By Rebecca Picciotto and Drew An-Pham

The Trump administration is creating a task force to identify federal land that would be suitable for building affordable housing.

The initiative marks the administration's first step toward a pledge to unlock vast swaths of federal land to address America's housing shortage by transferring or leasing the land to local governments.

The task force will be run jointly by the Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Land Management, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the two agencies' secretaries wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Sunday.

Developing even 512,000 acres of the Bureau of Land Management's lots could yield between three million and four million new homes across western states such as Nevada, Utah, California and Arizona, according to a preliminary analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., center-right think tank.

An increase of that magnitude would represent one of the most ambitious housing proposals in U.S. history. It would go a long way to addressing the U.S. housing shortage, which depending on the estimate runs to more than seven million units.

But few housing analysts see a clear path for a program like this. In some areas, the surrounding infrastructure and zoning laws would have to allow for home building, or be changed to do so. President Trump's plan would also contend with logistical and environmental challenges.

Trump's home-building ambitions could slam into many of the same thorny challenges that any housing initiative of magnitude has encountered in recent years. Nimbyism, red tape at the local-government level, labor shortages and higher materials costs have foiled many major efforts to build new housing, especially for lower- and middle-income families.

"Freeing up federal land for more housing -- I think it's a good idea," said U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, which has an affordable-housing shortage and where the federal government owns roughly a fifth of the state's land.

"But the problem with housing policy is that politicians want a magic housing button that they can press. And that's not how this works," Schatz said.

The federal government is the country's largest land owner, controlling 650 million acres, or more than a quarter of all U.S. land.

The administration has been undeterred so far by opposition to other parts of Trump's policy agenda, from shrinking the government to eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

Trump could face more significant challenges to a housing plan of scale. Much of federal land is located in rural states such as Utah, Idaho and Montana. A lot of it is in remote areas that would require disrupting wildlife habitats and building entire infrastructure systems from scratch in order to put new housing there.

"There's plenty of land, no doubt, but the trick is releasing the right land in the right places," said Pete Carroll, who leads public-policy and industry-relations research at CoreLogic.

The aim of Trump's new task force is to identify the land parcels suitable for building. It will then transfer or lease them out to public-housing authorities, nonprofits or local governments to develop homes.

The land might occasionally be sold to private developers, according to a HUD representative. The federal agencies would determine that on a "case-by-case basis" in coordination with the local government.

"HUD will pinpoint where housing needs are most pressing," and Interior "will identify locations that can support homes while carefully considering environmental impact and land-use restrictions," the agencies' secretaries wrote in the Journal's opinion piece.

Only a small portion of U.S. government-owned land is near cities with housing shortages. About 47 million acres, or 7.3% of all federal land, falls within metropolitan areas that need more homes, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of government land maps and housing-shortage data from the National Association of Realtors.

In the New York City metro area, the site of one of the worst housing shortages in the U.S., just 3.4% of the land is federally owned. Much of it is concentrated in New Jersey, Brooklyn and Queens.

In a few cases, local housing shortages overlap with an abundance of federal land in the area, such as Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. This policy could make a big difference for those housing markets.

In Nevada, where federal land covers more than 80% of the region, the state's Bureau of Land Management has sold 50 acres to build affordable housing through a unique Southern Nevada land-sale program that became law in 1998. That program could achieve even more supply if some environmental and appraisal reviews were streamlined, said Bureau of Land Management Acting Director Jon Raby.

Local residents are also inevitably going to voice Nimby concerns over more crowded neighborhoods, schools and other changes that come with more density, said National Association of Home Builders President and Chief Executive Jim Tobin.

"You're going to run up against the people who don't want more housing in their neighborhood because it's going to increase the line at Starbucks," Tobin said.

Past presidents, including Joe Biden and Barack Obama, have tried to repurpose the government's unused land for housing.

The policy is difficult to execute partly because it requires coordinated "buy-in" from local, state and federal government officials, said Shaun Donovan, Obama's former HUD secretary and director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Still, said NAHB's Tobin, "finding developable, desirable land for cheap is the holy grail of home building."

Write to Rebecca Picciotto at Rebecca.Picciotto@wsj.com and Drew An-Pham at drew.an-pham@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 17, 2025 05:30 ET (09:30 GMT)

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