Families Need Affordable Houses. Let’s Build Them on Federal Land

A few years ago, I visited a cousin at her home in a relatively new Utah suburb. To one side, the home had sweeping views of Utah Lake and the Wasatch Mountains, while virgin desert spread out toward the horizon. But when I remarked that the house would soon surely be surrounded by yet another subdivision, I was quickly corrected. The land beyond the home, my cousin told me, belonged to the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, a federal agency, and could therefore not be developed. In this particular neighborhood, the frontier was fixed. 

Today, neighborhoods like my cousin’s and the federal land they adjoin have become the center of a heated debate over housing. On the one hand, some have suggested that such land might be developed, alleviating shortages of family-oriented housing in expensive cities. The Institute for Family Studies’ own Lyman Stone recently argued this point in the Wall Street Journal, and Utah Sen. Mike Lee was pursuing a sweeping version of this idea before dropping it last month. 

On the other side, however, proponents of wildland recreation, environmentalists, and others have pushed back, arguing that federal land is a shared and sensitive resource. And once sold or developed, that land cannot easily be reclaimed. Predictably, the debate has largely broken down along partisan lines (though Sen. Lee’s maximalist approach to selling federal land faced bipartisan condemnation). 

But this is not an issue that needs to be partisan at all. That’s because the amount of land needed to actually make a dent in cities’ housing shortages is minuscule relative to what’s available. Land that is already near existing neighborhoods could be converted to housing with relatively minor tradeoffs. And while that may not be everyone’s preferred solution, cities that want to remain dynamic, economically vibrant, and—perhaps most importantly— affordable to families need to find a place to build the kind of housing families actually want. Federal land developed in a “limited” way, to borrow Stone’s term, is the obvious choice. 

I’ll use my own metro area, Salt Lake City, as an example. When my wife and I moved to our current neighborhood six years ago, we bought our house for just under $600,000—a price that was barely within reach for us, and which was already the result of years of runups. Today, Zillow thinks my house would be worth around $1 million, a price increase that has far outpaced inflation or wage growth. The obvious result of this trend is that many middle-class families who might have wanted to live in Salt Lake cannot afford to do so. 

This type of affordability problem plagues cities across the U.S. and is propelled in large part by a supply shortage. Estimates vary, but Realtor.com recently put the shortage at a staggering 4 million housing units across the entire United States.

In Utah, Gov. Spencer Cox has proposed a solution that involves building 35,000 new homes within the next five years. Cox’s proposal specifically focuses on starter homes, rejuvenating the “American Dream,” and families.

Cox hasn’t specifically said where all those homes might be built, but as a thought experiment, imagine if they all went up on former federal land. If all 35,000 homes were built on quarter-acre lots, the entire project would require 8,750 acres. Obviously adding in streets, parks, schools, and other amenities would require more space, though homes also could be built with slightly higher densities. However, to make things easy, let’s be generous and imagine this project would require 20,000 acres. 

That sounds like a large number. 

But, in fact, the federal government manages 33.2 million acres in Utah, or 63% of the state.¹ The 20,000 theoretical acres required to achieve the governor’s dream scenario, then, would only require about 0.06% of that land. Even if the 20,000 acres were doubled, or tripled, it’s still barely a rounding error. And this is assuming every single new home is built on once-federal land. In practice, many would end up on land that is already private, meaning the amount of land at issue here is negligible. 

Utah is a useful case study, but it’s hardly unique among western states. In neighboring Nevada, the federal government manages more than 56 million acres, or over 80% of the state. In Idaho, the feds oversee nearly 33 million acres, or just under 62% of the state. Oregon, Washington, California, and Arizona—all states that have seen housing prices soar in recent years—also all have tens of millions of acres under federal management. If each of these states set aside 20,000 acres for housing development, most people would be hard pressed to even see a difference on their respective federal land maps. 

Critics of this idea often argue that it makes little sense to develop open land when there is space in cities for more housing. I, too, have on a number of occasions made the argument that we should build in existing places first. 

But recent development in cities suggests that while there are many upsides to “infill”—or building on underutilized urban land such as parking lots—attracting families is not one of them. Salt Lake, for example, has seen a flurry of construction in recent years. Streets that were once lined with parking lots and strip malls are now filled with multi-story apartment buildings. The flood of new housing was so significant that it actually drove down rents as new supply outpaced demand. That’s a good thing for affordability, and many other cities have also added hundreds or thousands of new units to their central cores in recent years. 

However, much of this new housing consists of studio, one- or two-bedroom apartments. Many buildings are located on busy arterial streets, far from amenities such as major parks, and with limited open space. It is no surprise, then, that very few families have actually moved into this new housing. The situation is so dire in my city that last year the local school district ended up closing several elementary schools. They simply didn’t have enough students to carry on, and even those that remain are operating below capacity. 

There are many potential takeaways from this situation, but the most obvious is that families want things like yards, garages, a lack of shared walls, more bedrooms, and so on. But that type of development is extremely difficult to do as infill thanks to both building regulations and financial constraints. And so cities that want to remain attractive to families need to find places to do what builders call “greenfield” development, or development in places that aren’t already built up. Right or wrong, that’s what families have repeatedly shown that they want right now.

Failing to accommodate families by keeping vast swaths of land locked up does not appear to be pushing them into more central, denser neighborhoods. It’s not changing preferences. It’s simply pushing families into further-flung suburbs, delaying their homeownership journey, or pricing them out altogether. That’s not family-friendly policy; it’s the text-book definition of NIMBYism. 

On the other hand, thoughtful and limited development of federal land in places like my cousin’s neighborhood—which is to say, areas that currently see little use and are located near existing infrastructure—means making room for more families with only the most minor of tradeoffs. 

There is, of course, a larger philosophical debate to be had about the role of the government in managing federal land. That’s a particularly contentious topic in many parts of the West, but it’s important to keep in mind that this is not that debate. We’re talking about less than 1% of the federal land in states where housing costs are crushing families. Accommodating those families doesn’t require paving over national forests or whittling away at national parks. Hiking trails, climbing courses, hunting grounds, wildlife preserves, and more can all coexist with the type of housing that families clearly prefer. The only question is if we can make room for those families in our collective backyard. 

Jim Dalrymple II is a journalist and author of the Nuclear Meltdown newsletter about families. He also covers housing for Inman and has previously worked at BuzzFeed News and the Salt Lake Tribune.

Editor's Note: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or views of the Institute for Family Studies.

*Photo credit: Shutterstock