Debby Bright, Real Estate Broker

07/19/2025

Build Homes on Federal Land


Picture Palace/Getty ImagesCreditCredit...Picture Palace/Getty Images

By Binyamin Appelbaum, The New York Times
Opinion Writer, reporting from St. George, Utah
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 in 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.


Homes under construction at in Las Vegas in 2022.Credit...Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal, via Getty Images

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.
Binyamin Appelbaum is the lead writer on economics and business for The Times editorial board. He is based in Washington. • Facebook

07/19/2025

The Trend Disrupting Conventional Housing Wisdom
A conversation with Rogé Karma about whether the Sun Belt is going the way of Los Angeles and San Francisco
By Stephanie Bai, The Atlantic

Single-family homes in a residential neighborhood in San Marcos, Texas (Jordan Vonderhaar / Bloomberg / Getty)
Conventional housing wisdom dictates that if you can’t afford Los Angeles or New York City, try Austin or Atlanta. For years, astronomical prices, labyrinthine zoning laws, and dwindling square footage have driven renters and homeowners out of big coastal cities in droves. Their search for more affordable zip codes has frequently landed them in the Sun Belt, a region that stretches across America’s Southeast and Southwest.
But where some people struck housing gold, others are now seeing diminishing returns. In a recent story titled “The Whole Country Is Starting to Look Like California,” my colleague Rogé Karma reported that “over the past decade, the median home price has increased by 134 percent in Phoenix, 133 percent in Miami, 129 percent in Atlanta, and 99 percent in Dallas”—and these rates outpace New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Maybe Sun Belt cities aren’t as different from their coastal counterparts as we once thought. I spoke with Rogé to figure out what that might mean for the rest of the country.
Stephanie Bai: You point to research suggesting that housing development in Sun Belt cities right now is at a similar point to big coastal cities 20 years ago. How does this trend challenge what experts thought they knew about those regions?
Rogé Karma: The way that experts think about the U.S. housing market is really a tale of two housing markets. The commonly held opinion, and it’s been borne out by the data, is that it is really hard to build housing on the coasts, where anti-growth liberals impose excessive land-use regulations and zoning laws. Then you have the second housing market, which is the Sun Belt. This includes cities such as Miami and Phoenix and Dallas and Austin, which are building a seemingly endless supply of cheap housing under what appear to be looser regulations.
But lately, you’re seeing prices spike in the same areas that used to be a refuge from spiking prices. Over the past 25 years, the rate of housing production in some major Sun Belt cities has fallen by half or more. Our housing market used to work in a very specific way: A problem on the coast was being solved by this pressure-release valve in the Sun Belt. But now that pressure-release valve is getting cut off.
Stephanie: How can the Sun Belt avoid looking like the next California?
Rogé: One thing that became really clear to me was that these places that seem so different are actually suffering from the same affliction. I was surprised to find that the zoning regulations in some Sun Belt cities weren’t actually that much better than those in the coastal cities—that a lot of laws on the books were very similar and very restrictive. The way that Sun Belt cities were able to get around it was just by sprawling, and now that they’re starting to hit the limits of their sprawl, those same laws are a lot more binding.
Stephanie: Another big factor you cite for why development has slowed in the Sun Belt is NIMBYism. You described it as “the seemingly universal human tendency to put down roots and then oppose new development.” That psychology is fascinating to me—why do you think that impulse is so universal?
Rogé: One explanation is pure and simple economics. In America, people’s fortunes are largely bound up in their homes. If you allow a lot of development around you, the value of your home could fall.
A second dynamic, and I’ve been influenced here by a paper by David Broockman and others, is an aesthetic one. Their research found that homeowners in cities are less opposed to new development than renters outside of cities are. Their explanation is that a lot of your position on new development comes down to your aesthetic preferences. I live in a neighborhood in D.C. that has high-rises everywhere. I moved there because I like density, and I like what it brings—diversity, good restaurants—whereas someone who moves to a suburb of Dallas might have moved there because they want more space, because they like white-picket-fence homes. Then all of a sudden, when a high-rise is proposed near them, they’re worried about that aesthetic changing. I think it’s a combination of materialism and aesthetic preference, and then a darker side: a reflexive opposition to newcomers, especially when those newcomers are different from you.
Stephanie: If that mindset is so entrenched, can policy alone help overcome that impulse?
Rogé: Policy isn’t going to change people’s psychology, but here’s what it can do: It can change laws that allow people who have this NIMBYism tendency to have outsize influence. If a state decides that they don’t want to have as much development, that’s one thing. If one or two homeowners get to decide to block development, that’s another thing. We can at least make it so that a small group of people aren’t able to block development that would help hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people.
Stephanie: Speaking of big policy shifts, California recently rolled back a monumental environmental law that had been used to delay housing development in the state. How do you take that news? Will California start to look less like the paragon of the housing crisis in America?
Rogé: The California Environmental Quality Act is well known by housing activists everywhere. And you’re right, it’s a law that was originally created to protect the environment but has been weaponized to block not only dense housing but also solar farms and transit and other things that would actually reduce emissions. I’m very happy to see it reformed—that’s a step in the right direction.
But California’s housing crisis has been metastasizing for decades; I don’t know if one change is going to have a big impact right away. I have much more hope for the Sun Belt states. One reason I focus on them in my story is that a lot of those cities aren’t that far gone. Raleigh, North Carolina, recently responded to the demand for housing with a slate of new reforms that made it much easier to build apartments and dense housing in more places, especially near transit.
Stephanie: Maybe that’s the answer to my earlier question. The Sun Belt states can avoid becoming the next California if they take action on housing and zoning policies now.
Rogé: Exactly. They can look at California and see their future.

