EDITORIAL: Federal land ownership drives housing costs higher

In many places, high housing prices are largely a self-inflicted wound. That isn’t the case in Nevada.

In a splashy March 2025 Wall Street Journal op-ed, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum outlined how “Federal land can be Home Sweet Home.”

“America needs more affordable housing, and the federal government can make it happen by making federal land available to build affordable housing stock,” they wrote.

They noted that the Interior Department manages more than 500 million acres. Much of that land is “suitable for residential use.” They announced the creation of a joint task force to “identify locations that can support homes.”

Southern Nevada should have been the first place that task force looked to release land. The federal government “owns” more than 85 percent of Nevada and 88 percent of Clark County. Much of that land is barren desert. Nevada’s growing population is hungry for new development, too.

Fast forward 15 months.

“The lack of land (in the Las Vegas Valley) available for residential and multifamily development is the biggest contributing factor to lack of affordable housing,” government relations attorney David Edelblute told the Review-Journal’s Patrick Blennerhassett.

The 1998 Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act has released some land for development. But as the years have gone on, the process has slowed significantly.

“It’s become a bottleneck marred by slow-moving governments at the local, state and federal levels who often have shifting and opposing priorities depending on who is in power,” Mr. Edelblute said. “The result is obvious — we are now in a housing crisis in all facets that could have been avoided.”

In some places, there simply isn’t more land to develop, because of water or geographic features. That isn’t Nevada’s problem. As anyone who’s driven to Mesquite or Tonopah knows, Nevada contains millions of acres of open land. Most of it is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, not the National Park Service or Department of Defense.

The fact that more supply reduces prices isn’t merely an academic theory. Southern Nevada’s rapidly falling rents are the result of a past increase in multifamily construction.

Gov. Joe Lombardo has done what he can on this issue. Working with the BLM, Gov. Lombardo recently released an interactive map to help private developers find land that could be available for purchase. It’s an innovative move.

It will work much better if Mr. Turner and Mr. Burgum’s task force sells 100,000 acres — or better yet 1 million acres. That’s a paltry 1.8 percent of the federal government’s real estate portfolio in the Silver State. Give Nevada back some of her land.