An early version of the US Senate budget bill which passed last week included a provision to sell off between 2 and 3 million acres of federal land in western states, ostensibly to be used for homebuilding.
I agree with the other commenters, great article, very timely and informative. It is interesting though that the other major limiting factor for growth in western cities was not mentioned: water. For example lake Mead, the water source for Las Vegas almost went below minimum pool A few years ago, and future water shortages are on the horizon.
First Shawn Ryan interviewed Braxton McCoy (episode 213)
And Braxton mentions that the states already have a means of selling/developing fed land. The “problem” from the politicians view is that they have to justify every acre, every time, on a need basis.
Secondly
This is sadly rather political
If the land is used for “affordable” housing then the western states do not have the population necessary to maintain 2 party “equilibrium”
Meaning they will flip to being heavily Democrat. guessing based on how most “affordable” housing districts vote already.
But let’s be real
the main reason they want it sold off in mass is to profit…
That is exactly the point - keeping the population of western states mostly in big cities gives Liberals more power.
And secondly, the bug cities are what everyone talks about but they aren't where the biggest need is - the biggest need is in small towns that have jobs but nowhere to house workers.
For example, as I mentioned elsewhere, look at the growth of mining on federal land in central Nevada and how little housing is available in places like Tonopah or Beatty.
I’m curious: if we take out the undevelopable land from our national population density, how does that adjusted density stack up against other countries?
I'm not sure a 20-mile cutoff makes sense...the world is full of suburban areas and towns that grew up on open land 30+ miles from urban centers. If there is a highway there and a good school district, people and businesses will locate there.
It’s worth looking at the maps of the 20 large urban areas. Most of those have very little developable federal land even at 30 miles. *Maaaybe* people will commute 30 miles to Missoula or Albuquerque, but they’re not going to commute 30 miles to Powell, WY. And note that he isn’t drawing a 20 mile radius from the urban center - he’s drawing a 20 mile radius from any census block with over 100 people per sq km. So 20 miles means 20 miles from the far edges of town, even before you get to the part of the commute in the town or city itself.
Great analysis that shows the physical and geographical issues that preclude the large scale offloading of federal land as a quick fix to housing prices. Someone looking at a map of just the federal ownership of western lands would get the wrong impression of its utility for housing. And on top of the mountainous terrain there is the gigantic problem of water availability.
But what really sets off westerners about the sale of public lands is that no sane person expects it to be done competently and without the corrosive effect of campaign dollars.
Vegas and such are already handled under an existing legal process. The answer, generally speaking, is: hell no. This is our birthright, ours to steward. I care far more about preserving this great inheritance than I do about making the GDP line go up.
What about protected land serving as water catchments locally or regionally in the West? I'm not sure things work quite the same way in the West, but in the East protected lands are very important for that purpose.
One question I had as part of this policy debate is the effectiveness of making more land available in terms of how it affects housing costs compared to other policy measures.
For example, could the federal government incentivize permitting practices that promote infill or higher density development, and how effective would that be in affecting housing costs?
Part of my thinking is: compared to other developed countries, the US has a lot of land available. US development practices in the late 20th and early 21st centure have led to more sprawl of low density development, in contrast to earlier American development. So is the problem actually that the US needs more land or is it that US housing development patterns need to adapt?
Exactly. We should be building up, not out. But you also need dedicated right-of-way public transportation so that people don't need a car for daily activities, like Houten, NL
Land for building houses in the middle of nowhere, not near jobs would cost billion in tax payer dollars to fund water, sewer, road and infrastructure and would only create vacation homes for the wealthy
While I'm not very onboard with the government telling people what to do with their money, your comment about "empty" land really resonates. It's a lesson humans keep having to learn over and over. "Oh no, maybe it was a mistake to fill in all our marshes because it turns out they're important mitigaters of storm surge. Ah shucks, it probably wasn't great to cut down all our old growth forests and lose all that biodiversity. Well hell, turns out prarie grasslands were actually a pretty big carbon sink-- too bad we've lost about 80% of it." The post mentions some have argued this land doesn't have much environmental value, but humans have historically been bad enough ar determining environmental value that it's hard not to be immediately skeptical of those claims.
How binding is the 20% steepness limit? In Wellington, NZ, buildings are built on very steep slopes. There are office buildings in the CBD where you can walk into a building at ground level, go up seven stories and walk out at ground level, on the other side. And these aren't big office buildings in terms of footprints.
