New affordable housing group exposes the lie of public land selloff | Opinion
The current resurgence of the public land sell-off movement began with a false promise: Give up your public land, and you will get affordable housing.
“This partnership will identify underused public lands suitable for residential development and streamline the land transfer process,” said Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum in a promo video released several months ago alongside Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner.
“We’re opening underused federal land to expand housing, support local development and get Washington, D.C., out of the way of communities that are just trying to grow,” echoed Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah.
Lee’s interest in affordable housing was a new development. Outside of political office, the main thing Lee was known for was representing a company that wanted to import nuclear waste to his home state from Italy.
Turner played football.
Burgum made a fortune in software and speculation. When he was governor of North Dakota, he did appoint a board to find affordable housing solutions in his home state. The committee recommended a series of targeted investments in things like zoning reform, grants for new building and financing methods, homelessness services, financial coaching and building up the construction workforce.
Nowhere on the list was anything to do with transferring public land — because actual affordable housing advocates do not view that as a serious solution.
This week, actual affordable housing advocates from across the country — including organizations like the National Coalition for the Homeless, the National Low Income Housing Coalition and the National Housing Law Project — have announced a partnership called Shared Ground with public land conservation organizations — including the Wilderness Society, the Sierra Club and the Idaho Conservation League. The partnership plans to advocate for “increased funding, zoning reform, and community-based development,” according to a news release — a broadly similar set of priorities to those set out by Burgum’s own committee just two years ago, when his priority was affordable housing rather than public land transfer.
“Protecting our public lands and ensuring every American has a safe, affordable place to call home are complementary goals,” Donald Whitehead, executive director of National Coalition for the Homeless, said in a news release. “We must reject the false choice between conservation and housing. Any use of public land must come with legally enforceable requirements to ensure it serves the public interest, providing permanent affordability and equitable access for local communities.”
This false choice is plain to see in Idaho.
You can find a few specific places in Idaho where the lack of private land contributes to insanely high real estate prices — Stanley comes to mind. But you have much the same problem in similar locations where there’s tons of private farmland available to convert to subdivisions, like the Teton Valley. Open up more land in Stanley for development, you’ll almost certainly just have a few more multimillion-dollar houses.
Affordable workforce housing in places like Stanley and Driggs invariably involves some combination of extremely long commutes, businesses with on-site housing and heavy public subsidies. A bit more land won’t change that.
It wouldn’t solve any problems in larger communities like Boise either. Imagine you convert some big portions of the foothills, the main portions of public land abutting the city, from trails into lots for housing. Would you expect that land to be covered in cheap apartments or expensive homes, given their prime real estate?
The formation of this new partnership demonstrates the obvious: The people who really care about affordable housing do not see public land selloff as a solution. And, conversely, the people who see public land sales as a solution do not really care about affordable housing.
Their real priorities are quite different: They simply do not believe that the federal government should be in the business of owning lots of land — this was the outright assertion of Utah’s doomed land “disposal” lawsuit.
Invoking affordable housing is a thoroughly dishonest and disingenuous ruse they have used to attempt to put a bit of shine on their deeply unpopular plans. Don’t get suckered in.
Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.