Privatize Federal Land!

I’ve long advocated selling off some federal land—an idea that reliably causes mass fainting spells among the enlightened. How could we possibly part with our national patrimony, our land, our sacred wilderness? Calm down. Most of this “public land” is never used by the public. Selling some of it would actually make it more accessible and useful to real people.

Moreover, most of you wailing about selling some Federal land are probably very happy we sold the “public” airwaves for your private cell phone use. Privatizing the airwaves made them much more useful to the public. (Thank you Reed!).

AEI has an excellent map of the lands that could be sold and developed in the Mike Lee bill. Here’s their conclusion:

The data show a significant opportunity. Our analysis finds that developing just 135-180 square miles of the most suitable BLM land, a minuscule fraction of the total, could yield approximately 1 million new homes over ten years. This would substantially address the West’s housing shortage while generating an estimated $15 billion for the U.S. Treasury from land sales.

Here’s an example of the some of the land potentially developable around Las Vegas.

Here’s a Google satellite image of the bit around Mountain’s Edge. Enjoy your fishing on these public lands!

And here’s a very crude but useful scatter plot showing the correlation between median home prices in a state and Federal land ownership. Should home prices in Utah (63.1% Federally owned) really be 71% higher than in Texas (1.8% Federally owned)? Of course, Texas is famously an urban hellscape with no parks, no open space, and nowhere to hunt or fish.

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