Obviously they would have to be native-led - but are the reservations not, as one might put it - open for development, treaty port style? I've read in passing that the First Nations have been pro-development in some of the parts of Canada whether they have land.
The land around Las Vegas is already covered by a land sale program under the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act created by Harry Reid. It uses the proceeds from the lad sales for conservation. A good model. It’s allowed Las Vegas to continue to grow. https://www.blm.gov/programs/lands-and-realty/regional-information/nevada/snplma
I like this analysis a lot because it starts with the principles of housing demand. To Nolan's point, we **COULD** sell off thousands of acres in the middle of Wyoming. However, without jobs to support this housing, the housing would unfortunately be virtually useless. So, Nolan's suggestion here is to look at the places that have a little bit of demand capacity and cross that with the geography of publicly-owned lands.
A big step in the right direction. Kudos. However, we still have not yet crossed the Rubicon. What is broken most about housing policy in the United States is that we have 35,700 different municipalities with outdated permitting processes and building codes that are not tied the best interest or the quality of life of their residents or the local economy. If we instead, use the economic reality of service workers as the benchmark for housing policy, we will be able to build housing substantially cheaper than we can build it now... I give you... the housing renaissance.
We already have literally thousands of cities and towns in the interior of the country that have been losing their population for decades. These freedom cities are dumb.
...they aren't dumb, especially as outlined above. However, your point is valid that much of the Rust Belt (my lineage) does not have an economy, therein building housing where there are not jobs for people is short-sighted. The exception may be the ability to work-from-home.
Cost of housing must match the labor market of an economy, otherwise you have a mismatch (which is where we are today).
You actually pinpoint the exact reason it's dumb idea: the issue isn't a lack of cities, it's a lack of jobs. Which of course that stupid orange pig Republicans worship has no ideas to resolve.
This is a good topic for a thought experiment, I’d probably go for it too if I were a planning writer. As a practitioner though, it drives me a little nuts that this much can be written without mentioning water rights or water infrastructure in the most water starved part of the country. Or that Nolan would automatically assume that Grand Junction would see price reductions from developing BLM land, without even asking whether or not there is a ton of non BLM land that could be developed now (there is). And why isn’t it? Well, maybe supply and demand isn’t actually the whole issue.
You didn’t mention the need to put in metro lines before you build, which is crucial! Cut and cover is WAY cheaper than tunneling. And without a preexisting transit union, you can set the area up for comprehensive *driverless* subway service in a turnkey manner. Perhaps connected via commuter rail to the twin city while dependent on it for an employment base (but this kind of idea is unlikely to be successful without preexisting commitments from companies to locate operations in the greenfield city).
Why are airports the most expensive thing to build? That’s counterintuitive, though I come from a pretty flat part of the world.
Of your five states mentioned as good candidates for this sort of growth, four of them are *massively* water constrained. As medium and high density housing is not only more efficient generally, it's also more water efficient, which makes a vertical infill policy a much better choices for urban Nevada, SW Utah, most of California, and many other places in the American West. As someone who has studied land use and water in these places, continued sprawl is neither necessary nor desirable as a policy in most of the locations referenced in your article.
Hi, Nolan. I enjoyed your book about how planning is 1) a good and important discipline that has 2) been adversely impacted because it’s captured by special interests. So it’s somewhat surprising to see you write a piece advocating for 1) terrible exurban planning 2) so developers can take advantage of free real estate. It’s not coming across as satire(?) so it’s just sort of baffling.
“We should bulldoze 1000-year-old juniper trees in a waterless desert dark-sky sanctuary to build a commuter suburb so the market will prompt regional 3-story walk-up developers to provide abundant housing” is maybe a less compelling argument for market-based solutions to the housing crisis than it seemed when you typed it. At this rate we’re like 2 months away from YIMBY’s earnestly going to the mat to turn farmland into Levittowns but with ADUs and hourly bus service.
