The ball is rolling on selling federal lands for housing with the creation of a task force that would identify federal land that would be suitable for housing. The task force would be run by the Departments of the Interior and Housing and Urban Development.
“The aim of Trump’s new task force is to identify the land parcels suitable for building. It will then transfer or lease them out to public-housing authorities, nonprofits or local governments to develop homes. The land might occasionally be sold to private developers, according to a HUD representative. The federal agencies would determine that on a “case-by-case basis” in coordination with the local government.”
Really? One might suspect this money-grubbing Administration would sell the most valuable land and to the highest bidder. Especially if this is going to be used to finance its sovereign wealth fund.
No mention here of whether the Forest Service or national forest lands would be involved – it could be limited to lands not otherwise “designated,” including national forests. The other interesting thing is this:
“Developing even 512,000 acres of the Bureau of Land Management’s lots could yield between three million and four million new homes across western states such as Nevada, Utah, California and Arizona, according to a preliminary analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., center-right think tank.”
It’s hard to picture where those acres would not be, given that …
“Only a small portion of U.S. government-owned land is near cities with housing shortages. About 47 million acres, or 7.3% of all federal land, falls within metropolitan areas that need more homes, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of government land maps and housing-shortage data from the National Association of Realtors.
In a few cases, local housing shortages overlap with an abundance of federal land in the area, such as Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. This policy could make a big difference for those housing markets.”
But what about Seattle, Portland, Spokane and … Missoula. The prices in many northwestern national forest-adjacent cities (and towns) indicate a housing shortage in these places. This article says the Secretaries want “affordable” housing, but it’s hard to imagine what kind of constraints that would put on the process – anywhere that has a housing shortage has an affordable housing shortage, and I can’t imagine this federal government adding requirements to local real estate deals to ensure housing affordability. Given the lack of guardrails being recognized by this Administration, I can imagine that any community that is interested could be coming into some new real estate.
“HUD will pinpoint where housing needs are most pressing,” and Interior “will identify locations that can support homes while carefully considering environmental impact and land-use restrictions,” the agencies’ secretaries wrote in the Journal’s opinion piece.
So they say. Will they consider the effects on national forest management of expanding the WUI? Land management plans should have identified lands suitable for disposal (or maybe a process for doing that) – would this matter? (Maybe someone with a WSJ subscription can pry out some more details about what these Secretaries have in mind.)
Just when I conclude it cannot get any worse, it gets worse. 3 reasons why the wildfires are so destructive. One of these is an expanding Wildland- Urban Interface (WUI). So, let’s expand the WUI. Have we lost our minds?
In my Student Teaching Experience in 2007, I develop a poster entitled, “Everything is Commected.” The initial focus was on “ecosystems” but the thoughts from the students suggested Newton’s Law that for every action, there is a full, opposite reaction. They got it.
Now, I am asking myself, how will this be expanded beyond the one-half million acres; we know it will. What will be the consequences to human and wild life? Are we prepared for this intentional destruction and the generational impacts it will bring, or perhaps no one really cares.
This cannot be a decision whereby the musker decides. So many of us have spent a lifetime trying to make sure the parts and pieces of the land system fit together and in harmony. My conclusions: surely we cannot be this irresponsible. Or, we will be exceedingly deliberate to ensure the impacts that we can be reasonably confident will happen, are raised to a high level of thinkers who care, for a full and thoughtful assessment thereof?
Very respectfully
.
Who is “the musker”?
Sorry, “connected.” I am so sorry if this action is real. It’s hard to spell correctly.
Back during the Bush Jr’s Administration, a plan was developed to dispose of many isolated parcels of FS system lands, using that funding for other lands adjustment actions. Most of these parcels were not even identifiable on the ground; old mining claims that had reverted/sold/abandoned back to federal jurisdiction. Truly, the best thing since sliced bread! However, a few liberal outlets got ahold of where theses parcels were and organized an outcry against such action. Some of these things were pieces of acres in size!
At that time, we had a couple hundred acres of donation of fine, private lands that would come over the FS. Believe it or not, it was parcels held by the Eisenhower’s – of Ike’s group. They were attacked to the point they told us (FS) to pound sand…..
I don’t think the push back was a R vs. D thing, at least not in my neck of the woods. We have a number of USFS floater parcels and the locals, most of whom vote R, got together to push back. None of them, D or R, wanted their local piece of public land, where they walk the dog, hunt, fish, hike and seek peace and quiet, to become off limits and packed with houses. It’s a NIMBY thing, and for many of them, it’s part of why they live where they do.
Thanks, John. This is very alarming.
There are laws governing where and under what circumstances federal public lands may be disposed of. Burgum doesn’t just get to decide to start selling it off or randomly transferring it to other entities. But when have silly little laws and the Constitution ever stopped this administration?
