Solving the housing crisis

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: It’s Thursday, the 26th of June.

Thank you for listening to today’s edition of WORLD Radio. Good morning, I’m Mary Reichard.

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: And I’m Myrna Brown.

First up on The World and Everything in It: creating affordable housing.

The Big Beautiful Bill once included a plan to sell off public lands to help lower housing costs. But this week, the Senate dropped that part of the legislation.

Supporters aren’t giving up though. They say they’ll propose an amended bill because people need houses.

REICHARD: The public land in question spans 11 Western states, and locals are torn over whether the plan would solve the problem or make it worse.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

MARY MUNCY: Dave and Laura Pearl live in Kaysville, Utah, and they spend a lot of time on public lands.

DAVE: I think every bike trip that we've done over the last couple years has been on public lands. Almost every trail that we've ridden has been on public lands.

They’ve lived in Utah for five years and are worried the sale of public lands near their home could change what they do outside. But they do see why Congress is considering it.

DAVE: We both work and we make pretty good money, but the home prices here are just so expensive that we're currently renting a house from some friends.

But Dave and his wife, Laura, don’t think selling public lands is the best way to lower housing costs.

LAURA: It might just be one tree, but that one tree is part of a forest.

The Senate had proposed selling less than one percent of land owned by the United States Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM. That’s a little over two million acres.

It was supposed to be part of the current spending package, but the Senate parliament ruled that the provision did not relate to the purpose of the bill. That doesn’t technically mean it’s dead, but few Congresses have defied a ruling from the parliament.

Instead, the sponsor of the bill, Utah Senator Mike Lee, posted on X that he will amend the bill and try to pass it separately.

ED PINTO: The western third of the country has the most severe housing unaffordability in the country.

Ed Pinto is the co-founder and director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center.

PINTO: The Bureau of Land Management manages 245 million acres in the lower 48. That's the size of Texas.

And almost all of it is out west. The original bill excluded a lot of land, like national parks, monuments, or wilderness areas, and it said anyone who buys it must state what their purpose would be and stick to it.

Senator Lee says now he’s going to add more stipulations, including not selling any Forest Service land and only selling BLM land within five miles of population centers.

Pinto says even though a lot of land would have been offered for sale in the original bill, developers probably would have only bought a fraction of it.

PINTO: You want to be near other residential development. You don't want to be, you know, 30 or 40 or 50 miles away from the nearest development.

That’s because it takes money to build things like roads and to run power lines, and most people want to be close to their job in the city.

The government passed a similar bill in 1998 ordering the BLM to sell off land around Las Vegas for affordable housing, but they didn’t put a time limit on the project, and as of last year, about 35 percent of that land remains unsold.

It’s unclear whether a new bill would have a timeframe, but the old one required the land to be offered for sale within five years.

The question on many people’s minds is will the sale of public land actually lead to lower housing prices?

DAVID DWORKIN: As pretty much everybody knows, housing prices have gone through the roof over the last five years.

David Dworkin is president and CEO of the National Housing Conference.

DWORKIN: Generally, to buy the same home, you would need twice as much of the income that you would have needed in 2019.

Dworkin says there are a lot of factors that drive that price, but the biggest one, and the foundation of the problem, is a lack of supply.

DWORKIN: During the financial crisis, we lost a lot of home builders who went out of business, and that's definitely compounded it. We've slowly recovered our annual construction to a sustainable level, but we are so deep in the hole that it will take years for us to make up the gap.

He says the other factor is that in many communities where the number of jobs is rising, the number of homes isn’t. And that’s affecting people from San Francisco to Lincoln, Nebraska. But Dworkin doesn’t think selling federal land is a silver bullet.

DWORKIN: It definitely would be helpful. There is a lot of federal land out there that is underutilized, but we can't get lost in the numbers. People are like, ‘Oh, look at all these, you know, millions of acres of land,’ and most of that is never going to be developed for housing or pretty much anything else. There's a reason the federal government owns it, and in many cases, it's because nobody else wants to.

Selling public land that could be used for housing would help cities like Bend, Oregon, where the rapidly growing city is surrounded by federal land. But it’s not going to help every city.

DWORKIN: We also need to think holistically about what it takes to build a home.

Costs rise when tariffs are in place, when supply chains break down, or when there just aren’t enough people on the job site. And Dworkin says sometimes it's blocked by locals who have a “not in my backyard” mentality.

DWORKIN: People basically say, ‘Oh, I support affordable housing, just not here.’

As of November, some estimates put the U.S. housing need at a little over a million homes. Others put that number closer to five million. Dworkin says selling public land could do some good, but it’s going to take a lot more than that to fix the problem.

DWORKIN: We got into it by not building a unit at a time, and we're going to have to get out of it the same way. You know, a unit at a time, there is no magic fix. The bottom line is we just have to build housing.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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