If there’s demand for a 7+ story building, you can build one on that sort of land for probably a small multiple of the price of the same building on flat land. But I bet a 1 story building on land this same slope would be nearly as expensive as the 7+ story building, because it would still need all those support structures and/or earth movement. So the steepness is probably much more binding in places that don’t have the demand to finance taller buildings on existing land.
There is no such thing as "empty" land. All undeveloped land is someone's home - someone non-human.
On average, fifteen percent of a city's land is deemed vacant. It would be FAR better to "develop" the vacant land within an existing city than to take more land away from non-human species.
In addition, recommending more development in places like Las Vegas, already straining from lack of water from decades of abuse of ground and reservoir water, is what leads to people buying homes and then having no access to water, a situation that is unfortunately increasingly common.
Finally, there are about 7 million second homes in the United States. No one needs more than one house. If we were truly concerned about providing homes to people, we'd eliminate second homes.
Oh yeah, that guy is scary as F. He and think nothing alike. I am loyal to the natural world above all else, as all life forms on the planet, include humans are utterly dependent on it. He is a human supremacist through and through.
I do? That's odd. To pick 3 random ideas from his platform, I've said nothing about "abolishing the police" (terrible idea!!) or "building out renewable energy on public lands" (destroying far more nature in the process, plus there's no such thing as so-called "renewables", they are "rebuildables" and cost nature dearly), or "no cost childcare" (terrible idea as it promotes increasing population growth in a world with catastrophic overpopulation). I don't think I sound like him in the slightest!
It’s always struck me as strange that so much of the American West remains under federal ownership, largely due to a desire to freeze the landscape in stasis, as if the entire region should serve as a kind of national park. I love the national park system deeply, but this model of ownership often prevents a wider range of potential uses, even in areas far from pristine wilderness or existing urban hubs.
Geography absolutely shapes economic destiny. But what about the smaller-scale opportunities, the villages, communities, and richness of life that could emerge if more of these mountainous regions were open to thoughtful development?
I really liked the 20% grade map you shared, but I’m unclear on its granularity. A patch of land just 100 square meters in a remote valley might be idyllic, and I imagine there are many such places scattered across federal lands. Yet these areas rarely become thriving communities, not because they lack appeal, but because it’s so difficult to move from rural outpost to hamlet to town. That transition requires institutional knowledge, capital, and political will, resources that are often inaccessible to local actors.
I can’t help but wonder what might already exist, what vibrant networks of life and culture could have taken root, but for the current land-use regime.
I think you have it backwards. It’s not that the land remains in stasis because it’s federal land - it’s that it remains federal land because there was never any demand to develop it. With all the homestead acts, anyone who wanted some of this land could fill out some paperwork and get the land for free, provided that they actually moved out there and set up a homestead. The fact that no one did so, despite the free real estate, indicates that most of this land just wasn’t very useful for subsistence agriculture. There’s very little water in most of these places, and the places that do have water are mostly on hillsides, where it’s hard to build anything or grow any crops.
i admit all the easy land was developed. but as mentioned in the article the homestead act has not been policy for some time and effectively the policy of the government is that the land is not for civil settlement, rather conservation, economic activity like mining, and available for purchase by large developers.
It's true that the homestead acts haven't been policy since the 1970s - but that still gave people over 50 years to claim this land for free if they wanted to, after these states had been admitted as states! The fact that not one single person chose this land, even as people were taking other land, seems to justify the more industrial-or-conservation-oriented federal policy.
This is largely not the case. The vast majority of western public land is BLM and USFS. Both of those operate under multiple-use regimes where both economic and recreational activity occur.
economic and recreational activity are not the same as settlement, and while avenues exist to purchase the land it’s not really the same as the land being default yes for development
A little disappointed in the analysis here. Maybe the amount of developable land really is too small to impact the housing market as you suggest but you make no rigorous attempt to evaluate that intuition quantitatively. I’m sure some economist somewhere has written a formal model that could be useful or at least done enough to make some back of the envelope calculations possible.
I agree with the other commenters, great article, very timely and informative. It is interesting though that the other major limiting factor for growth in western cities was not mentioned: water. For example lake Mead, the water source for Las Vegas almost went below minimum pool A few years ago, and future water shortages are on the horizon.
Couple of things
First Shawn Ryan interviewed Braxton McCoy (episode 213)
And Braxton mentions that the states already have a means of selling/developing fed land. The “problem” from the politicians view is that they have to justify every acre, every time, on a need basis.
