Stephen Slivinski
There are a few safe bets on outrageous online reactions to proposed government policies. Unhinged hyperventilation over very modest proposals to sell federal land seems to be one of them.
A recent proposal by the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources directs the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service to auction off a combined 1 to 1.5 percent of federally owned land to private owners for the express purpose of building new housing in 11 western states.
To see the overheated reaction from opponents, you’d think the committee was proposing to build casinos along the rim of the Grand Canyon and Olive Gardens in Yellowstone. There was pearl-grasping over the perceived acreage (“It’s equal to the size of Connecticut!”) and revulsion over transferring ownership rights of federally owned land to private owners (“This land is our birthright!”).
The proposal is indeed modest: as noted already, it’s no more than 1.5 percent of what is currently federally owned land in 11 of the 20 largest states in the US. Together, those states equal 1.7 million square miles. Tiny Connecticut amounts to 0.3 percent of that 11-state landmass.
Assuming the feds max out this allotment (which they are not required to do), there’s a rather lengthy multi-year process to sell the land, including getting approval from the state and local governments (including tribal governments if applicable) where each parcel is located.
And that’s the big myth in all of this: these are not beautiful national parks with breathtaking vistas. This is mostly land in the hands of the Bureau of Land Management, the agency that oversees the purchase and management of land that, when the bureau was created in 1946, was described as “the land nobody wanted.”
Plus, the land has to be deemed suitable for housing development, specifically, as determined by the aforementioned process and prioritizing attributes such as being adjacent to already developed areas and having access to existing infrastructure.
This isn’t the first time such a proposal has been put forward—or, for that matter, been enacted. There’s a version of this that has already been in place in the geographic zones along the outskirts of Las Vegas for most of the past 30 years. That one was also designed specifically to increase the land available to build new housing, and, unlike this proposal, which requires the land to be sold at market price, that land was to be sold at a discount.
The author of that proposal? Well-known fire-breathing free-market radical Sen. Harry Reid (D‑NV).