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Proposals to open up public lands for housing development are attracting increasing attention, especially in Utah and Nevada where elected officials have been vocal in their support of this concept. But a growing number of people are realizing that the West's housing affordability crisis won't be solved by simply making it easier to privatize and develop public land. Location, local land use policies, infrastructure requirements, and affordability guardrails are just some of the many other considerations that influence whether and where housing can and should be built on public land.
Even homebuilders agree that most public land doesn't make sense for housing development. "The vast majority of federal land in Utah is kind of irrelevant to this discussion. It's not in the path of growth. It doesn't have any sort of intrinsic value for solving housing affordability,” Stacy Young, the Southern Utah Home Builders Association's government affairs director, told KUER. “It's a very tiny, tiny percentage of federal land that would ever make sense."
In a July 2024 Westwise blog post, Center for Western Priorities Communications Manager Kate Groetzinger dug into the question of what role public land can and should play in addressing housing affordability in the West. As a handful of successful examples demonstrate, targeted methods of developing public land for housing can be helpful, but only after local governments have implemented reforms that free up existing housing stock, incentivize dense development, and ensure affordability.
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This land is a living entity. And right now, as we hear the wind moving through the trees, that is our ancestors acknowledging our presence.”