Secondly
This is sadly rather political
If the land is used for “affordable” housing then the western states do not have the population necessary to maintain 2 party “equilibrium”
Meaning they will flip to being heavily Democrat. guessing based on how most “affordable” housing districts vote already.
But let’s be real
the main reason they want it sold off in mass is to profit…
That is exactly the point - keeping the population of western states mostly in big cities gives Liberals more power.
And secondly, the bug cities are what everyone talks about but they aren't where the biggest need is - the biggest need is in small towns that have jobs but nowhere to house workers.
For example, as I mentioned elsewhere, look at the growth of mining on federal land in central Nevada and how little housing is available in places like Tonopah or Beatty.
I’m curious: if we take out the undevelopable land from our national population density, how does that adjusted density stack up against other countries?
This would definitely be an interesting statistic to gather! Some places like Norway would jump in the population density ratings!
Great analysis. Thank you for the detailed work.
I'm not sure a 20-mile cutoff makes sense...the world is full of suburban areas and towns that grew up on open land 30+ miles from urban centers. If there is a highway there and a good school district, people and businesses will locate there.
It’s worth looking at the maps of the 20 large urban areas. Most of those have very little developable federal land even at 30 miles. *Maaaybe* people will commute 30 miles to Missoula or Albuquerque, but they’re not going to commute 30 miles to Powell, WY. And note that he isn’t drawing a 20 mile radius from the urban center - he’s drawing a 20 mile radius from any census block with over 100 people per sq km. So 20 miles means 20 miles from the far edges of town, even before you get to the part of the commute in the town or city itself.
Great analysis that shows the physical and geographical issues that preclude the large scale offloading of federal land as a quick fix to housing prices. Someone looking at a map of just the federal ownership of western lands would get the wrong impression of its utility for housing. And on top of the mountainous terrain there is the gigantic problem of water availability.
But what really sets off westerners about the sale of public lands is that no sane person expects it to be done competently and without the corrosive effect of campaign dollars.
Vegas and such are already handled under an existing legal process. The answer, generally speaking, is: hell no. This is our birthright, ours to steward. I care far more about preserving this great inheritance than I do about making the GDP line go up.
yeah it'd be a real destruction of our birthright if that empty land in Las Vegas directly across from housing developments was also made housing...
Seriously, what's with all the anti-human Gaians showing up?
What do you mean by "birthright" in this case?
People need places to live.
Also selling federal land wouldn’t even increase GDP
What about protected land serving as water catchments locally or regionally in the West? I'm not sure things work quite the same way in the West, but in the East protected lands are very important for that purpose.
Notice how the East has a lot less protected land and doesn't suffer from many problems.
Great article!
One question I had as part of this policy debate is the effectiveness of making more land available in terms of how it affects housing costs compared to other policy measures.
For example, could the federal government incentivize permitting practices that promote infill or higher density development, and how effective would that be in affecting housing costs?
Part of my thinking is: compared to other developed countries, the US has a lot of land available. US development practices in the late 20th and early 21st centure have led to more sprawl of low density development, in contrast to earlier American development. So is the problem actually that the US needs more land or is it that US housing development patterns need to adapt?
Exactly. We should be building up, not out. But you also need dedicated right-of-way public transportation so that people don't need a car for daily activities, like Houten, NL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-TuGAHR78w
People prefer to live in low density housing. We have a lot of land, we should make use of this asset.
Land for building houses in the middle of nowhere, not near jobs would cost billion in tax payer dollars to fund water, sewer, road and infrastructure and would only create vacation homes for the wealthy
So require them to pay for it themselves.
Sure, it will never get built - it is stupid
While I'm not very onboard with the government telling people what to do with their money, your comment about "empty" land really resonates. It's a lesson humans keep having to learn over and over. "Oh no, maybe it was a mistake to fill in all our marshes because it turns out they're important mitigaters of storm surge. Ah shucks, it probably wasn't great to cut down all our old growth forests and lose all that biodiversity. Well hell, turns out prarie grasslands were actually a pretty big carbon sink-- too bad we've lost about 80% of it." The post mentions some have argued this land doesn't have much environmental value, but humans have historically been bad enough ar determining environmental value that it's hard not to be immediately skeptical of those claims.
Funny how nothing seriously bad actually happened as a result of developing all the land in the east, or for that matter in the Old World
Argh, apologies, I was trying to respond to Elisabeth Robson's comment.
The Presidio is federal land that could be much more productively used if sold off.