Unfortunately, we don't have a housing availability crisis;
we have a hyper-inflated housing cost vs income crisis.
Built by the same city leaders who statistically do little to address true affordability. Statistically, those city planners negotiate a <10% income vs. affordability residency quotient, which is erased when the low-income person sells up after 3 to 5yrs when their family outgrows their affordable condo! Which unsurprisingly increases property tax revenues by resetting its Prop 13 affordability exemption!!!
The builders win because they build for long-term gains against local elected officials, who can be easily outmaneuver and/or bribe local city/county politicians. This is not to say all counties suffer from this problem, but you would be hard-pressed to prove it's not true on a state level.
Land won't fix the affordability issue until we fix the developers' outsized long-view influence on local governments, which are perpetually strapped for cash.
LA solved that problem in the 1940's 50's and 60's when it encouraged servicemen leaving the military to buy and build Sears & Robuc pannelized kit homes. No, they were not great, but they averted a severe housing affordability problem, if only on a small scale.
Fast Forward to today, and we have super-insulated SIP panel homes that are easily constructed by laypersons. Some even come with the roofing and solar installed. The ever-present bugaboo is who will pay for the build-out of road, sewer, cable, and power infrastructure.
In wallced the ever-helpful developers who could add an affordable $120K/house at cost for utilities and roads on a $120-180K affordable factory home. Just run it by the developers; they will laugh you out of the room!!! and then buy off the proper county officials to ensure your project never happens.
I have seen it firsthand at Habitat for Humanity and Habitat for Heros. A civic-minded person donated the land for 27 units with solar energy. It then took the city and county 3 years to appease local developers with pre-approvals for 136 times the habitat sq footage In an undeveloped area 3 miles away. On top of that, most counties want to tax your home on its value, not what it cost you to build!!! The So-Call Heros were protected by special valuation exemptions.
I challenge you, in a good way, To Match that!!!! but IT ONLY HAPPENED after the county developers got 136 times the sq footage approved. Not Cool when you're dealing with disabled heros!!!! Some of which have succumbed to their disabilities.
The problem for the YIMBY folks is that the incoming administration doesn't agree with their goals, or really have goals at all, except to make a series of grand political demonstrations. Working with a Trump administration on ostensibly shared goals is kind of like inviting in a private equity firm to fix a business but not expecting them to strip it and sell it off. The incoming administration can be relied upon to take negative actions like removing regulations and opening lands up to capitalism. But they cannot be relied on to take any subsequent steps that would build upon the initial policy change. They tear down, they do not build.
All of the sites you propose are basically deserts. They will only get hotter and dryer as the climate evolves.
Water is the single biggest issue-instead of building unsustainable communities in deserts, look at the land around the Great Lakes. There is probably potential in older cities to redevelop.
That seems kinda bananas to me, except perhaps in a "modest proposal" way. Why not also do Death Valley? Shouldn't we be in a mode where we try to capitalize as much as possible on our existing infrastructure investments, considering water, electricity, and transportation? Carrizo Plain has none of those. The only thing it has is ready access to the San Andreas fault, a feature nobody wants.
Anyway the manner in which BLM acquired management of Carrizo was by private gift, so I assume that the people who raised all that money put covenants on it that prevent this weird proposal.
The point is to use a proposal like this to get people to realize that upzoning in cities, using USPS land for housing, and putting workforce housing on forest edges near resort/luxury towns is better than building new cities.
"... or a Native American reservation."
Obviously they would have to be native-led - but are the reservations not, as one might put it - open for development, treaty port style? I've read in passing that the First Nations have been pro-development in some of the parts of Canada whether they have land.
The land around Las Vegas is already covered by a land sale program under the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act created by Harry Reid. It uses the proceeds from the lad sales for conservation. A good model. It’s allowed Las Vegas to continue to grow. https://www.blm.gov/programs/lands-and-realty/regional-information/nevada/snplma
I like this analysis a lot because it starts with the principles of housing demand. To Nolan's point, we **COULD** sell off thousands of acres in the middle of Wyoming. However, without jobs to support this housing, the housing would unfortunately be virtually useless. So, Nolan's suggestion here is to look at the places that have a little bit of demand capacity and cross that with the geography of publicly-owned lands.
