Democratic Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego endorsed the Trump administration’s initiative to use federal lands to address the housing crisis.
Gallego, a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, sent a letter to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — the two men who created the administration’s Joint Task Force on Federal Land for Housing— applauding the initiative to tackle the crisis. Approximately 38% of Arizona’s land is federally owned, making it a potential hotspot for the task force.
“I applaud the formation of such a Task Force to utilize federal land as a partial solution to addressing the nation’s housing supply crisis,” Gallego wrote in the letter. “As the Task Force develops its initiatives and recommendations, I encourage a balanced approach to land development that prioritizes environmental stewardship, respects tribal sovereignty, and involves meaningful engagement with local, state, and tribal communities to ensure housing developments meet their specific needs.”
Gallego’s letter also requested further details on the task force. The senator posed questions regarding transparency of operations, methodology of federal land inventory, coordination between the task force, the Department of Transportation (DOT), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as protocols surrounding private developers and tribal communities.
Dan Kish, who worked on the House Natural Resources Committee overseeing the Department of Interior (DOI), spoke with the Daily Caller News Foundation in March, using his background to answer questions similar to Gallego’s.
“The truth of the matter is the federal government holds a lot of relatively valuable parcels that most people don’t even know about that are close to metro areas that they’ve got by default or neglect or don’t even necessarily know that they own,” Kish told the DCNF. “They may have a chain-link fence around them or something like that with a sign on them and those would be the ones that they’d be looking for that would be close to existing housing stock or transportation.”
Although there’s no mention of the EPA or DOT, an op-ed Turner and Burgum wrote for the Wall Street Journal states the task force will “carefully consider” environmental concerns as well as support infrastructure needed to develop housing communities.
“Interior will identify locations that can support homes while carefully considering environmental impact and land-use restrictions,” the secretaries wrote. “Working together, our agencies can take inventory of underused federal properties, transfer or lease them to states or localities to address housing needs, and support the infrastructure required to make development viable—all while ensuring affordability remains at the core of the mission.”
Gallego is not only supportive of the housing initiative, but he wants to work with the task force as well.
“I definitely want to work on it,” Gallego told Semafor. “What I don’t want to see is us selling plots of land in some of the most beautiful national forests and parks just so some rich guy can get a 50-acre ranch.”
Even in the DCNF’s March conversation, Kish anticipated the task force would spark concerns over national park land security.
“There’s gonna be people who scream bloody murder and say they’re selling off the national parks, but that’s hyperbole,” Kish said. “In essence what we’re talking about here is taking a look at our resource base and seeing whether it doesn’t make some sense to free it up.”
Gallego did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
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