Whoever first said, "The devil is in the details," never met a politician or took a stroll through our current bureaucracy. Politicians and their proposed new laws thrive in the vagaries of language, where words seemingly have no meaning, but weigh and strain the systems they enforce. These people delight in generalities, as they can mean anything, and they can mean nothing.
This allows them to continually pull the wool over the eyes of their constituents.
Case in point, Utah's HCR014 proposal which, on the surface, supposedly is designed to be a far more narrow public land seizure for affordable housing than Senator Mike Lee's salting of Carthage's earth attack he mounted last summer. Narrow, however, this is not, though that's how Representative and co-sponsor of this bill, Raymond Ward, describes it.
And he describes this land-grab as such as the public resoundingly told lawmakers to stop trying to sell off our public lands. Indeed, public lands in public hands has a near universal approval rating. Politicians know it's a third rail. But suicidal or not, they want that land for themselves and to sell to their developer buddies, so they're going to keep trying to convince the public that they're on our side, even when it's obvious they aren't. That's what this new proposal is, just another attack.
First and foremost, there isn't a housing crisis as you've been led to believe. We have more than enough homes on the market for everyone currently looking for one. What we have is an affordability crisis regarding being able to purchase a home, as the older generations have begun holding onto their homes for longer to see better returns on their "investments."
Don't believe me? According to the real estate site Redfin, "There were an estimated 44% more home sellers than buyers in the U.S. housing market in January," putting the number of home sellers at 1,961,858 homes for sale each month. Now, the realtors state that this is a buyer's market, but the median for-sale home price hasn't truly dropped in any significant way. Likewise, the actual economy for working-class Americans, which is the predominant subset of the US population, is struggling with stagnant wages, ever-higher inflation, tariff-driven inflation, and a job market that's about as cool as Antarctica.
There are more sellers than buyers because those homes for sale remain unaffordable.
But reality has never stopped folks from saying anything that contradicts what they want from an outcome, and the clearest example is HCR014 titled, "Concurrent Resolution Supporting the Transfer of Federally Managed Lands." The basics of the proposed bill would be to petition Congress to give Utah "unreserved lands," which is a term the group of land-sales advocates has coined to mean whatever they want, so that Utah's legislature can work with the Department of the Interior and Bureau of Land Management in "authorizing limited and targeted sales, transfers, or exchanges of unreserved lands managed by the federal government for the purpose of facilitating moderate-income housing."
As I started this report, however, there are no details on what defines "moderate-income housing." There's nothing that defines what affordable housing would look like or how much it'd cost. Moderate-income housing could mean something very different from person-to-person, as there are vastly different socioeconomic factors at play. Last year, the median home-sale price in Utah was $527,752, according to Zillow. That's a 2% increase from the prior year. And for many, that's still unaffordable.
Vagaries, once again.
Moreover, according to the bill's proponents, it would have a far narrower scope than Senator Mike Lee's sell-em-in-ya-got-them approach to which parcels of public land they propose to sell. That, however, isn't the case.
According to the bill's text, "Be it further resolved that the Legislature and the Governor urge that consideration be limited to unreserved lands located within or immediately adjacent to existing municipal or county boundaries or population centers within county boundaries, or in close proximity to existing infrastructure, where development can occur in a focused and efficient manner." Now, that does sound more limited than "Sell off everything!" But in reality, there are a lot of terms that aren't defined here.
What defines "immediately adjacent to existing municipal or county boundaries or population centers"? Is it 2 miles from those? 5 miles? 10 miles? What? Speaking as a Utahn who lives pretty darn close to a National Forest, defining the scope of "adjacent" seems damn important. But again, these people thrive in generalities and in the vagueness of bureaucracy. And for those in Salt Lake City reading this, depending on that definition, the entire Wasatch Front and Back could be up for sale with this proposal. Do you really think those lands will go to "moderate-income housing"? Cause I sure don't.
This proposal is just another case of public land sell-off advocates wanting to pull one over the public, and it'd mean reducing your public land access to off-road, fish, hike, camp, hunter, and more. As always, call your representatives, call your elected officials. Tell them you don't support this, and nor should they.
