This story is an excerpt from Inno Lab Notes, a newsletter where we explore housing, transportation and energy solutions.
Joe Biden dropping out of the presidential race seemed to eclipse all other national and local news this weekend, but there was another bit of national news that caught my attention last week.
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The White House announced “major new actions to lower housing costs.” Some of the moves — like a 5% cap on rent increases — will require congressional action.
But the president also directed federal agencies to “assess surplus federal land that can be repurposed to build more affordable housing across the country.”
The call to use public lands for affordable housing could be of particular interest in Utah — where more than half of the land is federally controlled. And it begs the question — what federal lands are considered “surplus?”
There are nearly 12,000 acres of “buildable, government-owned land in urban, transit-accessible communities” in Utah, per a study from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and Center for Geospatial Solutions.
“People think that available land is a limiting agent to our ability to meet our housing needs,” George McCarthy, president and CEO of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy told me. “And it’s just not true.”
Sen. Mike Lee has been pushing to turn over public lands in the West through his HOUSES Act, which would allow local governments to nominate parcels for transfer. (I wrote about the proposal in great detail in January). But new housing under Lee’s plan wouldn’t have to be affordable, leading some to call it a “McMansion Subsidy Act.”
While conservation groups bristled over Lee’s plan, they praised last week’s announcement from the White House.
“The Interior Department is showing how public lands that are already well-suited to development can be part of the housing solution,” Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the environmental nonprofit Center for Western Priorities, said in a statement, “with appropriate safeguards to make sure the housing is affordable and doesn’t end up as trophy homes for billionaires.”
The White House pointed to a sale of 20 acres of land in Clark County, Nevada, for affordable housing.
But that sale is going through under the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act — which was passed decades ago during Nevada Sen. Harry Reid’s tenure to acomodate the state’s growing population. The act lets the Bureau of Land Management to dispose of certain lands in Nevada.
I called Ron Mobley, the special legislation program manager for BLM’s Nevada State Office, to confirm that Nevada’s program hadn’t changed.
It had not, although he hoped that the White House’s actions could help other states. “The need is everywhere,” Mobley told me, “it’s not just Clark County or Nevada.”
“Those are [Nevada] lands that have already been designated for disposal, and there’s a process that’s already been set up to do that,” explained Redge Johnson, director of Utah Public Lands. But he said Biden’s public lands announcement “could affect some of those lands within our city limits.”
He noted that the plan seemed to be in line with Lee’s HOUSES Act.
“I’m just really excited to see that both parties seem to be working on this,” Johnson said, “I do think it’s critically important.”