Democrats and Republicans in Nevada don’t agree on much, but they do agree that more housing is needed across the state — and that the state’s vast swaths of federal land should be a part of the solution.
Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo and the state’s two Democratic senators — though their approaches can differ — both want more federal land freed up to increase supply and bring down home costs. President Joe Biden’s administration was engaged on the issue, but incoming president Donald Trump has pledged to go further.
“I will work with your governor to open up new tracts of federal land for large-scale housing construction, and you’ll get it for a much lower price,” Trump said at a Sept. 13 rally in Las Vegas.
“We’ll start with a small portion,” he continued. “You’ll get it going, and then we’re going to open up large portions of land. We will create special new zones with ultra-low taxes and ultra-low regulations to allow the development of really extraordinary new housing at a proper price.”
While the details of Trump’s proposals are vague, there are a number of avenues — legislative, administrative and judicial — that advocates are pursuing to convey more land. But his ability to effect significant change likely hinges on whether he seeks reforms that can win enough buy-in in Congress.
Neither Trump nor the Department of Interior can unilaterally sell off public land to developers on a whim or simply grant developers the authority to build housing on these lands. Most significant land policy changes would need to come through Congress — where the Nevada delegation has been working for years to convey specific parcels of land across the state to local entities or put them up for sale.
However, some tools are available at the agency level that allow the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) — the biggest landlord in Nevada — to convey land for housing, though regulatory and capacity challenges remain.
The most extreme change could come through the Supreme Court, which has yet to decide if it will hear a lawsuit from neighboring Utah seeking a ruling that federal ownership of land undesignated for a specific purpose is unconstitutional and should be transferred to states.
And of course, land is just one element of Nevada’s housing crisis — financing and zoning often make affordable housing deals, in particular, challenging.
Still, with advocates for the release of more federal land for housing positioned in the White House, Carson City and Congress, the time is ripe.
“The key to this is for us, as governors, to be able to plan,” Lombardo told fellow governors during a housing panel at the Western Governors Association meeting in Las Vegas on Dec. 9. “In the current situation we’re put in, we don’t have the ability to do that. It’s hard for us to bring solutions if we can’t plan for it.”
While many of the state’s Democrats are taking a wait-and-see approach on Trump’s tactics, they believe it’s a possible area for collaboration.
“There’s certainly an appetite to do [permitting reform],” said Rep. Susie Lee (D-NV), who sits on the House Natural Resources Committee. “And I think [the] approach to lands, especially availability for housing, is definitely an avenue there.”
Slow-moving Nevada lands bills have stalled
Nevada counties, members of Congress and Lombardo agree that passage of Nevada lands bills would be a more comprehensive solution to Nevada’s lands challenges.
The rub? Actually passing a Nevada lands bill through Congress.
Currently, Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV) has a bill, which has existed in some form since 2021, to expand the area encircling Las Vegas from which the Bureau of Land Management is authorized to sell land at auction to developers.
Their original authority to do this lies in the 1998 Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act (SNPLMA), which has reshaped the Las Vegas Valley and kept land auction profits in Nevada for conservation-related projects.
Read More: Conservation and development: Nevada’s unique public lands process draws renewed attention
In the North, Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) introduced a Washoe County lands bill in January to convey specific parcels across the county, some to local entities, some for sale and 30 acres explicitly for affordable housing. And Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV) has worked for several Congresses to pass a package of land bills that address the needs of rural counties. But outside of a conveyance to the military in Churchill County 2022, none of the delegation’s major lands bills have become law.
These bills, requested by counties and negotiated between them and developers, ranchers, sportsmen and conservationists, have their share of detractors, mainly among environmentalists. Continuing a tradition started by SNPLMA and the late Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), they aim to balance development and conservation needs by placing some land into permanent conservation status in exchange for the conveyance of smaller acreages. They are intentionally drafted over years in order to reach consensus.
