Can public lands fix the West’s affordable housing crisis?

This story is part of The Salt Lake Tribune’s ongoing commitment to identify solutions to Utah’s biggest challenges through the work of the Innovation Lab.

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Saratoga Springs • Not long ago the quickly growing city of Saratoga Springs was better known for its farms than suburbs. Now rows of new homes and apartments are sprouting up where irrigation systems once rested.

But in the middle of a quickly developing part of the city, there’s a 20-acre rectangle of open land with a transmission line running through it. The rectangle is surrounded by private land and brand new homes, a yellow crane, a school and State Route 73 are just a few minutes away.

It’s a parcel of public land managed by the Bureau of Land Management.

“Should we be looking at some of those parcels as places where we put housing or amenities for housing, open space, public service buildings, things of that nature?” wondered Utah Public Lands director Redge Johnson from his office in Salt Lake City. “There are a lot of these in-holdings or orphan properties around the state that just don’t fit the general narrative of what public lands are.”

Those types of inholdings are rare in Utah, Salt Lake, and Davis Counties, Johnson said, but that’s not the case in fast-growing counties like Sevier, Washington, and Iron.

In those counties running out of space and cheap housing, some argue that lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management should be put to work and turned into more houses.

Sen. Mike Lee, for the second year in a row, proposed the Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter (HOUSES ACT) in hopes of speeding up the process of selling public lands destined to become homes. A 2022 report from Lee’s office estimated that his legislation would fill 35% of the housing shortage in Utah and increase the number of people who could afford the average home in Utah by 21% — but critics question if it would result in a single affordable unit in the West.

The Bureau of Land Management controls about 42% of land in the state, but are those public lands the answer to the state’s affordable housing crisis?

Affordable housing, or McMansion subsidies?

The federal government already has a process for transferring ownership of public lands.

Under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, the U.S. Department of Interior can sell a tract of land if it meets several requirements, one of which is serving “important public objectives, including but not limited to, expansion of communities and economic development.” The Recreation and Public Purposes Act also lets the BLM sell or lease public lands, but it’s “a long arduous paperwork process,” Johnson said.

Lee’s HOUSES Act would attempt to streamline and speed up the land transfer process in cases where the end goal is more housing. A state or local government would nominate a public lands parcel and the transfer would have to be completed within a year for tracts under 640 acres. Land with special designations — like national monuments or wilderness areas — wouldn’t be eligible.

The bill doesn’t require homes to be sold for a specific price or reserved for people making a percentage of the area’s median income.

“The big problem with the HOUSES Act is that it doesn’t do anything to make housing affordable,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation and advocacy group. “It provides for McMansions on public land.”

Lee’s office didn’t comment but shared an FAQ sheet.

In response to the question, “How do we ensure that this isn’t a giveaway to developers or businesses?” the FAQ answered, “This proposal would require that 85% of land acquired must be used for residential purposes at a density not less than 4 homes per acre. The remaining 15% would be eligible for use by commercial businesses to fulfill other needs of potential communities.”

The density requirements, Weiss argued, could still allow for large homes. “It’s not what mountain communities need,” Weiss said, “it is an invitation just to give away public land to developers in a way that does nothing to solve the housing crisis in the West.”

In some places where BLM land is close to a town center, a transfer for home building might make sense, said Danya Rumore, director of the Wallace Stegner Center Environmental Dispute Resolution Program at the University of Utah and co-director of the Gateway and Natural Amenity Region Initiative.

“I could imagine there would be some places where the Bureau of Land Management thinks it’s actually appropriate to repurpose land,” Rumore said. “And I know that often our federal land management agencies are very eager to work with their nearby communities as best they can within their legal constraints.” It would likely need to be a nuanced, and site-specific conversation.

There’s also a risk of “developing to meet current demand” Rumore said.

In a report published last May, Headwater Economics outlined how roads, water, emergency response and other infrastructure systems “can be stressed by an influx of visitors and new residents.” Maintenance costs, the authors wrote, “often disproportionately burden residents.”

