Nevada’s public land hosts mines, recreation, wildlife and renewable energy. Now, it’s being asked to pull more weight. 

Lawmakers at all levels and on both sides of the aisle are advocating for the release of federal land as a solution to the state’s affordable housing shortage. 

Members of the state’s federal delegation have repeatedly introduced bills calling for the release of public land, and state lawmakers this session have broadly shown support for one of those bills. And, Gov. Joe Lombardo, since his election, has called for the release of lands and touted talks with President Donald Trump on the issue. 

Most recently, he has requested that Nevada be represented on a federal public lands and housing task force and entered into a memorandum of understanding with the state Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office to “exchange information and expedite the release of federal land for attainable housing.”

Housing is a local issue, but the housing market is regional, and ensuring affordable housing is built “is simultaneously no one’s and everyone’s” responsibility, according to Nic Irwin, research director at the Lied Center for Real Estate at UNLV and an author of a February report focusing on affordable housing from the Guinn Center. “Whatever your political stripes, everyone knows housing is needed.” 

The call to release federal land for housing builds on a battle that has raged for decades since a broad shift in federal management pivoted from the release to retention of public lands. There’s still dispute about whether the arrangement is holding back housing development, and to what extent releasing land would address a shortage.

“The notion of making federal land the enemy and the reason we can’t have affordable housing is the feds own all the land — that’s just wrong on its face,” said John Leshy, author of Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands. “Federal lands are not an obstacle to affordable housing.

“Everybody wants to point their finger somewhere else, and the feds are such an easy place to point a finger, and public lands are such an easy scapegoat.” 

‘The sign of big government is land ownership’

Signed in 1864, the state Constitution declares that Nevada “forever disclaim[s] all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within said territory” — in other words, at statehood, Nevada agreed it wouldn’t claim any public land that wasn’t already spoken for.

But a lot has changed since 1864, including the way, and rate, in which the United States disposes of federal land. 

Through the mid 1800s, the federal government actively tried to offload its vast reserves of land, offering incentives such as the Homestead Act and Desert Lands Entry Act to spur people West. Through the Homestead Act alone, nearly 214 million acres were settled.

But by the late 19th century, there was a shift in the way public lands were viewed. Yellowstone was set aside in 1872 as the first national park; Sequoia and Yosemite national parks soon followed. The Taylor Grazing Act, signed into law in 1935, ended open grazing on public rangelands and established the Division of Grazing (a predecessor of the BLM).

And then, in 1976, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy Management Act (FLPMA), the guiding document for the BLM that many historians point to as a pivotal moment in the disposal of public lands. The act specifically states that “the public lands be retained in Federal ownership, unless … it is determined that disposal of a particular parcel will serve the national interest.” The act also repealed many of the nation’s previous disposal laws. 

“The question after FLPMA ... is, ‘What should the federal government allow people to do on the land?’” said Leisl Carr Childers, a Colorado State University professor who authored a book on public lands and multiple use in Nevada. “But it’s the federal government's land, period — and the act of federal retention of land was a huge shift. I think it’s been an undervalued shift.” 

In the decades since, headline-making efforts have been made to release large swaths of public land, in Nevada and across the West.

In the 1970s, former Rep. Jim Santini (D-NV) was at the forefront of the Sagebrush Rebellion, a movement to transfer public lands from the federal government to individual states. Santini, along with Sen. Orrin Hatch, (R-Utah), requested the federal government turn over 554 million acres of federal land to Western states.

That effort failed, as did a bid last year by the state of Utah, which took a case directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, questioning if the BLM’s claim to manage 18.5 million acres of land in the state was legitimate.

Since the 1970s, the protest against federal land retention has become synonymous with opposition to big government, Carr Childers said. 

“The thinking goes, if the federal government owns less land, there will be less regulation and red tape,” she said. But, “It is utterly over simplistic to say we have too much public land … That is not how public lands work, that is not part of their utility, that is not part of their value.” 

SNPLMA

Although his push for the large-scale release of federal lands failed, Santini found success in 1980 with the passage of the Santini-Burton Act that allowed for the sale and development of about 7,000 acres of Clark County land in exchange for conservation of similar-sized parcels in the Lake Tahoe Basin.

In 1998, former Sen. Harry Reid’s (D-NV)  Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act (SNPLMA) built off the Santini-Burton Act, expanding the acreage available for sale around Clark County and using the revenue to fund conservation projects. Since 1998, more than 67,000 acres of public lands have been set aside in Clark County through the act; more than 29,000 acres remain available for disposal. 

