“There’s a nationwide shortage that some estimate to be about 7 million homes,” Lee said. “It’s not acceptable in America. Americans deserve the chance to be able to buy a home, and they need land to do so.”
According to Lee, the federal government currently controls about 640 million acres—“nearly between a fourth and a third of all the land in the United States”—and much of it is unused and mismanaged. He emphasized that the bill targets only non-essential land with no environmental or recreational value.
“There are a number of pieces of that land, that portfolio of real estate, that has zero recreational value,” he said. “It doesn’t have significant conservation value, value for hunting, fishing, grazing, hiking, and so forth.”
Lee pushed back on criticism that the bill would sell off protected lands: “You can’t even have it considered for sale under these provisions if you fit into any of the 16 or so categories of protected federal lands—national monuments, forests, wilderness areas, national recreation areas, rivers, trails, and so forth.”
Instead, the legislation would focus specifically on “vacant lots next to existing residential developments—not national parks.”
“The solution involves allowing the US government to sell off a limited number of these parcels of land at an affordable price to allow people to build homes, with preference toward single-family homes,” Lee said. “This has all kinds of protections in it that make sure that we’re not selling off Crown Jewels.”
“Maps have been put out there that are badly misleading about what this bill actually does, suggesting that it would sell all the land listed on a map. The maps aren’t authentic. They aren’t legitimate. There’s a process, there are criteria—it’s impossible to come up with a map of what could be sold under it.”
Lee pointed out that the housing crunch is especially severe in the western US, where the federal government owns the largest share of land. “The US government owns less than 15 percent of every state to the east of Colorado,” he said. “From Colorado’s eastern slope to the west, the US government owns at least 16 percent of the land in every state. In my state, it’s more like two-thirds of the land that’s owned by the US government. That’s where a lot of our housing shortages tend to be the most acute.”
“The parliamentarian is revisiting the issue today in light of some new information that she didn’t have and some new language that we’ve added.”
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