There’s additional stress on natural resources, the report authors note, and in the arid West, water scarcity is a concern.

“A lot of these communities are really struggling to deal with their infrastructure needs,” Rumore said, “and Moab was a perfect example of this where their wastewater system was basically overwhelmed.”

She also worried about roads, traffic and forcing a town’s workforce to spend more on transportation. Pairing a new development with public transportation though, could be an effective strategy.

A targeted approach

There’s a reason why the plot in Saratoga Springs defies expectations.

“The Forest Service and BLM lands are really the lands that nobody wanted back in the 19th century” explained Andrew Plantinga, a natural resources and economic policy professor at the University of California Santa Barbara’s Bren School of Environmental Science and Management.

“That means that they tend to be in places that are inaccessible and inhospitable,” he said

However, Plantinga said, “If you selected the lands carefully, you could identify some Forest Service and BLM lands where a housing project would be feasible.”

Weiss, with the Center for Western Priorities, isn’t against all schemes to build on federal lands. “If you do it right, public lands can be part of that solution to the housing crunch,” Weiss said, “but you have to make sure you’re doing it in the right places.”

He pointed to Colorado Senator Michael Bennet’s work on the proposed Forest Service Flexible Housing Partnerships Act, as one positive example. The bipartisan legislation aims to ensure the United States Forest Service is able to lease administrative lands for local needs, like building affordable housing.

The sites targeted in the provision likely have some infrastructure on them, Weiss said. It uses public lands for housing “in a way that is not going to create an additional encroachment or a giveaway of public lands that folks use, but use the existing land that’s there in a smart way that benefits communities.”

Where have public lands been used for affordable housing?

Some elements of the HOUSES Act aren’t entirely new.

One example is the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, passed in 1998 under the guidance of U.S. Senator Harry Reid. It authorized the Bureau of Land Management to “dispose” of certain lands around the Las Vegas Valley.

“Because of how much land BLM owns, there was no way for Las Vegas, Clark County, City of Henderson, City of North Las Vegas and City of Las Vegas to grow without BLM selling land or doing a land exchange or something,” explained Ron Mobley, the special legislation program manager for BLM’s Nevada State Office.

Land sales in the region generated about $4.5 billion in revenue since 1998, according to Mobley. But, the Nevada Independent reported, the act “facilitated Las Vegas’ growth in a manner that some environmental groups have said has only worsened the effects of climate change and warming.”

Although the legislation created new development opportunities in a landlocked region and funds for restoration projects, less than 1% of the lands sold under SNPLMA were for affordable housing (housing reserved for people making 80% or less of the area median income), Mobley said.

Acquiring land for affordable housing projects through SNPLMA is a complicated process requiring a lot of work from the local jurisdiction and developers, said Lorri Murphy, vice president of real estate development for Ovation, which built and manages several affordable housing projects on former BLM land in the Las Vegas Valley. “But anything you can do to reduce the costs makes it easier to make these projects feasible.”

Some recent procedural changes may make the process easier though, and Clark County currently has an application in for a BLM parcel that would be turned into a Community Land Trust with homes for families that make 80% of the area’s median income.

Is it housing, or wealth inequality?

The wealthy have a voracious appetite for homes in gateway communities from Springdale to Jackson, Wyoming, and some argue the rule of supply and demand breaks in popular Western gateway communities.

“There’s a real demand for second, third, fourth homeownership in these communities,” Rumore said. “It’s the local workforce that is really getting squeezed out, pushed out.”

“I don’t think this is so much a housing issue,” Rumore with the University of Utah said. Housing, Rumore continued, is the symptom, the canary in the coal mine, for wealth inequality.

In a world where people in Aspen can afford to purchase homes for $30 million dollars while workers in that community only make $20 an hour, will the free market actually ever work?

Even if public lands are opened for housing development the central problem may remain: if you build it, the rich will come.

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