DENVER, March 24, 2024—In an interview with Bloomberg Law published Monday, the Trump administration announced it’s considering selling off 625 square miles of public land (400,000 acres) for housing development across the West. Jon Raby, the acting director of the Bureau of Land Management, said the administration is looking at all national public lands as far as 10 miles away from any city and town with as few as 5,000 people.
The Center for Western Priorities released the following statement from Deputy Director Aaron Weiss:
“Get ready for a housing development to pave over your favorite hiking trail. The Trump administration just announced a bleak vision for traffic jams and suburban sprawl across the West. The president wants to sell off the lands that are most accessible to Westerners for hiking, hunting, and camping and turn them into miles of McMansions that stretch across our deserts and mountains. Building ten miles out from small towns is not a recipe for smart growth or affordable housing. It’s just a giveaway to billionaire developers at the expense of America’s parks, trails, and wildlife.”
Last week, the departments of Interior and Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced a plan to work together to identify public land that could be used to develop housing and to sell that land to local governments and private developers. The announcement did not include information about what metrics would be used to determine what lands are suitable for this purpose, nor did the announcement include any information about whether the agencies would impose income restrictions or density requirements on the housing built through this initiative.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is actively undercutting HUD’s efforts to develop affordable housing. The administration has so far stalled at least $60 million in funding intended largely for affordable housing developments nationwide, according to information obtained by the Associated Press. An internal memo obtained by The Washington Post shows that the Trump administration is planning to cut HUD staffing in half.
Learn more
- Plan to Sell Off ‘Underutilized’ Federal Land for Affordable Housing Is Ineffective and Inefficient, Experts Say — Outdoor Life
- HUD Secretary Scott Turner and DOI Secretary Doug Burgum Announce Joint Task Force To Use Federal Lands for Affordable Housing — HUD
- Trump administration throws hundreds of affordable housing projects into limbo after contract cuts — Associated Press
- HUD cuts expected to worsen America’s housing crisis, staffers say — Washington Post
- The West has an affordable housing crisis. Can public land help? — Westwise
- Senator Mike Lee’s ‘McMansion Subsidy Act’ will not fix affordable housing — Westwise
- Housing affordability is not a land availability problem — Center for Western Priorities TikTok
For more information, visit westernpriorities.org.