In These Times - The conventional wise men of the free market say the cause is simple: Housing construction isn’t keeping up with demand. Of late, this thinking has converged on a rare bipartisan consensus: The real obstacle to affordable housing is the federal public lands surrounding many Western communities, which (we are told) are strangling development and driving up prices....
The lands in question are the 437 million acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service and open to everyone to camp, walk, hunt, forage, fish. The idea to turn these public forests, grasslands and deserts into privately owned housing developments has a certain sinister elegance: It harnesses very real anger about housing inequality and turns it not against the actual villains but against one of this country’s most egalitarian institutions.
This idea has gained so much traction in recent months, as anger about housing continues to build, that it even made it into the primetime of the 2024 presidential race: Both the Harris and Trump campaigns pledged to help solve the country’s housing woes by opening public lands to housing development, with JD Vance and Tim Walz batting the proposal around during the vice-presidential debate. Republicans included the idea in their 2024 party platform, and President Biden included it in his July 2024 housing plan, which ordered federal agencies to assess how “surplus” federal land could be used to build more affordable housing across the country. More
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Let us be very clear. Any place with enough water to support agricultiure or real communiities in the west has already been designated as private. Every one of these new "developments" is going to be subject to drought, distant water supplies that are diminishing, soil erosion, wildfires, and ever higher temperatiures. They would require expensive utility upgrades. Essentialy a way to turn pubic assets into a few private forturnes rather than provide real housing that people can afford to live in close to work.. Increasing energy use and speeding up climate disasters like wildfire at a time when it is harder and harder to get home insurance in these places.. Just plain will not work.
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