A big step in the right direction. Kudos. However, we still have not yet crossed the Rubicon. What is broken most about housing policy in the United States is that we have 35,700 different municipalities with outdated permitting processes and building codes that are not tied the best interest or the quality of life of their residents or the local economy. If we instead, use the economic reality of service workers as the benchmark for housing policy, we will be able to build housing substantially cheaper than we can build it now... I give you... the housing renaissance.
We already have literally thousands of cities and towns in the interior of the country that have been losing their population for decades. These freedom cities are dumb.
...they aren't dumb, especially as outlined above. However, your point is valid that much of the Rust Belt (my lineage) does not have an economy, therein building housing where there are not jobs for people is short-sighted. The exception may be the ability to work-from-home.
Cost of housing must match the labor market of an economy, otherwise you have a mismatch (which is where we are today).
You actually pinpoint the exact reason it's dumb idea: the issue isn't a lack of cities, it's a lack of jobs. Which of course that stupid orange pig Republicans worship has no ideas to resolve.
....so.... we agree?!? [shrug] lol
This is a good topic for a thought experiment, I’d probably go for it too if I were a planning writer. As a practitioner though, it drives me a little nuts that this much can be written without mentioning water rights or water infrastructure in the most water starved part of the country. Or that Nolan would automatically assume that Grand Junction would see price reductions from developing BLM land, without even asking whether or not there is a ton of non BLM land that could be developed now (there is). And why isn’t it? Well, maybe supply and demand isn’t actually the whole issue.
Amen. See tomorrow’s edition of my newsletter, The Practice of Community.
You didn’t mention the need to put in metro lines before you build, which is crucial! Cut and cover is WAY cheaper than tunneling. And without a preexisting transit union, you can set the area up for comprehensive *driverless* subway service in a turnkey manner. Perhaps connected via commuter rail to the twin city while dependent on it for an employment base (but this kind of idea is unlikely to be successful without preexisting commitments from companies to locate operations in the greenfield city).
Why are airports the most expensive thing to build? That’s counterintuitive, though I come from a pretty flat part of the world.
Of your five states mentioned as good candidates for this sort of growth, four of them are *massively* water constrained. As medium and high density housing is not only more efficient generally, it's also more water efficient, which makes a vertical infill policy a much better choices for urban Nevada, SW Utah, most of California, and many other places in the American West. As someone who has studied land use and water in these places, continued sprawl is neither necessary nor desirable as a policy in most of the locations referenced in your article.
The biggest challenge of building a new city is jobs. The federal government has many ways to direct jobs to a place, including:
* Relocating a US Federal Agency wholly or partially from the DC area to one of the New Cities
* Building a VA medical center within the city
If the state is on board, the new city can support a new campus of a state university
Hi, Nolan. I enjoyed your book about how planning is 1) a good and important discipline that has 2) been adversely impacted because it’s captured by special interests. So it’s somewhat surprising to see you write a piece advocating for 1) terrible exurban planning 2) so developers can take advantage of free real estate. It’s not coming across as satire(?) so it’s just sort of baffling.
“We should bulldoze 1000-year-old juniper trees in a waterless desert dark-sky sanctuary to build a commuter suburb so the market will prompt regional 3-story walk-up developers to provide abundant housing” is maybe a less compelling argument for market-based solutions to the housing crisis than it seemed when you typed it. At this rate we’re like 2 months away from YIMBY’s earnestly going to the mat to turn farmland into Levittowns but with ADUs and hourly bus service.
Don’t suppose you looked at a geologic map of your Coltah city? I will posting about this over at The Practice of Community tomorrow.
Unfortunately, we don't have a housing availability crisis;
we have a hyper-inflated housing cost vs income crisis.
