Benji Backer, executive chairman and founder of the American Conservation Coalition, recently took to X in hysterics over the Senate reconciliation bill’s inclusion of the HOUSES Act, a proposal to use a minuscule fraction of our excessive federal land stock to address the housing crisis. In his post, Backer said Senate Republicans were “secretly trying to sell 3 MILLION acres of America’s public land for development. And it includes some of my favorite places, specifically ones in the pictures below,” posting pictures that included a shot of Lake Constance in Olympic National Park.
There are two major problems with Backer’s post that threaten to rob the public of a serious policy debate on the legislation. First, there has never been anything secret about the proposal, which was announced more than half a decade ago at the Sutherland Institute as a kind of “new Homestead Act,” hearkening back to the 19th-century policy that gave earnest, hardworking U.S. citizens land to cultivate.
Many organizations have published reports on the HOUSES Act over the years with encouraging effect. Congress’s Joint Economic Committee produced a 44-page report demonstrating that “the HOUSES Act would alleviate 14% of the nation’s housing shortage” and result in nearly 5 million more Americans being able to “afford the average home in their state.” The Niskanen Center concluded that the HOUSES Act was “consistent with an all-of-the-above, pro-housing abundance agenda and contains reasonable guardrails to protect sensitive or special lands from development.” Similarly, scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, such as Edward Pinto and Tobias Peter, have praised the bill for addressing artificial housing scarcities.
Second, and much more simply, Backer got his facts wrong. Despite making repeated appeals that “the areas I posted pictures of are SPECIFICALLY for sale” (original capitalization), Lake Constance would not be eligible for sale under any version of the bill since it was first proposed in 2018. The legislation specifically prohibits the sale of federally protected lands, which it defines ad nauseam across 15 lines of bill text to include “a National Park” such as Olympic. Backer has refused to engage publicly when challenged on this point, simply sharing a link to a public lands tracker that corroborates the criticism of his post.
Far from some secret cabal to sell off our national parks, the HOUSES Act has always made it clear that our great American land heritage would continue to be protected under its provisions. However, the federal government owns roughly 640 million acres of land, or 28% of the continental United States, and much of it is unremarkable brushland that could be responsibly returned to the states and developed to alleviate the housing crisis. Why would anyone prioritize that over future generations of Americans?
The problem is even more pertinent in many of our country’s western states, where federal landownership is often much more extreme. For example, Utah has seen massive housing price increases as a result of the federal government controlling two-thirds of its total land area. It’s no surprise, then, that even Utah politicians with a reputation for moderation, such as former Republican Sen. Mitt Romney and Sen. John Curtis (R), were original supporters of the HOUSES Act. For that same reason, it is practically unremarkable that Sen. Dan Sullivan’s (R-AK) state (61% federal land), as well as Sens. John Barrasso (R-WY) and Cynthia Lummis’s (R-WY) state (nearly half composed of federal land) have also been co-sponsors since the legislation was first introduced in Congress.
THE WEST DESERVES A SAY IN PUBLIC LANDS
With the American dream growing increasingly out of reach for millions of Americans thanks to rising home prices, I don’t think it’s crazy to consider cutting government red tape and enacting a second Homestead Act. There might even be an important policy debate to be had about preserving America’s national beauty beyond the expansive list set out in the bill (if beauty is in the eye of the beholder, then there is no doubt that some of the 0.75% of nonprotected land under consideration might be beautiful).
But irresponsible social media posts don’t advance any kind of conversation about the kind of country we want to leave to our children and grandchildren. I, for one, want my children to be able to afford to live in their own homes and visit our country’s great national parks. I have every confidence that the HOUSES Act would make that future more possible.
John Shelton is the policy director for Advancing American Freedom. He received degrees from Duke University (M.Div.) and the University of Virginia (B.A.) and lives in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., with his wife, Katelyn, and their children