The Discourse Lounge · Housing & Cities
TIER 4 Sat, 21 Jun 2025 19:10:43 +0000
Sen. Mike Lee and President Trump intend to fulfill a campaign promise to sell federal lands for suburban sprawl. ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | ---|---|--- | | | Forwarded this email? Subscribe here for more --- # Will Selling Public Land End the Housing Crisis? ### Sen. Mike Lee and President Trump intend to fulfill a campaign promise to sell federal lands for suburban sprawl. | | Darrell Owens --- | Jun 21| | | ∙| | Preview ---|---|--- | --- --- | | | --- | | --- | | --- | | --- | | READ IN APP --- | | ---|---|--- Sen. Mike Lee of Utah (R) would consider selling 1% of this federal land to developers to fight high housing costs. _Disclaimer: This article and all articles on my Substack are my own opinions written on my own time. They are not opinions endorsed by my employer or its associated university._ This is a paid article and will be free in one week. -- Essential to Trump's win in 2024 was the widespread dissatisfaction with housing costs among young voters. Young families and post-college graduates lack the mobility to move into communities with the highest job concentrations. First-time homebuyers now have a median age closing in on 40 years old, and those buying homes are doing it far away from city centers, not by choice, but necessity. The housing crisis became a national crisis primarily due to the 2008 Great Recession reducing home construction for many years, even as over 70 million Millennials were coming of age and a decade or two away from buying a home. Republicans and Democrats have begun to focus on housing policy at a national level. The Democrats are in a battle between the Abundance liberals and the Antitrust leftists on how to do housing policy, with the latter trading barbs at the idea that the crisis is caused by anything other than greedy corporate behavior. The Abundance crowd appears to be winning at swaying major Democratic figures such as former president Obama, and even socialists like New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have embraced many aspects of it. Up until now, the Republicans have offered entirely demand-side solutions, namely mass deportations and reduced legal immigration. Blaming the housing crisis on the surge in migrants during the asylum crisis under the Biden Administration, and the broader trend of America accepting immigrants, has been remarkably successful (even with immigrant voters) despite how stupid the idea is. It never made any sense to blame migrants who work for the lowest wages for why owning a home in many states now costs over half a million dollars, but the American people aren't very smart and don't understand how economics works -- housing economics the least of all. In just six months of his first term, Trump has done everything possible to make the housing crisis worse. Short of an outright executive order banning housing construction, I can't think of anything else I would do to increase home costs that Trump hasn't already done. A quick summary of Trump's inflationary actions: 1. Imposed steel tariffs on the world during his first term while U.S. domestic steel production continued to decline, and then imposed more during his second term even as foreign steel imports plummeted with a 35% drop last year alone, making construction projects over 8 stories tall ever more expensive. 2. Is threatening 27% lumber tariffs on Canada by year's end while threatening to invade them for no reason, a nation that supplies 1/3rd of our lumber consumption, making single-family and small apartment construction much more expensive and material purchases risky. 3. Sent immigration police to arrest non-criminal workers at housing development sites and Home Depots nationwide, despite immigrants (many undocumented) comprising half or more of our most populous states' construction labor force. Workers are scared of coming to work, leaving many housing sites unfinished, and inducing a severe labor shortage. 4. Failing to follow through on his nonsensical campaign promise to mass deport millions of people and reduce housing demand, thereby allowing the supply and demand balance to worsen. (I think this policy is terrible, but the fact is Trump has failed at his demand-side "solution.") 5. Created mass volatility in the stock market and crucially the bond market, making investors terrified to invest in known risky ventures like housing developments, drying up funding for development projects. 6. Preparing to cut $33 billion in funding for subsidized housing programs and Section 8 vouchers, thereby putting next year's low income housing projects into limbo and threatening homelessness for over 2 million families. Some on Twitter have mentioned that the Supreme Court recently ruled in a bipartisan 9 - 0 decision that environmental review has been abused as a tactic to stop projects rather than inform decision making. Whether that helps housing or not isn't clear (the case was about a coal train), but you can't thank Trump for that because everyone regardless of ideology and partisan affiliation agreed. In comes far-right congressman Mike Lee of Utah -- who took a brief break from lying that the right-wing Minnesota assassin was a left winger -- with a first major attempt at a Republican response to the housing crisis: sell public land. It's part of the Republican's "Big Beautiful Bill" budget that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, would add $3.3 trillion to the U.S. national debt and increase the deficit by $2.8 trillion, thanks to the bill shrinking economic growth. Lee's provisions would instruct the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Forest Service (USFS) to sell under 1% of their land to presumably private developers for housing development. This is an idea that J.D. Vance mentioned during his debate with Tim Walz: that the federal government owns a bunch of land not producing any revenue, and therefore it can sprawl out to provide housing. Federal lands generating revenue is not some inherent need and selling land is usually a bad way to gain consistent revenue. Although land generating revenue for the government is not conceptually a bad idea either. After all, Norway funds its massive welfare state with public enterprises on public land. I imagine this is too socialistic and pagan European for J.D. Vance, though. Emblematic of Democratic over-dependency on consultants, Tim Walz had performed poorly during this housing section despite standing on stronger ground policy-wise. Unfortunately, he spent little time emphasizing Vance's unpopular idea of selling parks and preserves to developers. Instead, he started with this canned sentimentalism about what a house means to him, then he claimed that the housing crisis is primarily the fault of corporations buying up houses for no reason, since "folks are not living in those houses." He did correctly identify Minneapolis as a city that had reduced rents with new housing supply but he didn't explain it well. Corporations are buying single-family homes to rent them out to because people want rental housing in the suburbs, but suburbs aren't allowing the construction of rental, multi-family housing. Corporations like Blackstone did buy up foreclosed houses at auction during the mortgage crisis between 2007 and 2011, but by 2014 this scheme had begun to slow down. Institutional investors or big corporations own about the same share of houses today that they did 10 years ago, around 1-2% nationally, but with a higher share in southern and midwestern markets. In California, where single-family homes cost over $1 million, 2% of single-family homes are owned by large companies with 10 properties or more. Companies like Zillow tried to use their price-predicting software to buy and sell houses but lost a bunch of money and quit. Walz then said that Minneapolis reduced rents but he kept stammering and abstracting it to conservative-coded, likely Democratic consultant-tested phrases like "red tape" because as Obama's speech writer revealed, Democratic operatives think "zoning" is too wonky for average people to understand. I recall being annoyed on debate night watching Walz dance around and stammer at what exactly Minneapolis did to lower rents. Regardless, J.D. Vance won, so now we're following through on his promise to sell federal lands vis-a-vis Mike Lee's bill. It's bad politics but the policy is even worse and that's what I'll cover below. Here's a map of federal lands eligible for sale. Lee dismissed this map as inaccurate to quell uproar, but as a geographic information programmer, I can confirm this map is accurate. It's not hard to get files of BLM and USFS land. ... ## Subscribe to The Discourse Lounge to unlock the rest. 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