Under SNPLMA, the state, local government entities and public housing authorities are allowed to submit requests to "reserve" land to be put toward affordable housing. 

Federal data shows however that, thus far, when public lands are released in Nevada, very little is converted into affordable housing. Although more than 550 acres are currently reserved across Southern Nevada, only 50 acres have been dedicated to affordable housing, according to BLM data, despite estimates by the National Low Income Housing Coalition that the state is short nearly 78,000 affordable housing units. 

“SNPLMA does not have real guardrails requiring affordable housing,” said Aaron Weiss, director of the progressive conservation group Center for Western Priorities. “Any sort of sale for affordable housing lives and dies on the … guardrails that are put on it.”

Vinny Spotleson, chair of the Sierra Club’s Toiyabe Chapter, said he was surprised to learn that several dozen acres of SNPLMA land have gone toward affordable housing.

“That’s more than I thought — that’s how little SNPLMA has done for affordable housing,” he said.  

Federal housing push and Lombardo

Nevada isn’t the only state facing a housing shortage. 

The federal government is looking to find underutilized land that could hold up to 7 million affordable housing units nationwide — the estimated number that are needed to meet the needs of extremely low-income families, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. 

The federal government has floated the idea of selling about 400,000 acres of federal land managed by the BLM to address the nationwide housing shortage, potentially making land available within 10 miles of cities or towns with populations greater than 5,000 people. But a recent analysis by the Center for American Progress found that, in the 10 Western states with the most BLM land, less than 1 percent of those lands are within 10 miles of major population centers.

In Nevada, where the federal government owns more than 80 percent of the state’s land, about 2 percent of the state’s land would fall under those federal parameters, according to estimates by Friends of Nevada Wilderness.

Outsized federal land ownership “creates a unique set of problems for Nevada,” according to the Guinn Center report, adding “local and state governments are often subject to policy decisions made by federal agencies.” 

As the federal entities explore the release of federal land for housing, Lombardo requested that the state “be an active part of the conversations with the U.S. Department of Interior and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development … it’s part of the solution we’re trying to achieve.”

He’s made similar pitches since taking office in 2023, including in a letter earlier this year to Senate Majority Leader Nicole Cannizzaro (D-Las Vegas) and Speaker Steve Yeager (D-Las Vegas), in which he requested their support “to advocate for the immediate and systematic release of federal land in Nevada” as he “continued to engage with our federal delegation and the President on this issue.”

There isn’t a fixed, statewide acreage target that should be set aside for affordable housing, Lombardo told The Nevada Independent in an email. Instead, the partnership between his office and the BLM will focus on mapping land previously identified for disposal “to better inform responsible and efficient housing, economic development, and infrastructure expansion.” 

“There is already land available for disposal,” Lombardo said. “Assessing these lands to determine their suitability for attainable and affordable housing — such as considering proximity to existing infrastructure like schools, roads, and job centers — is a reasonable starting point.”

Carr Childers draws a distinction between tailored requests from leaders in Nevada and a blanket call from a presidential administration to sell off land.

“Politicians at the federal level … [are] not interested in place specificity, but ideology. If one of the ideas of big government is owning too much land, then dumping land for a politically palatable reason is good policy,” she said. But the idea of releasing hundreds of thousands of acres of federal land for housing “lacks the specificity to deal with land, because land is place specific.”

It makes more sense when state and local officials, such as Nevada’s federal delegation or Clark County, raise the red flag for the release of more land, she said, because it addresses a specific area’s need. 

“There’s no perfect solution, there’s only compromise,” she said. “You have to be OK with some level of sprawl, but you have to include infill as well.”

Is there a shortage of developable land in Nevada?

As the Las Vegas Valley has rapidly expanded in the last half century, some pockets of land within the valley have remained undeveloped or are underused. 

A 2025 Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada inventory showed that there are more than 78,000 acres across urbanized Southern Nevada that are vacant or underutilized, such as being used for parking or housing buildings worth less than the land. Most of that acreage (69,300 acres) is vacant.

The most underused land, according to the inventory, is concentrated in dense, urban areas such as along Boulder Highway, Maryland Parkway and Charleston Boulevard.

According to the inventory, there are more than 25,600 acres in North Las Vegas, more than 15,300 acres in Las Vegas and more than 12,500 acres in Henderson. There are also more than 16,500 acres in the county and a combined 8,300 acres in Boulder City and Mesquite.