Here’s a Congressional Research Service publication that lays out the authorities under which the BLM, US Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and Forest Service may acquire or dispose of public lands:
https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/RL/PDF/RL34273/RL34273.25.pdf
That’s a good collection, thanks. My sense is that they are thinking of the Las Vegas example, which required action by Congress, which might temper this to reality a little. But you are right that we should expect some attempts to avoid that kind of oversight (like trying to force-fit it into some of these existing authorities – you know, like we are being invaded by Venezuela).
Yes, you can assume the worst of the Admin’s intentions, and that political and legal forces who disagree will lose out..but it will be a long and scary four years. And some of us have to watch our blood pressure. So.. I predict it may happen in some areas but it’s not going to be a big thing.
I’m thinking that we could expect to see this as the beginning of a few efforts to find angles for disposing of public lands. I’m sure I’ll be admonished for reading ill intent into this. Of course it doesn’t take much to point out that there’s abundant reason for reading ill intent into things. Maybe PERC will write a policy paper on how this is a common sense solution for creating more Yellowstone clubs oops I meant “affordable housing”. Probably be admonished for that dig too. Certainly they wouldn’t reverse engineer studies that happen to support privatizing public lands, oops again I meant “creating incentives”. I mostly play the gadfly with this as they’re closer to fossil fuel interests, strictly speaking, than ALEC. Birds of a feather still.
There is a long distance, time-wise and politically, between establishing a task force and anything happening.
I did run across this news today…https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/blm-auction-brings-16-million-for-8-parcels-across-las-vegas-valley/
Apparently Congress thought it was OK to do this as per SNPLMA?
here’s more info from the Nevada Affordable Housing Toolkit. https://toolkit.nvhousingcoalition.org/blm-land-control-and-public-lands
“money-grubbing Administration”?
Notwithstanding that the Administration has identified billions in what many of us agree is waste, fraud and abuse or that they are attempting to reduce expenditures across all agencies–including so-called conservative favorites such as the Pentagon, or that they are attempting to address not only the $36 trillion debt but also the $10 trillion in debt that we will have to refinance in the next 6 months through means other than the popular Democrat mantra of “we just need to tax billionaires”, there’s the fact that GAO has estimated that federal spending on federal land recreational programs alone loses over $300 billion annually and that the 11 western states containing the majority of federally owned lands (55%) contribute only 22% of federal income tax (48% and 10% if we leave out CA, which many of us dream about).
If we’re going to argue with pejoratives, then let’s apply the moniker “parasite” to the public land users who rely on the taxpayers who are the least likely to use government lands to pay for the user’s personal entertainment on those lands and then turn loose the money-grubbing administration to begin recovering the costs of having a massive, money losing federal estate from those users who fail to pay their own way.
I’m curious about this: “there’s the fact that GAO has estimated that federal spending on federal land recreational programs alone loses over $300 billion annually….” I tried finding this and couldn’t. I’m wondering if that number includes federal tax receipts from businesses that make money off of recreation on federal lands. That shouldn’t just include the businesses, but the employees paying taxes that work at those businesses. And then there are, of course, those businesses that make money supplying those businesses with goods and services. Recreation on federal lands is the lifeblood for the town I live by and all those people are, presumably, paying federal taxes.
You could look up the GAO report… and report back on their assumptions.
I didn’t find it when I did a search. Probably not doing it right
Maybe Shaun can tell us which GAO report.
Do you sincerely believe the intent of this administration’s actions is to reduce the federal deficit? It is abundantly clear they’re running the government like a private equity firm would – asset-stripping to enrich themselves.
I think “the Admin” is not one entity. I think some people want to improve how the government runs. It’s our government and people like to know what’s going on, and they like it to be run well. Others are really worried aobut the federal deficit. In fact, many people outside the Admin are also worried about the deficit. If you look at the next layers down from the Prez, below Cabinet level, the two I’m paying closest attention to… Forests and Health, it seems like they are quite reasonable people. In some cases, they seem fairly idealistic about what they want to do (I’m thinking Makary and Bhattacharya in the health part of government.)
The thing about today is that we get to hear people in their own voices and can make up our own minds about their intentions.
We can also watch whether their actions match their intentions.
It reminds me a bit of some USG training we had called “Executive Leadership” or something like that at the Kennedy School. We studied the Cuban Missile Crisis and how there were different sets of actors in the Soviet government with different objectives, and we could have made the wrong decision by considering the Soviet government as “one thing” when it was many jostling things. So yes, I believe that there are folks in the Admin and allied who are interested in reducing the deficit, and not asset-stripping.
From 2015..https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/jul/21/rand-paul/rand-paul-us-borrows-1-million-minute/ R’s have disappointed Senator Paul again and again, and yet here we are.