Tuesday night’s debate between Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz was one of the most civil, policy-focussed debates voters have had the pleasure of watching in quite some time.
But for all the congeniality that was fostered onstage last night, one area of bipartisan agreement was missed on what has suddenly become one of the hottest issues in politics: housing costs.
After pressing Walz on how Harris can meet her promise of building 3 million homes (she can’t), moderator Margaret Brennan asked Vance, “Sen. Vance, as far as your campaign’s position, the promise is to seize federal lands to build homes, remove regulation, provide tax breaks, and cut back on immigration, which you say pushes up prices. Where are you going to build all the new homes you’re promising?”
To which Vance replied, “Now, Tim just mentioned a bunch of ideas. Now, some of those ideas I actually think are halfway decent, and some of them I disagree with. But the most important thing here is Kamala Harris is not running as a newcomer to politics. She is the sitting vice president. If she wants to enact all of these policies to make housing more affordable, I invite her to use the office that the American people already gave her, not sit around and campaign and do nothing while Americans find the American Dream of home ownership completely unaffordable.”
Brennan, however, did not like this answer, so she pressed again. “Senator, where are you going to seize the federal lands? Can you clarify?”
To which Vance replied, “Well, what Donald Trump has said is we have a lot of federal lands that aren’t being used for anything. They’re not being used for national parks. They’re not being used. And they could be places where we build a lot of housing. And I do think that we should be opening up building in this country. We have a lot of land that could be used.”
Brennan then turned to Walz for his thoughts. He said, “I was going to ask, though, on this question, are we going to drill and build houses in the same federal land? And I think when people hear federal lands, these are really important pieces of land. Now, Minnesota doesn’t have a lot of federal lands. I know in the western part of the countries, we do. There’s not a lot of federal lands in and around Minneapolis, for example. So the issue is, I don’t understand the federal lands issue unless we see this. And I worry about this as someone who cares deeply about our national parks and our federal lands.”
It is understandable that Walz doesn’t understand federal land issues. Just 6.8% of Minnesota’s territory is owned by the federal government. But that is not true for many Western states like Utah, where the federal government owns 63.1% of all the land, or California, where it owns 45.4%. There are a lot of hot housing markets throughout the West that are near federal lands that have not been designated as parks or wildlife preserves. That land could be sold to developers to build new houses.
The government would not need to “seize” anything. The government already owns the land. That’s what makes it federal land.
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In fact, selling off federal land in Western states so more housing can be built is such a good common sense idea, it is even in the Harris housing plan: “Vice President Harris will also take action to make certain federal lands eligible to be repurposed for new housing developments that families can afford.”
Maybe Brennan and Walz should spend more time reading Harris’s housing plan before attacking Vance for wanting to build condos in the Grand Canyon.