President Donald Trump in March signed an executive order that called for building new housing on federal land. Arizona, and many parts of the country, are facing severe housing shortages, and supporters say opening up these lands to development could help.
Alex Horowitz, director of housing policy at the Pew Charitable Trusts, joined The Show to discuss, starting with some of the reasons why this might be a good idea to help alleviate some of the housing shortage.
The Pew Charitable Trusts
Full conversation
ALEX HOROWITZ: So all federal land is not created equal. As an example, there are post offices in towns and cities throughout the country, and so that’s an example of federal land where there’s a real opportunity for people to be close to the places they go every day. And so to improve walkability, to decrease traffic, to help people have short commutes, and turning over parcels like that or adding housing on top of post offices or instead of them in some places can be a great use of existing federal land.
Because we see that the primary driver for, for residents is location. And people are getting priced out of communities, and as they seek out lower housing costs, they often end up with higher transportation costs. So infill parcels like post offices and like federal office buildings which may be underused, or pockets of land in existing cities and towns can be a great opportunity to add housing where it’s needed most.
MARK BRODIE: So when you talk about not all federal land is sort of created equally, I assume this sort of leads to one of the one of the concerns, which is that a lot of this federal land is, is not in places where people do live or necessarily want to live. It’s kind of out like away from, away from other population centers, business centers, things like that.
HOROWITZ: That’s right. So most federal land is not suitable for housing, and in fact we’re talking about a very small portion that would be suitable. And there are really four reasons why.
One is a lack of infrastructure, so a lack of roads, sewer, water, electrical, internet, so the infrastructure is just not in place. Second is that if the housing is far away from the places people go every day, that can put a real strain on household budgets because it drives up transportation costs as people who put more miles on cars, they spend more on gas. A third problem here is that with existing federal land being where it is, the, the time that that people spend to get there, it can mean that there just aren’t enough hours in the day. A lot of people are trying to shrink their commutes rather than increase them. And the last one is that homeowners insurance keeps going up every year, and part of that is because some new housing is built in fire-prone areas, in flood-prone areas, and so it’s very possible to see your insurance costs rise as you live farther and farther from established cities and towns.
BRODIE: Is there a concern also about what this federal land is used for other than potentially housing? Like if it’s environmentally sensitive or maybe it’s, you know, there’s some other use for it. It’s, it’s a recreation area, things like that that might be lost if you, if you develop it?
HOROWITZ: Well, that’s a possibility, too, but my focus is really on housing in this work, and so the, the affordability and availability of housing. Look, I, I need to acknowledge absolutely there could be trade-offs if you’re not using land for other purposes and you’re using it for housing instead. But even as housing, this land that is far from cities and towns is usually not very well suited to housing because we see the most demand and the greatest shortage, is housing that is near jobs, that’s near schools, that’s near commerce.
BRODIE: So given that, as you say, a lot of this federal land is not necessarily suitable for housing, assuming that the Trump administration goes ahead with this, how big of a dent do you think this could put in the, the housing shortage we’re dealing with?
HOROWITZ: Because of location issues and infrastructure issues, this does not look like a primary solution to America’s housing shortage. And that’s a shame because America’s housing shortage is immense. The U.S. is short between 4 and 7 million homes, and there are real promising solutions to making a difference … and to ending that shortage.
As examples, permitting reform, land use reform to make it easier to build starter homes, to make it easier to build apartments; building code reforms to make it less expensive to build. All of those have a proven track record, whereas this idea of using land that is for the most part far flung, hasn’t really been tried before with a lot of success. And so the more promising approaches for transferring federal land look like they’re about infill.
BRODIE: So when you’re looking at, for example, maybe converting a post office or some other federal building into housing. If it’s infill, are you envisioning or maybe would it be ideal to have that as more multifamily housing as opposed to single family housing in those spaces?
HOROWITZ: That’s usually the case, and we see that overall the shortage of multifamily housing is probably even larger than the shortage of single family housing. So enabling more multifamily housing can be a good way for seniors to downsize who want to, and to open up opportunities that people can live closer to jobs and that they can access amenities and schools. So multifamily housing is a strong solution for that problem.
BRODIE: When you’re looking at more infill or or even closer in land that maybe hasn’t been developed before, I wonder if maybe like city or municipal land or state land might be a better place for governments to be looking if public entities are looking to turn their land into housing.
HOROWITZ: We need an all of the above approach. Our housing shortage is just that severe. So city land, state land, federal land that’s in existing cities and towns, absolutely, all of those should be on the table.
BRODIE: So given sort of all the pros and cons of using federal land for housing as we’ve talked about, on balance, is it worth it for the Trump administration, do you think, to pursue this strategy?
HOROWITZ: Well, look, whether it’s a city government, a state government or the federal government, it’s absolutely worth cataloging land that is unoccupied and would place people near opportunity where there’s the most demand to live. So that can mean vacant office buildings, it can mean parcels that are unused, parking lots are often something that just remains as parking for a long time, even though they are underused, especially with reduced commuting.
So it’s absolutely worth cataloging buildings and parcels that are in high demand places, because part of the goal here is to improve household budgets overall, and with half of renters spending more than 30% of income on rent, with home prices near an all-time high, households need all the help they can get, but that means that we’ve got to consider their transportation cost, too. So that they need to be able to live closer to the places that they travel most often, so we don’t create more traffic, and we don’t create more strain on their budgets.
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