Built by the same city leaders who statistically do little to address true affordability. Statistically, those city planners negotiate a <10% income vs. affordability residency quotient, which is erased when the low-income person sells up after 3 to 5yrs when their family outgrows their affordable condo! Which unsurprisingly increases property tax revenues by resetting its Prop 13 affordability exemption!!!
The builders win because they build for long-term gains against local elected officials, who can be easily outmaneuver and/or bribe local city/county politicians. This is not to say all counties suffer from this problem, but you would be hard-pressed to prove it's not true on a state level.
Land won't fix the affordability issue until we fix the developers' outsized long-view influence on local governments, which are perpetually strapped for cash.
LA solved that problem in the 1940's 50's and 60's when it encouraged servicemen leaving the military to buy and build Sears & Robuc pannelized kit homes. No, they were not great, but they averted a severe housing affordability problem, if only on a small scale.
Fast Forward to today, and we have super-insulated SIP panel homes that are easily constructed by laypersons. Some even come with the roofing and solar installed. The ever-present bugaboo is who will pay for the build-out of road, sewer, cable, and power infrastructure.
In wallced the ever-helpful developers who could add an affordable $120K/house at cost for utilities and roads on a $120-180K affordable factory home. Just run it by the developers; they will laugh you out of the room!!! and then buy off the proper county officials to ensure your project never happens.
I have seen it firsthand at Habitat for Humanity and Habitat for Heros. A civic-minded person donated the land for 27 units with solar energy. It then took the city and county 3 years to appease local developers with pre-approvals for 136 times the habitat sq footage In an undeveloped area 3 miles away. On top of that, most counties want to tax your home on its value, not what it cost you to build!!! The So-Call Heros were protected by special valuation exemptions.
I challenge you, in a good way, To Match that!!!! but IT ONLY HAPPENED after the county developers got 136 times the sq footage approved. Not Cool when you're dealing with disabled heros!!!! Some of which have succumbed to their disabilities.
Today there are more
But if they sell off the BLM land outside Moab and St. George where will we rip our 4x4's around?!?
rad article, thanks!!! I live in Grand Junction, CO, and can attest to the massive unused acreage of open country on all sides.
The problem for the YIMBY folks is that the incoming administration doesn't agree with their goals, or really have goals at all, except to make a series of grand political demonstrations. Working with a Trump administration on ostensibly shared goals is kind of like inviting in a private equity firm to fix a business but not expecting them to strip it and sell it off. The incoming administration can be relied upon to take negative actions like removing regulations and opening lands up to capitalism. But they cannot be relied on to take any subsequent steps that would build upon the initial policy change. They tear down, they do not build.
All of the sites you propose are basically deserts. They will only get hotter and dryer as the climate evolves.
Water is the single biggest issue-instead of building unsustainable communities in deserts, look at the land around the Great Lakes. There is probably potential in older cities to redevelop.
You can't be seriously suggesting that Interior should try to lease the Carrizo Plain, a national monument, to developers.
They should sell the flat parts to developers
That seems kinda bananas to me, except perhaps in a "modest proposal" way. Why not also do Death Valley? Shouldn't we be in a mode where we try to capitalize as much as possible on our existing infrastructure investments, considering water, electricity, and transportation? Carrizo Plain has none of those. The only thing it has is ready access to the San Andreas fault, a feature nobody wants.
Anyway the manner in which BLM acquired management of Carrizo was by private gift, so I assume that the people who raised all that money put covenants on it that prevent this weird proposal.
The point is to use a proposal like this to get people to realize that upzoning in cities, using USPS land for housing, and putting workforce housing on forest edges near resort/luxury towns is better than building new cities.
That won't, of course, increase the number of homes declared uninsurable.
Imagine if there were Developer Laws/ Bonds that guaranteed insurability for 20yrs on new built homes on forest edges?
Oh wait, developers will invalidate the laws by going bankrupt every 12 years.