How binding is the 20% steepness limit? In Wellington, NZ, buildings are built on very steep slopes. There are office buildings in the CBD where you can walk into a building at ground level, go up seven stories and walk out at ground level, on the other side. And these aren't big office buildings in terms of footprints.
If there’s demand for a 7+ story building, you can build one on that sort of land for probably a small multiple of the price of the same building on flat land. But I bet a 1 story building on land this same slope would be nearly as expensive as the 7+ story building, because it would still need all those support structures and/or earth movement. So the steepness is probably much more binding in places that don’t have the demand to finance taller buildings on existing land.
"...empty, unprotected federal land."
There is no such thing as "empty" land. All undeveloped land is someone's home - someone non-human.
On average, fifteen percent of a city's land is deemed vacant. It would be FAR better to "develop" the vacant land within an existing city than to take more land away from non-human species.
In addition, recommending more development in places like Las Vegas, already straining from lack of water from decades of abuse of ground and reservoir water, is what leads to people buying homes and then having no access to water, a situation that is unfortunately increasingly common.
Finally, there are about 7 million second homes in the United States. No one needs more than one house. If we were truly concerned about providing homes to people, we'd eliminate second homes.
There is a guy running for Mayor of New York, he's a Jihad Marxist. You should check him out, you guys think alike.
Oh yeah, that guy is scary as F. He and think nothing alike. I am loyal to the natural world above all else, as all life forms on the planet, include humans are utterly dependent on it. He is a human supremacist through and through.
Strange, that you sound like him.
I do? That's odd. To pick 3 random ideas from his platform, I've said nothing about "abolishing the police" (terrible idea!!) or "building out renewable energy on public lands" (destroying far more nature in the process, plus there's no such thing as so-called "renewables", they are "rebuildables" and cost nature dearly), or "no cost childcare" (terrible idea as it promotes increasing population growth in a world with catastrophic overpopulation). I don't think I sound like him in the slightest!
That's what popped into my head when I read your first comment.
It’s always struck me as strange that so much of the American West remains under federal ownership, largely due to a desire to freeze the landscape in stasis, as if the entire region should serve as a kind of national park. I love the national park system deeply, but this model of ownership often prevents a wider range of potential uses, even in areas far from pristine wilderness or existing urban hubs.
Geography absolutely shapes economic destiny. But what about the smaller-scale opportunities, the villages, communities, and richness of life that could emerge if more of these mountainous regions were open to thoughtful development?
I really liked the 20% grade map you shared, but I’m unclear on its granularity. A patch of land just 100 square meters in a remote valley might be idyllic, and I imagine there are many such places scattered across federal lands. Yet these areas rarely become thriving communities, not because they lack appeal, but because it’s so difficult to move from rural outpost to hamlet to town. That transition requires institutional knowledge, capital, and political will, resources that are often inaccessible to local actors.
I can’t help but wonder what might already exist, what vibrant networks of life and culture could have taken root, but for the current land-use regime.
I think you have it backwards. It’s not that the land remains in stasis because it’s federal land - it’s that it remains federal land because there was never any demand to develop it. With all the homestead acts, anyone who wanted some of this land could fill out some paperwork and get the land for free, provided that they actually moved out there and set up a homestead. The fact that no one did so, despite the free real estate, indicates that most of this land just wasn’t very useful for subsistence agriculture. There’s very little water in most of these places, and the places that do have water are mostly on hillsides, where it’s hard to build anything or grow any crops.
i admit all the easy land was developed. but as mentioned in the article the homestead act has not been policy for some time and effectively the policy of the government is that the land is not for civil settlement, rather conservation, economic activity like mining, and available for purchase by large developers.
It's true that the homestead acts haven't been policy since the 1970s - but that still gave people over 50 years to claim this land for free if they wanted to, after these states had been admitted as states! The fact that not one single person chose this land, even as people were taking other land, seems to justify the more industrial-or-conservation-oriented federal policy.
This is largely not the case. The vast majority of western public land is BLM and USFS. Both of those operate under multiple-use regimes where both economic and recreational activity occur.
economic and recreational activity are not the same as settlement, and while avenues exist to purchase the land it’s not really the same as the land being default yes for development
A little disappointed in the analysis here. Maybe the amount of developable land really is too small to impact the housing market as you suggest but you make no rigorous attempt to evaluate that intuition quantitatively. I’m sure some economist somewhere has written a formal model that could be useful or at least done enough to make some back of the envelope calculations possible.
In particular the relevant thing to estimate is the *welfare gains* to selling federal land.