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The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced that it is moving ahead with a plan to sell 20 acres of Nevada public lands near the city of Las Vegas to the Clark County Department of Social Services for affordable housing.
The proposal is the first under an agreement between the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Interior departments 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 agreement and the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act of 1998. The development planned under BLM's announcement would require 80 percent of the units be sold to first-time homebuyers with household incomes at or below 80 percent of the median income for the Las Vegas area, with the other 20 percent going to first-time buyers at or below 100 percent of the area’s median income.
The Biden administration’s action stands in stark contrast to proposals from some elected officials who have called for the wholesale transfer of public lands without safeguards to ensure a giveaway leads to affordable housing. Nevada Governor Joe Lombardo sent a letter to President Joe Biden this year demanding the transfer of 50,000 acres of public land around Las Vegas with seemingly no restrictions—a recipe for more sprawl and a gift to subdivision developers. Utah Senator Mike Lee’s HOUSES Act contains a similar prescription, allowing local governments to nominate unlimited acres for transfer to developers along with a meaningless density requirement and no measures to ensure housing affordability.
Center for Western Priorities Deputy Director Aaron Weiss said in a statement, “The Interior department is showing how public lands that are already well-suited to development can be part of the housing solution, with appropriate safeguards to make sure the housing is affordable and doesn’t end up as trophy homes for billionaires.”
Project 2025 would devastate America's public lands
Project 2025 was launched by the Koch-funded think tank Heritage Foundation in 2022, and is an extreme political agenda that seeks to hand public lands over to corporations, end vital land protections, and harm wildlife. The chapter on the Interior department was written by former acting BLM head William Perry Pendley, and it lays out a plan to gut the Interior department and remove environmental safeguards that ensure the health of our public lands. Pendley freely admits that the energy section was written “in its entirety” by oil industry leaders.
The recommendations in Project 2025 stand in stark contrast to the wishes of Western voters, who, year after year, affirm their love of public lands and wildlife in polling conducted by Colorado College in the annual Conservation in the West poll. The majority of Western voters across the political spectrum say they want elected officials to preserve nature and protect wildlife, not sell off public lands to the oil, gas and mining industries, as Project 2025 recommends.
Read the new blog post from Center for Western Priorities Communications Manager Kate Groetzinger for an overview of the most egregious aspects in Project 2025 that pertain to public lands.
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It is unacceptable that extremists in Congress have let the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act expire and left hundreds of radiation-exposed Arizonans without the care and compensation they deserve.”
