The housing affordability crisis is complex, and building on public lands alone won’t help.
For years, politicians in the West have called on the federal government to sell off public lands to developers. They say there’s a housing shortage in the West, but the solutions they’re calling for don’t address the real issue: affordability. This affordable housing crisis is real and is caused by a variety of factors, including poorly regulated short-term rentals, restrictive building codes and zoning, and second home ownership. Simply freeing up public land won’t eliminate the problem, as they claim.
Senator Mike Lee’s HOUSES Act, first introduced in 2022, would allow local and state governments to nominate unlimited tracts of unprotected federal public land to be conveyed by the Interior Department to state and local governments, which can then sell the lands to developers. The bill contains a meaningless density requirement and nothing to ensure affordability. Lee’s bill would encourage suburban sprawl on America’s public lands, while failing to bring down the cost of housing.
In March 2025, the Trump administration announced the creation of a federal task force aimed at making national public lands available for housing in March 2025 and the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management said his agency is looking into the suitability of selling public lands within a 10-mile radius of towns in the West with as few as 5,000 residents for housing development. In April 2025, President Donald Trump released a proposed budget with deep cuts to housing assistance programs, calling into question the administration’s efforts to develop affordable housing on public lands.
There are some laws already on the books that allow public land to be leased and sold for housing development. The EXPLORE Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in January 2025, includes a provision reauthorizing the U.S. Forest Service to use administrative sites for workforce housing. Additionally, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act already authorizes the Bureau of Land Management to sell tracts of under 2,500 acres of public land to private buyers, if the land meets certain basic criteria.
Good-faith efforts to use public land to address the housing affordability crisis include guardrails aimed at ensuring the land is used to build housing that is truly attainable by those making at or below the local median wage and does not significantly exacerbate urban sprawl, as well as offsets any permanent land loss with public land protections or, better yet, achieves no net loss of public land through land swaps with state governments. Bad faith efforts involve using the housing affordability crisis as an excuse to make it easier for developers and real estate agents to privatize and subsequently profit off public lands, while doing nothing to bring down the cost of housing. There is some additional nuance, as the factors affecting affordability differ based on state and region. But the general concept is simple: efforts to build housing on public lands that don’t include meaningful density and affordability requirements are nothing more than a Trojan horse to privatize a vital public asset that increases quality of life for everyone, regardless of income, in the West.