“We bring all the stakeholders to the table with that thoughtful approach that gets everybody’s buy-in,” said Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), who said the legislative approach is the right one for Nevada. “We put a lot of thought into it. That’s why they take quite a long time.”
Given that neither Cortez Masto nor Rosen’s lands bills passed out of the Senate while the chamber was under Democratic control, it will likely be more difficult to advance their lands priorities in a Republican-controlled Senate.
Republican overhaul?
But some Republicans want legislative solutions to go further and — to the chagrin of conservationists and to the delight of some Western Republicans — completely change the way federally owned land can be sold and used for housing.
Here’s the status quo. Under the 1970s-era organizing act that set BLM’s mission, public lands can only be sold or exchanged if the agency has decided that a tract is either isolated and difficult to manage, no longer serving the purpose for which it was federally acquired or if its disposal will facilitate a public objective, including growth and economic development that cannot be achieved on other lands and that outweighs other public objectives, such as recreation.
“It’s specific in a good way,” said Kate Groetzinger, the communications director for the Center for Western Priorities, which advocates for protecting public lands. “It ensures that the land is only being used for housing if that’s the highest and best use of the land.”
Furthermore, the land must have been identified for sale or exchange in a region’s resource management plan (RMP), which are updated sporadically — Las Vegas’ current RMP, for example, is from 1998.
But Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), the incoming chairman of the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, has a bill called the HOUSES Act that would permit state and local governments to nominate non-protected federal land tracts for purchase, and then sell them to housing developers once acquired. The bill stipulates that 85 percent of the land be used for housing, with a minimum density requirement of four homes per acre, and that 15 percent could be used for commercial use. There is no minimum affordability requirement.
Lee, Republican allies and the National Association of Counties describe the bill as a salve to Western states’ housing shortage — easing the pressure on states and counties to grow in limited footprints, giving them more power in their urban planning, and helping supercharge an undersupplied housing market.
But opponents charge that it’s little more than an attempt to quickly give out public lands to developers.
“If you develop public land, if you just push the boundaries of these cities and towns out, eroding public land as you go and replacing nature with suburbs, that really will diminish the quality of life in the West,” Groetzinger said. “The reason we’re seeing this affordability issue is because people want to be close to public land.”
Trump has been unspecific in discussing what legislative solutions he prefers, and his transition team did not respond to a request for comment.
Development shortcuts apply narrowly
Rather than only putting their faith in Congress to pass a lands bill, Democrats and Republicans alike have also identified ways that the federal government can expedite the land release process for housing.
Several counties — most notably Clark County — have lands bills that passed decades ago authorizing the BLM to dispose of land. With SNPLMA, the Biden administration took a critical step forward in 2023 when it announced a memorandum of understanding (MOU) between federal agencies to pursue affordable housing under an underutilized part of the 1998 act.
The MOU streamlined the process by which affordable housing projects move through the BLM queue and set a rate of $100 per acre, so long as 80 percent of the units built on the land meet the legal definition of affordable. The first sale under this MOU occurred in October, when Clark County purchased 20 acres of land for $2,000 in the southwestern part of the Las Vegas Valley to build Cactus Trails, a community of 210 single-family homes for households earning $70,000 per year or less.
Jon Raby, the Nevada state director of the BLM, said the agency has become more aware of provisions that allow the agency to sell land at below fair market value in the last few years — and that it applies beyond Clark County.
“Leaning in on this and making more land available in and around not only the Las Vegas area, but across Nevada and across the West, can have dramatic positive effects,” Raby said at the WGA meeting.
Jess Molasky, the co-owner of a multifamily development firm in Las Vegas, said BLM’s new process has significantly improved expediency.
“This [MOU] cuts out like a year of the process,” Molasky said at the WGA meeting. “The appraisal process was like a whole year to appraise the land that we’re sitting on, holding the land with our capital out. And so it’s an important process that is getting [a] shortcut.”
