There are few topics that the Democrat and Republican presidential campaigns agree on. But of the many differing policy proposals in their platforms, there’s at least one similarity: freeing up limited portions of federally owned lands for new construction.
Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump have outlined the potential use of the lands to make housing more accessible, and their running mates, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, elaborated on such a strategy on the debate stage in the past week.
The concept has gained support that includes President Joe Biden as the U.S. struggles to bolster its supply of housing and bring down the cost of homeownership. Analysts have estimated that the U.S. is short between 1.5 and 5.5 million units of housing.
The rare bipartisan interest "just speaks to the unprecedented situation we're in right now with communities of all stripes, all shapes and sizes, all economic foundations, are dealing with unaffordability,” Megan Lawson, an economist at independent nonprofit research group Headwaters Economics said in an interview. “They're looking to come up with creative solutions, and this is one of them, looking at public lands as a possibility.”
According to an analysis by the group, as of June, the federal government owned more than a quarter of the land in the United States.
And in the country’s 13 Western states, defined as those south of Montana and including Alaska and Hawaii, about 50% of land is federally owned, according to Lawson. That’s significantly higher than the rest of the country, where about 3.5% of land is federally owned.
While on its face the concept seems straightforward, there are still challenges that would need to be overcome on both sides. And economists have warned that opening publicly owned lands, many of which are far from population centers, won't help much with shortages in dense urban areas.
Evolving positions
In the past week, while Vance touted plans for homebuilding on federal lands, Walz’s explanation of a Harris administration was less clear.
“What Donald Trump has said is we have a lot of federal lands that aren't being used for anything. They're not being used for national parks. They're not being used,” Vance said in their debate. “They could be places where we build a lot of housing. … We have a lot of land that could be used. We have a lot of Americans that need homes.”
Meanwhile, Walz pointed to the importance of federal protection for lands, calling them protected and seemingly questioning the viability of using those areas for housing.
The lands are “there for a reason. They belong to all of us,” he said. “But again, this is when you view housing and you view these things as commodities, like there's a chance to make money here. Let's take this federal land and let's sell it to people for that. I think there's better ways to do this.”
A spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign did not respond to a request to comment further. But in Harris’ Aug. 16 policy rollout, the vice president said she'd "take action to make certain federal lands eligible to be repurposed for new housing developments that families can afford."
Asked about the Trump-Vance ticket’s stance on federal land policy, Karoline Leavett, that campaign’s national press secretary, said that Trump “has a real plan to defeat inflation, bring down mortgage rates, and make purchasing a home dramatically more affordable.”
She added that “he will rein in federal spending, stop the unstainable invasion of illegal aliens which is driving up housing costs, cut taxes for American families, eliminate costly regulations, and free up appropriate portions of federal land for housing.”
Bipartisan support
After the Great Recession, there was a serious drop-off in homebuilding nationwide in a weakened housing market. It’s a trend that has had lasting effects and left the country grappling for more places for people to live.
As a result, some economists and lawmakers have also suggested that selling unused public land owned by the federal government could be part of the solution to the growing burden of the undersupply of housing by opening large swaths to homebuilders.
Because of that disparity in land ownership, the use of federal land for homebuilding has garnered bipartisan support that is determined more by geography than politics, said Lawson, the Headwaters economist.
In Congress, members of both parties have introduced legislation in recent years supporting using the lands at least in part for building residences.
Republican Sen. Mike Lee and Republican Rep. John Curtis, both of Utah, have offered companion bills in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. The bill known as the HOUSES Act would allow state and local governments to nominate parcels of land to the Bureau of Land Management for residential construction that meets outlined standards. A report from Congress' Joint Economic Committee Republicans found that if enacted, the bill could provide about 2.7 million residences and alleviate up to 14% of the nation's housing shortage.
Another set of legislation is the Forest Service Flexible Housing Partnerships Act, introduced into the Senate and House of Representatives last year by Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Republican Sen. Steve Daines of Montana and Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse of Colorado. That bill would strengthen existing legislation and give the U.S. Forest Service more authority “to lease underutilized administrative sites to address local needs, including for building affordable housing.”
The White House has put its support behind the movement, too. In July, Biden announced plans to work with the Bureau of Land Management to open hundreds of acres of public land in Nevada. One part of that plan, which has since undergone a public comment process, would see the sale of 20 acres of federal land to Clark County in Nevada, for “below market value at just $100 per acre.” If approved, the sale could provide up to “150 affordable homes for households making less than 80% of the area median income,” according to the White House.
It's a strategy similar to the precedent of using vacant federally owned buildings to serve the public interest, according to Andy Winkler, director of the Bipartisan Policy Center's housing and infrastructure projects.
"For a long time, it has been the policy that at least surplus, kind of underutilized buildings were given the opportunity to be conveyed or donated to state agencies or nonprofits to be used for homelessness purposes," he said in an interview. "So there's kind of some precedent out there for using federally owned property for kind of public interest reasons."
According to the U.S. General Services Administration, "surplus property" can be leased to "local public agencies to assist the homeless, and sales to public agencies may be negotiated at fair market value without restrictions on use."
'Complement, not a solution'
Though support from lawmakers and candidates exists, economists have cautioned that the policies may not be easy to enact. Regardless of the November election, one potential challenge a president could face will be balancing environmental concerns with the need for building, according to Winkler.
“I'm confident to some degree folks would kind of make good on the promise, but there aren't ways currently to jump through those environmental hoops,” he said.
Especially for a Democratic administration, “you can't, on the one hand, be trying to combat climate change, and on the other hand, opening up huge tracts of land to new development, as opposed to trying to build more dense communities or things like that,” Winkler said.
Any legislation would also need to include explicit provisions for affordability, according to Lawson.
“It’s got to be done very deliberately and intentionally to target that workforce housing or low-income housing,” she said. “It’s got to be targeted toward that if it's going to actually move the needle. Because otherwise, if we're just building more luxury … that's not going to improve housing affordability.”
Economists have also warned that using federal lands to promote homebuilding is not the end-all-be-all solution to the housing shortage. While it would help some areas, not everywhere would get relief, according to Alex Armlovich, a senior housing policy analyst at the Niskanen Center think tank.
“This is really peripheral land, which is still important, but it won't address the housing shortages that are in the cores of urban areas,” he said in an interview. “It’ll be a welcome relief to the Mountain West, but it’s actually a complement, not a substitute for land use reform."