The big industry in this pretty city in southwestern Utah is building and selling homes, and business is so good that St. George is running out of land.
Set beneath the red bluffs of the Colorado River plateau and blessed with sunshine more than 300 days a year, St. George has been one of the fastest-growing communities in the United States over the past quarter-century. Like many cities in the Mountain West, St. George is an island of private property in a sea of public land. The modern city is mostly built on homesteads that farmers claimed from the government in the 19th century, and as developers have run out of farmland to turn into subdivisions, prices have soared. Relative to local incomes, housing in St. George is more expensive than in New York.
The Trump administration is proposing to address the housing crisis Western cities by opening some of the government’s vast landholdings for development. Last month the Interior Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development announced a joint task force to identify parcels and expedite construction.
It’s a great idea, if it’s done right. Federal lands are a national resource, and the nation needs more housing. The proposal is easily caricatured as turning national parks into trailer parks, but there’s a lot of Western land that belongs to the government simply because no one else wanted it. It’s scrubland, not El Capitan.
The proposal won’t make a dent in the crisis, however, if the land is used for more vacation McMansions or even for single-family homes on quarter-acre lots. What cities like St. George need most — and what they mostly refuse to allow — are modest homes and apartments for low-wage workers and families.
The red bluffs above St. George should be preserved forever. The acres of barren land east of the St. George airport that the government owns because no one wanted to farm it? That should be used for apartment buildings.
The United States requires almost four million new homes just to meet the needs of its existing population, according to the mortgage finance company Freddie Mac. The shortage is particularly acute in the places with the greatest economic opportunities. Big coastal cities like New York and San Francisco get most of the attention, but the problem has become just as bad, if not worse, in some smaller cities.
In Ivins, which abuts St. George, backhoes are carving through an ancient lava flow to create a $2 billion resort called Black Desert. It will eventually employ 2,500 people, but it doesn’t include housing for any of them. The town’s mayor, Chris Hart, was recently quoted in a local paper asking plaintively, “Where are all these workers going to live?”
The beginnings of an answer can be found in Las Vegas, less than two hours southwest of St. George on Interstate 15.
Under a 1998 law, the federal government has auctioned for development some 35,000 acres of public land around Las Vegas. That land is now covered with thousands of homes, and the proceeds from the sales, more than $4 billion, have mostly gone to protect other public lands and to expand recreation.
The program has been notably successful in balancing the interests of expansionists and preservationists, the two great factions in Western land battles.
Similar programs in other parts of the West could make room for hundreds of thousands of new homes. Aside from protected lands, mountains and wetlands, the federal government owns roughly 800,000 acres of land — four times the land area of New York City — that is inside the boundaries of Western cities or within a mile of the city limits, according to an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank. That includes bigger cities like Phoenix as well as smaller ones such as Boise, Idaho and Bend, Ore.
The great flaw of the Las Vegas program, however, is profligacy. Instead of using scarce land to provide housing that workers can afford, the government has simply cleared the way for more sprawling subdivisions of high-priced homes. In Skye Canyon, a development of 9,000 homes on 1,700 acres of formerly federal land at the northwestern edge of Las Vegas, prices for new homes start above the $469,945 median for the metro area. Since the Las Vegas federal land sales began in 1998, local housing prices have more than tripled.
The government can do better by making two changes.
First, the federal government should lease land rather than sell it. A 2024 task force co-chaired by Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah, a Republican, proposed leasing federal land for housing development because federal lands are not subject to local zoning laws and other forms of municipal obstructionism.
“It would be a game changer,” said Steve Waldrip, the governor’s top adviser on housing.
Second, instead of trying to make money from land sales, the government should pick projects that serve the public interest and then subsidize them by providing the land at a nominal fee. State and local governments have long used similar strategies. Last year, the federal government sold a 20-acre parcel valued at $20 million to Clark County, the jurisdiction that includes the city of Las Vegas, for just $2,000, on the condition that it be used for affordable housing. The county plans to build 210 homes there at prices affordable for families making about $70,000 a year.
A 1976 law ended the era in which federal lands were basically available for the asking, and many Westerners are wary, at best, of proposals to turn back the clock. Environmental groups increasingly accept that the West needs more housing, but they argue that cities should stop sprawling outward and start growing upward. They are especially skeptical of granting power to the Trump administration to decide which federal lands to develop.
“I don’t think there is a problem with land transfer where it makes sense, where there’s a clear net benefit to the American people,” said Drew McConville, a senior fellow who works on Western land use issues at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank. “But the devil is in the details, and that devil can be pretty huge.”
Many homeowners in Western cities, and the politicians who serve their interests, are wary of development that they can’t control.
That sense of caution is both understandable and untenable. The United States has a housing crisis in large measure because our society has become better at saying no than saying yes. We’ve become so focused on the costs of building that we’ve lost sight of the damage that we are causing by not building.
At the northern edge of St. George there is an old motel that has been converted into single-room apartments for veterans and seniors who can’t afford to live anywhere else in the city.
Behind it sits 99 acres of empty federal land.
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