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During the presidential election, Donald J. Trump pledged to quickly lower prices for American households, including making housing more affordable.
“We are planning to open federal land for home construction,” Trump said in August. “We desperately need housing for people who can't afford what's going on right now.”
The Trump administration is now trying to chase that promise. Last month, federal authorities created a task force to identify and release federal land that can be used for housing developments.
The announcement is the first major initiative the Trump administration has deployed to deal with the country's affordable housing crisis. It's an idea with bipartisan support. Trump and Kamala Harris are former vice presidents and Democratic candidates for the president, supporting efforts to build affordable housing on certain federal lands.
Housing developers and researchers say the idea of making more federal land available for housing developments has some promise for western states like Nevada and California. However, the initiative rarely increases housing supply in other parts of the country where residents struggle with high shelter costs, such as New York and Miami.
Other challenges exist before building a home. Most federal lands don't have the water and sewer infrastructure needed to support residential communities. Environmental groups have also expressed concern over the administration's intention to sell public land due to potential impacts on wildlife habitats.
As part of the initiative, the Ministry of Home Affairs aims to identify locations where homes can be supported and reduce regulatory barriers involved in relocating or leasing land to local governments or public housing authorities. The Housing and Urban Development Department will also “identify where housing needs are most pressing” and ensure that the project is “aligned with affordable targets.”
John Laby, acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, estimates that federal officials could potentially use 400,000 acres of federal land for residential developments. The ever-refined estimate was decided after seeing land within 10 miles of cities and towns with a population of over 5,000 people, he said.
This effort could have the most impact in states such as California, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho and Colorado. Officials said the lands vary widely, ranging from deserts and grasslands to mountains and forests. Land is generally uneconomical or difficult to manage due to its scattered and isolated nature and “must meet certain public interest targets.”
In addition to the water, electricity and sewer systems that need to be built, federal officials may have to fight groups who believe that a particular area has higher habitat or conservation value. Laby said the area officials are generally underconservation value, but the Bureau of Land Management will consider concerns carefully.
“People love their public land,” Raby said. “Every acre is important to everyone.”
The Bureau of Land Management evaluates applications from stakeholders, such as state and local governments, who request the sale of a particular land. The agency then evaluates existing use of the land, providing environmental reviews and evaluations. Authorities say the land can be leased or sold at fair market value.
Some analysis found that freeing more federal land could result in the construction of millions of new homes. A recent analysis by Edward Pinto, a senior fellow at the Conservative American Enterprise Institute, shows that the possibility of selling about 544,000 acres of developmentable land, or about 0.2% of the land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management could potentially build 1.5 million new homes on land near existing cities. Analysis shows that if a new city is developed near an existing metropolitan area, another 1.5 million homes could be built over the next 50 years.
David Garcia, policy director for UP, a Washington-based research group, said the research group focused on housing shortages saw “great potential” in the initiative.
“When you think of federal lands, you often think of national parks, forested areas, or military bases, but urbanized areas have far more land than people are aware,” Garcia said.
Still, he said the process of releasing federal land could take years due to the stringent procedures, and that federal efforts alone would not be enough to compensate for the country's overall home shortage. Mortgage finance giant Freddie Mac estimates the country is short of around 3.7 million housing units.
Jim Tobin, president and CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, said he was optimistic that it could be made available for development in some of the country's fastest-growing markets, including Las Vegas and Phoenix.
“The land we have access to will be useful, especially in those markets. And you have the ability to keep pushing the suburbs out,” Tobin said.
But Tobin said the initiative could encounter challenges due to local nymbiism, or the “not my backyard” attitude that prevents home building to combat new developments in the neighborhood. “People don't like changing to where they live,” he said.
Federal officials say the new national initiative can replicate the efforts already underway in Nevada. A 1998 law promoted by then Nevada Senator Harry Reid, a law in which the Bureau of Land Management allowed the sale of certain public lands in the state for purposes such as home building. So far, the agency has sold approximately 50 acres of federal land, particularly for the construction of approximately 1,060 affordable housing units in the state.
However, some environmental groups have already expressed concern about how efforts will affect public lands. Atan Manuel, director of the Sierra Club's Land Conservation Program, said he is open to efforts to build affordable housing on land close to the developed community, but is deeply skeptical of the Trump administration's efforts. He said he was worried that the new development would “trample wildlife habitats” and that the public could lose land used for recreational purposes.
“I think this is a backhanded way to privatize federal land,” Manuel said. “We will assume until this administration proves the worst wrong.”
Some supporters said they are skeptical of the administration's attempts to address affordable housing as authorities are also cutting deep into the housing sector as part of a broader effort to reduce the federal government.
Kim Johnson, public policy manager for the National Union of Low Income Housing, said building more housing on public land could make a big difference to certain western states. But she also said she is concerned about the Trump administration's potential to “reduce” the housing sector workforce and cut federal resources that will help address the affordable housing crisis.
Johnson said she wanted administration officials to provide details on how they would ensure that homes built on federal land were affordable. “The question is always, how affordable and who is it affordable?” Johnson said.
“Efforts to streamline the department's processes and programs will help make HUD more successful, including dealing with the affordable housing crisis in our country,” said Kasey Lovett, a spokesman for the Housing and Urban Development Department.
Some homebuilder groups said they were optimistic about the effort. Dandun Moyer, chairman of the California Building Industry Association, said the biggest challenge facing state home builders is a lack of affordable and suitable for housing developments.
Dunmoyer said efforts to free up more federal land could help promote housing developments in California, given that the federal government owns about half of the state's land.
“It's difficult to find the land,” he said. “If there is land adjacent to the available city core, that would be interesting to us.”
