The Latest Plot To Privatize Public Lands

The scene struck me as emblematic of life in the modern West, where a class of wealthy newcomers is snuggling into a comfortable, healthy, fulfilling lifestyle and unwealthy locals are left to wage desperate, doomed gambits to afford surging housing costs. An unpredictable fury grows in people who live too long with the truth that a new West is being built— and it’s not for them.

The conventional wisemen of the free market say the cause is simple: Housing construction isn’t keeping up with demand. Of late, this thinking has converged on a rare bipartisan consensus: The real obstacle to affordable housing is the federal public lands surrounding many Western communities, which (we are told) are strangling development and driving up prices.

The lands in question are the 437 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service and open to everyone to camp, walk, hunt, forage, fish. The idea to turn these public forests, grasslands and deserts into privately owned housing developments has a certain sinister elegance: It harnesses very real anger about housing inequality and turns it not against the actual villains but against one of this country’s most egalitarian institutions.

This idea has gained so much traction in recent months, as anger about housing continues to build, that it even made it into the primetime of the 2024 presidential race: Both the Harris and Trump campaigns pledged to help solve the country’s housing woes by opening public lands to housing development, with JD Vance and Tim Walz batting the proposal around during the vice-presidential debate. Republicans included the idea in their 2024 party platform, and President Biden included it in his July 2024 housing plan, which ordered federal agencies to assess how ​“surplus” federal land could be used to build more affordable housing across the country. 

Republicans, for their part, have more expansive plans — and they’re the ones who now control all three branches of the federal government. Since 2022, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) has been introducing the Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter (HOUSES) Act, which would create an avenue for state and local governments to buy tracts of federal public land from the Bureau of Land Management for below market price and turn them over to housing developers. A 2022 report by Republicans on the Congressional Joint Economic Committee estimated the law could lead to the construction of some 2.7 million new homes and transfer some 681,000 acres of federal public land.

Would that solve the problem? Probably not, because it fundamentally misunderstands what the problem is. Drive any road out of Livingston (and many other Western towns) and you’ll find that bulldozers are already mauling the landscape to build more houses. But most of these won’t be remotely affordable to people who work for local wages. Instead, they’re being built to feed the seemingly infinite appetites of the tourism and luxury markets.

If you drive the backroads you’ll also likely see, in nooks and crannies of public land, homeless camps inhabited by the likes of our Subaru-dwelling friend. You can start to feel a bit like Coleridge’s thirst-crazed ancient mariner, adrift on a sea of greed and failed policy: Houses, houses everywhere, nor any home for you. This same maddening paradox has imprisoned communities across the West: Construction booms, new houses sprawl across the land — and still housing costs, and homelessness, surge. 

That’s because the problem isn’t simply a matter of too few houses but of too much money in too few hands. Journalist Jonathan Thompson put it this way in his ​“Land Desk” newsletter last year: ​“In these places, scarcity … is certainly a factor in high home prices, but only a minor one. The big driver is wealth inequality, which manifests as some folks’ willingness and ability to spend gobs of money to own their own little — or vast — piece of Jackson, Aspen, Moab, or Durango, versus everyone else’s inability to do the same.” 

The HOUSES Act includes no provisions to ensure affordability. A 2023 press release from Lee’s office claims the bill would prohibit ​“the development of luxury second homes … thereby focusing on affordability”— but the actual text of the bill contains no such strictures. The closest it comes is a density provision that would require a minimum of four homes per acre, and even that expires 15 years after the land is transferred. This isn’t a recipe for affordability but for a nightmare future in which every remotely flat scrap of ground in these areas, private and formerly public alike, is crusted over with McMansions that overlook seas of asphalt where heavily armed police — their departments well funded by the broadened tax base — spend their days herding around armies of unhoused restaurant workers and Airbnb cleaners.

It won’t stop the rich from buying up the West — it will only offer up more of it for them to buy.

While the Act would do little to create affordable housing, it would help achieve the longtime right-wing goal of privatizing public lands. It should be seen not as a novel solution to the housing problem but as a trojan horse — the latest ploy to get a wildly unpopular idea into law. And it should be no surprise that it comes out of the state of Utah, the heart of the anti-public-lands movement. Former Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), Sen. Mike Lee’s predecessor, first proposed a bill that would dissolve federal public lands back in 1979. In 2012, the Utah legislature revived the issue by passing a bill demanding the federal government turn over public lands to the state by the end of 2014. When the deadline passed, Utah began preparing a lawsuit to force the transfer, which it filed this past summer. (It was rejected by the Supreme Court in January.) ​“There’s a long history of western politicians scapegoating public lands for all of their problems,” says Kate Groetzinger, communications manager for the Center for Western Priorities, which opposes the HOUSES Act. ​“I don’t think building affordable housing is really the goal of the legislation — it’s about growth.” 

Yes, it’s about turning these desolate communist wastelands to productivity and profit, for God’s sake! Speaking on the topic at the October vice presidential debate, Vance put it this way: ​“What Donald Trump has said is we have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything.”

Vance and Trump must not get out much (the outdoors is, after all, tough on makeup and expensive suits), because it’s hard to believe anyone who has actually set foot on these lands could conclude they are ​“unused.” These are places where deer and elk and pronghorn antelope live, and where people go to hunt them — places where ranchers graze cattle, where families drive out from the cities to camp, where rare plants send down roots and send up their unrepeatable blooms, where snow falls and streams start and flow down to feed lakes and reservoirs and towns. They are home to wolves and bison and some of the last grizzly bears left in the lower-48, to fishing holes and berry patches where no one is turned away. These public lands are bastions of biodiversity in the face of the extinction crisis wiping species and their homes off the face of the earth forever. 

What the HOUSES Act would do is turn the firehose of luxury development — already ravaging the parts of these ecosystems that lie on private lands — on this public land habitat and all the creatures, plants and people who depend on it.

We’re dealing with a crisis of habitat destruction, for all of us: The same forces of luxury development and gentrification driving people out of their homes are also driving the homes of wild plants and animals out of existence. We need cross-species solidarity! So what can be done to house people without destroying wildlife habitat? Good ol’ Sen. Lee actually points in the right direction. His bill is about opening ​“underutilized space,” and he’s right — the West is full of it: Literally millions of houses are sitting empty! In Montana, for example,14% of the housing stock was vacant as of 2022 (the most recent numbers available), and half of those homes were categorized by the Census Bureau as ​“seasonal, recreational, occasional.” In places like Madison County, home of Big Sky, where affordable housing is even harder to come by, a staggering third of all housing units are categorized that way, and a 2021 study counted 24 short-term rentals per 100 households. 

Which is why I’m calling on Lee — if he really cares about access to affordable housing — to abandon the HOUSES Act in favor of a bill I’m drawing up called the HOME Act: Helping Open Mansions to Everyone. The HOME Act would tax the bejesus out of millionaire-owned second, third, fourth homes sitting empty, then use the money to create affordable housing land trusts. Unpaid taxes would be grounds for seizing the unoccupied mansions and turning them into resident-owned housing cooperatives. 

After all, before we send in the bulldozers on our common lands, shouldn’t we at least consider equitably sharing the housing we’ve already built?