housing. However, the bill’s language doesn’t mention any sort of cap on the amount of acreage that can be transferred, and it doesn’t include any affordability safeguards to guarantee that the land would be turned into affordable housing instead of market-rate subdivisions or high-end neighborhoods.
Sen. Lee also has a horrible track record when it comes to public lands, and he’s spent a good part of his career pushing an agenda to privatize federally owned lands by transferring them to the states. This has led many to view the HOUSES Act as just another thinly veiled attempt to divest Americans of their public lands.
“It has very few guardrails or stops, and it would essentially allow an unlimited amount of acreage to be transferred in a relatively expedited fashion,” McArthur says, referring to the bill. “That’s not the vision we have for America’s public lands.”
McArthur says the Public Lands in Public Hands Act introduced by Congressmen Ryan Zinke (R-Montana) and Gabe Vasquez (D-New Mexico) in February is meant to act as a counterweight to the HOUSES Act. The bill would prohibit the transfer of any public land parcels that are publicly accessible and larger than 300 acres, and it would make it even more restrictive for federal land management agencies to transfer public lands.
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These added restrictions would be a good thing. Because as much as some politicians would like to convince us otherwise, our publicly accessible, federally owned lands are one of the greatest assets that we possess as Americans. And for those of us who spend time in the outdoors, they’re too valuable to develop or put a price on.
“Our public lands are the lifeblood of folk that hunt and fish, and they allow us to enjoy the outdoors like nowhere else on Earth,” McArthur says. “We want to see stringent guardrails on the ability to sell or divest these lands from the public. To suggest that this is red tape that needs to be cut is deeply concerning.”