An opinion piece in the New York Times yesterday by Binyamin Appelbaum focuses on the housing affordability crisis from the standpoint of making more low-cost land available for housing development, from the inventory of federal lands.  Appelbaum’s piece, titled Build Homes on Federal Land, centers directly on Utah, and on what has been happening on a limited basis around Las Vegas.

The idea, of course, is that around and even within many western communities, there is federal land that isn’t being used for much of anything, that could be made available for new housing.

Under a 1998 law, the federal government has auctioned for development some 35,000 acres of public land around Las Vegas. That land is now covered with thousands of homes, and the proceeds from the sales, more than $4 billion, have mostly gone to protect other public lands and to expand recreation.

The great flaw of the Las Vegas program, however, is profligacy. Instead of using scarce land to provide housing that workers can afford, the government has simply cleared the way for more sprawling subdivisions of high-priced homes. In Skye Canyon, a development of 9,000 homes on 1,700 acres of formerly federal land at the northwestern edge of Las Vegas, prices for new homes start above the $469,945 median for the metro area. Since the Las Vegas federal land sales began in 1998, local housing prices have more than tripled.

The fix, according to many, is to make such federal lands available but on a limited, restricted basis for affordable housing.  Senator Mike Lee has introduced a bill in Congress the last couple of years to make federal lands available, but not with any of the affordability stipulations.

Lee’s HOUSES Act would attempt to streamline and speed up the land transfer process in cases where the end goal is more housing. A state or local government would nominate a public lands parcel and the transfer would have to be completed within a year for tracts under 640 acres. Land with special designations — like national monuments or wilderness areas — wouldn’t be eligible.

The bill doesn’t require homes to be sold for a specific price or reserved for people making a percentage of the area’s median income.

Appelbaum, writing from St. George, says,

The proposal won’t make a dent in the crisis, however, if the land is used for more vacation McMansions or even for single-family homes on quarter-acre lots. What cities like St. George need most — and what they mostly refuse to allow — are modest homes and apartments for low-wage workers and families.

The red bluffs above St. George should be preserved forever. The acres of barren land east of the St. George airport that the government owns because no one wanted to farm it? That should be used for apartment buildings.

So there are discussions about various ways to make the land available primarily for low-cost housing, many of them outlined in the two stories linked above.  Notably, Gov. Spencer Cox has weighed in with a proposal of his own:

… the federal government should lease land rather than sell it. A 2024 task force co-chaired by Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, a Republican, proposed leasing federal land for housing development because federal lands are not subject to local zoning laws and other forms of municipal obstructionism.  “It would be a game changer,” said Steve Waldrip, the governor’s top adviser on housing.

So, who’s going to lease the land?  The state?  And if the land is not subject to local planning processes, who’s going to oversee the development?  The state?  Kind of like what SITLA has been doing?  Or is this what the Beehive Development Authority would be used for?  And will this even make a dent along the Wasatch Front, where the most housing demand is?  There is Forest Service property adjacent, and some BLM land, but is it buildable, useable, desirable to change from open lands?

Many questions, but probably an idea worth exploring.