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06/20/2025

https://1drv.ms/w/c/b363122a7133afb2/EWddqSDjejZDsDZHJWJT-B4Bzz2jDcKWttKMJ9Cac6gsxQ

06/19/2025

The US Government Is Sitting on a Possible Solution to the Housing Crisis
By Bloomberg Businessweek
● The idea of opening up public lands to development enjoys bipartisan support and cuts through red tape.
By Michael Albertus
Among the more urgent tasks facing Donald Trump now that he’s heading back to the White House is answering calls to address the country’s housing availability and affordability crisis. First-time and low-income homebuyers are all but shut out of the housing market, foreclosing the opportunity to build wealth and put a down payment on their own American dream.
The Trump campaign offered several policies to address the problem, but the centerpiece was the idea to open up federally controlled public lands for housing construction. It’s a particularly attractive idea because it can skirt local red tape, and it has bipartisan support. But if it’s going to succeed, the plan has to be oriented toward transforming smaller plots of land within urban areas and on their periphery.
The data are clear that the nation’s current housing crisis stems from a lack of homebuilding in the wake of the Great Recession more than a decade ago. Home construction never caught back up to the demand of

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06/19/2025

Build Homes on Federal Land


By Binyamin Appelbaum, The New York Times
Opinion Writer, reporting from St. George, Utah

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 in 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.


Homes under construction at in Las Vegas in 2022.Credit...Bizuayehu Tesfaye/Las Vegas Review-Journal, via Getty Images

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.

Binyamin Appelbaum is the lead writer on economics and business for The Times editorial board. He is based in Washington. • Facebook

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06/19/2025

The Housing Market Was Supposed to Recover This Year. What Happened?
Economists predicted that the United States would break free of its long-running housing slump in 2025. But the opposite happened.
By Ronda Kaysen, The New York Times

Ronda Kaysen spoke with home buyers, sellers and real estate agents in cities around the country.
As 2025 began, the stars were aligning for a housing market rebound.
Inflation was easing, the economy looked strong and mortgage rates were drifting downward. By April, there were more available homes to buy than at any time since January 2020, according to the Federal Reserve of St. Louis. The conditions were ripe for buyers to re-emerge, checkbooks in hands, and sellers to negotiate.
Then on April 2, President Trump rolled out his expansive global trade tariffs, shocking the stock and bond markets and sparking fears of a recession. Mortgage rates jumped again, hitting 6.89 percent for a 30-year fixed-rate loan on May 29, their highest level since early February. The extreme volatility threw cold water on a fragile market. Buyers bailed out.
“There isn’t any urgency to buying right now — if anything it feels more risky to put a down payment into a home when you might not have a job six months from now,” said Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist of Redfin.
Real estate agents across the country report a chilled environment, with sellers unwilling to lower their prices and buyers reluctant to make a big purchase as the economy flounders and the costs for a mortgage, insurance and property taxes rise. Even in markets where prices have fallen and inventory is piling up, like Austin, Texas, homes are sitting on the market for months. In fiercely competitive areas, like the New York City suburbs, where prices are still rising and homes sell fast, properties that would have gotten a dozen offers a year ago now get two or three.
Image
Even in Maplewood, N.J., where homes sell fast and for above the list price, the pace is slowing. Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times
“Yes, there is more inventory, but it’s almost like too little too late,” said Selma Hepp, the chief economist for Cotality, a real estate data provider.
In 2024, there were fewer home sales than in any year since 1995. This year is looking worse. In April, the number of sales of existing homes dropped 2 percent from April 2024, while the median sale price rose 1.8 percent, marking 22 straight months of year-over-year price growth, according to the National Association of Realtors. The trade group also reported that pending sales are down from a year ago in every region of the country except the Midwest.
The number of canceled sales (one sign of a skittish market) also rose year over year, according to Redfin, which also found that there were nearly 500,000 more people trying to sell homes in April than there were people trying the buy them — the biggest such gap since Redfin began tracking the data in 2013.
La’Keshia White, a real estate agent in Douglasville, Ga., said that some of her prospective buyers dropped out of the market after losing federal jobs. Others are nervous and scaling back their budgets to leave more cushion should their financial situation change.