That acreage is enough to support several million more people, according to Spotleson, who said the current projections for land needed for development are based on “giant master planned communities and strip malls.” Instead, if the assumption was construction of five-or six-story buildings on those 78,000 acres, Spotleson said, there would be room for housing for millions of people, although some municipalities have growth ordinances capping how much housing can be built each year. 

But, some of that land is situated in areas unsuitable for development. And, said a spokesperson from the office of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), the Las Vegas Valley can’t meet its needs via infill alone.

By 2030, Nevada will face a land shortage that will stunt economic development, the Nevada Governor’s Office of Economic Development reported in 2023 — failure to secure an adequate amount of land could lead to a decline in gross regional product growth of between $9.3 billion and $15.5 billion per year.  

Southern Nevada is expected to grow by an additional 800,000 new residents over the next 25 years and another 75,000 are expected over the next 15 years in Washoe County, where there is also a shortage of non-federal, developable land — according to a 2021 study by the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada, there were, at the time, only about 26,000 acres suitable for development in western Nevada. 

“What we need is more housing for people,” Irwin said. “A big increase in supply of housing would push down costs of housing … If we limit sprawl, that means housing costs have nowhere to go but up.”

He pointed to development in Clark County, which has seen a steep dropoff in residential construction over the years. About 3,000 units of single-family housing were being built in the county in the mid 1990s and early 2000s — now, only around 900 housing units are being built per month, he said. 

But the release of public land doesn’t necessarily mean affordable housing shortages will be addressed, Irwin said. Adding guardrails for affordable housing doesn’t mean projects will necessarily be built; even if they are, construction far from city centers comes with a host of costly infrastructure needs that can drive up prices. 

‘Putting the onus on taxpayers’

The release of Nevada’s federal lands has become a bipartisan issue, both in favor of and against. Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV) introduced her Truckee Meadows Public Lands Management Act; Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV) previously submitted a lands bill of his own for Northern Nevada. 

Cortez Masto has pushed for increased release of federal lands in Southern Nevada through her Southern Nevada Economic and Development Conservation Act (SNEDCA), which would make 25,000 acres of land available for development while conserving 2 million acres. The act also contains language to ensure affordable housing applications are prioritized — if a local government body applies to use land for affordable housing, that application would receive prioritized review over other applications.

The act “is the best, most effective way to make more land available for affordable housing development in Southern Nevada,” Cortez Masto said in an emailed statement. 

The act noticeably has the support of many conservation groups and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. In a 2024 letter to former President Joe Biden, Lombardo wrote that the bill “proposes more flexibility, an expedited process and land transfer to local governments for affordable housing.” And during the current legislative session, a bipartisan group of state lawmakers showed support for a resolution proposed by Assm. Sandra Jauregui (D-Las Vegas) that prioritized the passage of Cortez’s Masto’s lands bill, although the resolution ultimately died. 

Cortez Masto’s bill isn’t without opposition, however — six Democratic lawmakers voted against the resolution and Rep. Dina Titus (D-NV) has also expressed opposition to the act, countering that the bill contains no affordable housing requirements. 

What’s missing from all the arguments over the divesting of federal land to states is that, even without processes such as Nevada’s unique lands bills in place, there are ways for municipalities to access federal land. 

While FLPMA (the BLM’s guiding document) directs the agency to retain most of its land, it does authorize the agency to dispose of lands that meet certain criteria — for example, those that are uneconomical or difficult to manage or those that will assist with community expansion or economic development. 

That land must also have been identified as potentially available for disposal in a local BLM Resource Management Plan (RMP), detailed road maps for each of the BLM’s jurisdictions that outline everything from wildland fire management to livestock grazing. 

The process can often be slow and costly, acknowledged Shaaron Netherton, executive director of Friends of Nevada Wilderness. 

Many of Nevada’s RMPs are sorely outdated, some more than 20 years old, meaning the land looks very different today than it did when it was previously identified for disposal. 

But the agreement Lombardo signed with the BLM earlier this year intends to combine the outdated, scattered information across the state’s RMPs to create a database of updated, cohesive information. 

As the old RMPs are studied and their information distilled, critics are keeping an eye on the process. 

“What we will be looking for is, are there guardrails for affordability? Are they prioritizing areas that are already in urban areas that have the infrastructure in place?” Weiss said. “If that stuff isn’t already there, you aren’t building affordable housing, you’re just putting the onus on taxpayers.”