A brief exchange between Ohio Senator J. D. Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz during their Oct. 1 vice presidential debate could foreshadow long-sought relief for Americans eager to purchase homes or secure affordable rental properties.
Asked about the Republican Party’s Platform proposal to sell some federal lands to address housing affordability, Vance responded, “Well, what Donald Trump has said is that when we have a lot of federal lands that are not being used for anything. They are not being used for a national park … and they could be places where we build a lot of housing.”
“We have a lot of land that could be used,” he added.
Vance’s reference to “a lot of land” is an understatement. The land in question is not set aside for national parks, national forests, wildlife refuges, national monuments, wilderness areas, or military bases. Rather, it is vast swaths of federal land in the West unassigned by Congress and administered by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM). BLM oversees 245 million acres, or 382,812.5 square miles. That’s slightly larger than France, Germany, and Austria combined.
The laws covering BLM lands are complex. Since 1960, BLM lands have been managed under federal law for “multiple use and sustained yield,” which includes mining, grazing, energy development (coal, oil, natural gas, and – more recently – wind and solar), and recreation. The Biden administration terminated “multiple use” in favor of “conservation,” a move that has triggered numerous lawsuits because of its devastating economic effect on nearby resource-dependent communities. BLM used to sell or otherwise dispose of its vast holdings, a practice that ended in 1976 with passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act (FLPMA).
“A planned sale of more than 2,500 acres must be submitted to Congress, which may veto the proposal,” noted William Perry Pendley, who led BLM in Trump’s first administration, in the Washington Examiner.
These restrictions, along with the ever-present threat of lawsuits by environmental groups determined to keep the human presence on BLM lands as low as possible, are keeping these lands largely off-limits to commercial development. But the nation’s growing shortage of affordable housing – even for people with solid incomes and good credit scores – cries out for a solution. And selling federal land for residential development offers a way out.
The housing crunch is for real. CBRE Research reported in spring 2024 that average monthly mortgage payments for a newly purchased home surpassed apartment rents by 30 percent. “The disparity between mortgage payments and rental costs presents a substantial hurdle for aspiring homeowners,” said Matt Vance, Americas Head of Multifamily Research for CBRE. “The sharp increase in the cost of buying a home has made it increasingly difficult for individuals and families to make the transition from renting to ownership.”
CBRE projects a shortage of 3.8 million housing units in the U.S. primarily single-family homes and smaller multi-unit dwellings. These housing types account for about 90 percent of the overall shortage, which is expected to persist until at least 2029.
One way to reverse the troubling trend of putting the American dream of homeownership out of people’s reach is to increase the amount of land on which homes can be built. This is what real-estate developer Trump had in mind when, in 2023, he called for the construction of ten “freedom cities” on undeveloped federal land. The homes in question could include detached single-family homes, condos, townhouses, rental apartments, and houses in rural settings, where food can be produced on surrounding land. These homes would be augmented by supermarkets, pharmacies, schools, churches, doctors’ offices, restaurants, and other businesses serving people’s needs – all built on private land, as is the American tradition.
Counties in affected areas would see their tax bases grow, as dormant government land is sold to vibrant private-sector ownership. States whose growth is impeded by the smothering presence of BLM land are Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, California, Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. These states may have their own elected officials and capital cities, but, in many respects, they are colonies lorded over by bureaucrats in distant Washington, D.C.
One of the innovations of the incoming Trump administrations is the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), an outside-of-government commission tasked with eliminating waste in the federal government. One of the first places DOGE’s leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, can recommend is cutting the waste that is the BLM’s labyrinthine bureaucracy. Land management by bureaucrats is terribly expensive. This is not only true for the taxpayer funds spent managing 245 million acres of government land. But there is also waste in the opportunity lost by these lands not being used for something so elementary as putting roofs over people’s heads.
In making their pitch to Congress to open these lands to residential and commercial development, Trump, Musk, and Ramaswamy should remind lawmakers that we are not a nation of land socialists.
Bonner Russell Cohen is a senior policy analyst with the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT).