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The Trump administration announced it has identified 625 square miles (400,000 acres) of national public land across the West for possible sale, ostensibly to address the housing shortage. In an interview with Bloomberg Law, Jon Raby, the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, revealed that the administration is considering selling lands as far as 10 miles away from cities and towns with as few as 5,000 residents.
A radius that large is a recipe for sprawl, highways, and trophy homes near national parks, not smart growth or affordable housing, explained Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities.
“Get ready for a housing development to pave over your favorite hiking trail," Weiss said. "The Trump administration just announced a bleak vision for traffic jams and suburban sprawl across the West. The president wants to sell off the lands that are most accessible to Westerners for hiking, hunting, and camping and turn them into miles of McMansions that stretch across our deserts and mountains."
Last week, the departments of Interior and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced a plan to work together to identify public land that could be used to develop housing and to sell that land to local governments and private developers. The announcement did not say whether the agencies would include income restrictions or density requirements on the housing.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is actively undercutting HUD’s efforts to develop affordable housing. The administration has stalled at least $60 million in funding intended largely for affordable housing developments nationwide, and is planning to cut HUD staffing in half.
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Here we are, with no plan, just cutting bodies, numbers and dollars. This is completely lunacy. If you were going to do something that was truly designed to destroy an organization, this is about how you’d go about doing it.”
