Freeing up land within a few miles of urban areas does not seem as if it would do much to diminish the beauty and the splendid solitudes of the West.

Writing in Capital Matters last week, Dominic Pino provided some useful background to the question of whether the federal government should sell some of its vast landholdings in the West. Should potential sales of some of this property have gone ahead?  Yes, although the then-current proposal to do just that has since been dropped.

I write as someone who loves driving through the emptiness of the West (in fact, I have just returned from a few days in central Nevada, checking out aliens, ghosts, and clowns for National Review). I understood the worries about a sell-off, but Dominic (typically) punctured a few myths about what it would mean. Please read the case he makes. This is not an idea that should go away.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Arthur Gailes, focused on the need for housing, had more on this topic here:

The American West faces a housing shortfall of nearly 2.8 million homes. This regulatory-induced scarcity has driven home prices to levels unattainable for millions of working families, particularly in states like California, Arizona, Utah, and Nevada. A legislative proposal from Senator Mike Lee (UT) offers a market-based approach to this crisis by unlocking a small fraction of federally owned land for housing.

To provide a data-driven assessment of this proposal, the AEI Housing Center has released a new interactive map and analysis of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in 11 western states. The proposal directs the Secretary of the Interior to dispose of between 0.25 and 0.5 percent of BLM land located within five miles of a population center for the express purpose of housing development. . . .

The data show a significant opportunity. Our analysis finds that developing just 135-180 square miles of the most suitable BLM land, a minuscule fraction of the total, could yield approximately 1 million new homes over ten years. This would substantially address the West’s housing shortage while generating an estimated $15 billion for the U.S. Treasury from land sales.

Unlocking land is the first step; ensuring it produces affordable housing is the next. The most effective path to affordability is not subsidy, but supply-side reform that legalizes the construction of starter homes. AEI’s Home Sweet Starter Home (HSSH) framework provides a model for this. By incentivizing localities to allow Light Touch Density, such as single-family homes on smaller lots (3,400 sq. ft.) and townhomes, the number of of homes built on a given parcel can be more than doubled while reducing prices by 15-20 percent.

It’s hard not to think that withdrawing the proposal to sell off a small fraction of the government’s Western landholdings has been an opportunity missed. As much as the YIMBY campaigners may like to argue otherwise, many people’s dream is not to live in a dense urban environment (even one with bike lanes!), but somewhere where they have some elbow room and (those fretting about the birth “dearth” please note) more space to bring up children. In a country this size, sprawl—and the potential for more sprawl—is not a problem, but an asset, the opportunity for more people to live their dream.

And freeing up land within a few miles of existing urban areas does not seem as if it would do much or indeed anything to diminish the beauty and the splendid solitudes of the West.