A Trojan horse
Poking holes in the seemingly altruistic push to use public lands for housing

Sometimes when I drive past the little house my wife and I bought when we first married 30 years ago, it makes me sad. Not only because of nostalgia but because of economics.

We were young professionals and bought a cute one-bedroom crackerbox in a small Montana town for less than $50,000. Today on Zillow, that house lists for more than $300,000. There’s no way salaries have kept up with that kind of inflation. Clearly, rising costs are hitting the working class hard. The escalating prices of fuel, food and shelter squeeze families like a vise.

But that doesn’t excuse people who would use the national housing crisis to advance their agenda to strip Americans of their public land heritage. While there are some rare opportunities for public land sales to help ease the tight housing market here and there, wholesale liquidating of public land is a false promise. 

People should know that the folks who ideologically oppose public land are exploiting the housing crisis to push their unpopular agenda.

Recently, some pundits have suggested that a fix for America’s housing problem is to sell off the public estate, thereby increasing the supply of available land. After all, the federal government manages hundreds of millions of acres.

In a few widely scattered places, it makes sense to allow careful urban development on limited public lands. Clark County, Nev., has done just that on the outskirts of Las Vegas. But that scenario has been collaboratively developed over the years through legislation pushed through by the late Nevada Democratic Senator Harry Reid.

A crop of mostly Republican politicians in the West resent the public estate simply because they dislike the idea of federal land ownership. They use both the courts and Congress in their attempts to reduce the public estate. In their vision, Western states should be more like Missouri or Kansas, with almost no public land.

These folks insist they aren’t targeting national parks or even national forests. They know that’s political suicide. Instead, they focus on Bureau of Land Management property as a precedent, which most people have never heard of. And what are these lands like?

First, the vast majority of BLM land is remote and rugged. Think of the tundra in Alaska, the basin-and-range desert of Nevada and the Missouri River Breaks of northern Montana. These are history’s leftovers, and not where most people want to – or even can – live.  

Second, these areas tend to be arid. Developments require water, and Western water rights already tend to be oversubscribed. Local climate alone means that human habitation in these places can’t be very dense.

These lands also are often prone to wildfire. Loading these “wildland-urban interfaces” with more homes could lead to future disaster. Managing fire risk in the interface grows more difficult and costly as they are developed. When the fires do come, damages can climb into the billions, rather than the millions. The tragic 2025 fires of Los Angeles would have been even more catastrophic had the adjacent Angeles National Forest been full of homes.

One more value is worth pointing out. Even if these public lands don’t have houses on them, public lands serve a purpose. Undeveloped canyons help control floods. Open lands provide habitat for wildlife – not just rare species – but also the deer and elk we like to hunt and the birds we like to watch. Public lands are valuable for recreation that’s good for our souls and are the goose that lays the golden egg for many rural economies.

The bottom line is that this debate has virtually nothing to do with the price of homes, which are high for a complex mix of reasons ranging from local growth policies and wealth disparity to high interest rates.

There’s a shortfall of millions of homes nationwide, but most of the demand simply isn’t where the public lands are. The BLM already has a process to liquidate lands when it needs to or when it makes sense. There is no screaming need for reform of that process, even if there is a screaming need for affordable housing.

To a local eye with any perspective, it’s clear that the argument to sell public lands for housing is a Trojan horse to take public lands out of public hands.

Ben Long is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West, writersontherange.org. He is senior program director for Resource Media in Kalispell, Mont.