However, lobbyists who work on land issues cautioned that the BLM’s authority to convey land for housing is difficult to pursue because of provisions against generating revenue — prior to the MOU, for example, only one affordable housing complex on federal land had opened in the past decade in Clark County. Another challenge is that these deals are subject to the federal definition of affordable housing, which is at or below 80 percent of area median income (AMI) — about $72,000 in Nevada, on average, per Raby.
Given the intensity of the housing crunch and growth in the state’s rural areas in particular, Lombardo said developers are eager to go beyond just low-income units and build market-rate and workforce housing on federal land. But such a regulatory change would require legislation. Until then, any developments through the MOU can only apply to low-income households.
Can BLM cut red tape?
Still, many want Trump to go further. In a series of letters to Biden, Lombardo asked the president to convey 50,000 acres in Clark County. Beyond supporting Nevada lands bills, he cited prioritizing a statewide RMP or county RMP updates at the Department of Interior, further streamlining and setting timelines on the disposal process.
In attached letters, numerous counties and state groups made other suggestions, including easing eligibility requirements on federal affordable housing grant programs and creating exceptions for wage requirements on rural developments that use federal funds.
And advocates for more efficient disposal are hoping for cultural and administrative changes in the operation of the BLM, which has long been understaffed. Vinson Guthreau, the executive director of the Nevada Association of Counties, said even in counties that have existing lands bills, the conveyance portion has been slower to implement than the conservation aspect.
Guthreau also suggested that the BLM could move affordable housing projects “to the top of the pile” or ensure that parcel nominations for housing are completed within 12 months — the timeline the agency is using for sales under the MOU for Southern Nevada.
“We’ll wait and see how it operates moving forward, but [the previous Trump administration] really made a concerted effort to listen to local concerns, whether it was on housing or services or homelessness,” said Guthreau. “We expect that to continue.”
While Democrats are similarly interested in improving BLM’s efficiency on housing projects, they’ll also be keeping a watchful eye for overreach.
“We certainly want to eliminate red tape, but we don’t want to eliminate protections, especially for some of our most at-risk communities,” said Lee.
Is land even the problem?
Despite the enormous focus on federal land, people in both parties acknowledge that it’s just one piece of the housing puzzle.
Financing remains a huge barrier for affordable housing developers, who often have to cobble together funding from federal, state and local grants and tax credits to make sure a project can “pencil” out — justify the cost of development. Land, Guthreau said, typically accounts for 8 to 10 percent of a developer’s cost, but can get up to 25 percent. The costs of permitting, utilities, construction materials and labor still exist even when land is available.
Many of the solutions that Cortez Masto wants the Trump administration to support, for example, involve financing, such as expanding the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit and increasing funding for affordable housing block grants.
Restrictive zoning is an issue. And there are a number of practical challenges too — Lombardo noted that the state’s pool of developers, builders and appraisers is small because of a high financial barrier to entry and a lack of interstate licensing.
Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV) cautioned that more land is not the silver bullet for lowering housing costs.
“You probably ought to know really well what it costs a square foot to go from raw land to a subdivision or apartment complex in Boulder City, Nevada, before you say, ‘If we can just get the land,’” Amodei said.
And not all land is created equal — even if massive swaths of federal land were opened up to housing, parcels would not be attractive to developers unless they’re already near the roads people need to get to work or are easily connected to water lines, sewage systems and other infrastructure.
Many environmental advocates want to prioritize infill development — building on existing vacant or underutilized land in developed areas, such as the Cactus Trails project, or change zoning laws to add units through greater density.
Given all of the challenges with obtaining more land, Lee said she hopes the incoming Trump administration can find ways, as Biden did, to improve the land transfer process on existing available parcels.
“I will say, [land] is one factor into housing costs,” she said. “But it’s an important one, and one that we hear about day in and day out in Southern Nevada. And so if they have an issue, particularly that allows for faster development of infill, like we saw in my district this summer, that’d be awesome.”
