Nevada governor zeroes in on housing crisis with help from Trump administration

With the federal government controlling 80 percent of the state, Gov. Joe Lombardo said Southern Nevada will run out of land to develop on by 2032 if more parcels aren’t released.

“And we have on average, across the United States, one of the highest median home prices in the country,” the Republican governor said during a Friday roundtable featuring the secretaries of the Department of Interior and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and other stakeholders. “So we need to access that land, we need to build and make (real estate) affordable for both the residents and the builders because in our current scheme we are priced out of the business.”

The governor is zeroing in on land controlled by the Bureau of Land Management in the state as a key factor to helping alleviate Nevada’s housing crisis.

Lowering costs

HUD Secretary Scott Turner said President Donald Trump has given him a clear order to lower housing costs across the board and across all states.

“We have a housing and affordability issue across the country, it’s no secret, it’s well known,” he said. “Washington doesn’t have all the answers. The answers are with the private sector and the nonprofit and faith-based sectors so we want to work as a convener and facilitator.”

During one exchange at the roundtable, Turner said BLM Nevada acting state director Kimberly Prill mentioned it takes around 12 months for the BLM to identify and sell land for affordable housing at $100 an acre in conjunction with HUD, which is outlined in the Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act (SNPLMA), passed in 1998.

“How long should that process be?” He asked, to which Prill responded “I know we can always do better.”

Turner further pressed Prill for an exact date to which Prill said “six months would be ideal.”

Clark County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick said the timeframe could be cut down to three months if the processes were properly streamlined.

Accessing federal land

One of the goals of the SNPLMA is “to dispose of BLM administered land in the State of Nevada for less than fair market value for affordable housing purposes to State or local governmental entities, including local public housing authorities,” according to the BLM website. However, since 1998, the BLM has only offloaded 17,519 acres to the private sector. The Las Vegas Valley alone is approximately 2.1 million acres.

In March, the Department of the Interior, which oversees the BLM across the country, entered into a memorandum of understanding with HUD to identify “underutilized” federal lands suitable for affordable housing development.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said getting interest rates down is another key component to making housing more affordable across the country, which would, in turn, bring down costs and mortgage rates. He mentioned the Trump administration’s cuts across various departments and levels of government are one way to help bring down federal spending.

“When (the government) stops spending more than we are bringing in, that is going to effect interest rates,” he said. “And you can’t talk about housing without talking about interest rates.”

Lombardo in April signed a data sharing agreement via a memorandum of understanding with the BLM to help identify land that is available for disposal in Nevada. He also recently introduced the Nevada Housing Access and Attainability Act, which would put forward $250 million in state resources to support more than $1 billion in housing through grants, loans and rebates.

U.S. Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nev. led the charge recently to approve a reconciliation bill that included a last-minute amendment to sell off more than 93,000 acres of public lands in Nevada, including 65,129 acres in Clark County and 15,860 acres in Washoe County which is earmarked for affordable housing, a move that mutliple Democrats and conservationist organisations have opposed. He said the measure looks to expedite the process of accessing local land for development given traditional land bills have been “phenomenally” hard to pass dating back more than a decade.

Amodei, who was at the roundtable, questioned why most of the Department of the Interior’s solicitors for Nevada’s BLM are still based out of Sacramento, even though the BLM controls far more land in Nevada than California. He also said the issue of affordable housing will be solved by accessing more federal lands in the state as well as local governments cutting red tape and bureaucracy in building, permitting and regulations associated with lengthy wait times.

“Part of what you are talking about is planning and zoning, that ain’t HUD, that ain’t the Department of Interior, it’s you people,” he said, speaking to local government officials and politicians in the room.

Contact Patrick Blennerhassett at pblennerhassett@reviewjournal.com.