“They used to be content, thinking their jobs are going to be there, but it’s not the same anymore,” Ms. White said.
In Lewisburg, W.Va., Leah and Jesse Jones, who were in the market for a three-bedroom home, lost out on two bids: one to a cash buyer who waived contingencies, and the other because the seller wouldn’t lower the price enough. After six months, they’ve paused their search, hoping a downturn might bring home prices down, too.
“I feel like buying a home, owning a home, is becoming a privilege that only the truly wealthy can enjoy,” said Ms. Jones, 45, a clinical dietitian.
Yet despite a market full of reluctant buyers, sellers are not under pressure to drop their prices. Almost 60 percent of households have an interest rate below 4 percent, according to a study published in the Journal of Finance; selling would mean trading that low rate for a much higher one on a new purchase. Not since the 1980s, when borrowing rates soared into the double digits, have so many Americans been locked into their mortgages, said Lu Liu, an assistant professor of finance at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and an author of the study, describing the conditions as “unprecedented.”
Added to that, the country hasn’t built enough homes since the foreclosure crisis, creating a chronic lack of new housing supply that drags down the market and keeps prices high. “There is no panacea in sight,” Dr. Liu said.
Image

Sellers are not “refusing to sell,” said Eric Bramlett, an Austin real estate agent. But are instead “stuck on their price.”Credit...Montinique Monroe for The New York Times
Even Austin is stuck, despite starting construction on 102,000 single-family homes between 2020 and 2024, according to Zonda, a data provider. The median sale price there has fallen by 18 percent since the peak in April 2022, according to Unlock MLS, the multiple listing service for the Austin Board of Realtors.
But buyers still see an overheated market — the median home price jumped 69 percent from April 2020 to April 2022 — and an uncertain future. Many sellers, in turn, would rather pull a listing from the market than meaningfully lower the price. “It’s a bit of a frozen market,” said Eric Bramlett, an Austin real estate agent.
In February, John Huffman and Nan Walsh listed their three-bedroom house in East Austin for $950,000, after buying a home in Columbus, Ohio, closer to family. The house hasn’t sold, and though they’ve lowered the price to $925,000, they’re in no hurry to make a deal. “I don’t feel any pressure,” said Mr. Huffman, 68.
The couple paid $618,000 for the house in 2017 and have a mortgage with a 2.6 percent interest rate. If it doesn’t sell, they may rent it out or use it as a winter getaway.
Ronda Kaysen, a real estate reporter for The Times, writes about the intersection of housing and society.

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01/19/2024

ADUs could be sold separately from homes under new California law
By Sarah Ravanidated, San Francisco Chronicle

AB1033, by Assembly Member Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, allows cities to decide whether property owners can sell ADUs separately as condos from the primary home.
Jessica Christian/The Chronicle

Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two bills Wednesday that will boost the construction of ADUs, or accessory dwelling units — the latest effort to address the state’s housing crisis.

AB1033, introduced by Assembly Member Phil Ting, D-San Francisco, allows cities to decide whether property owners can sell ADUs as condos, separate from homes. The bill repeals an existing law that prohibits separate sales of ADUs and will allow homeowners to get loans to build them, as opposed to repaying loans through rental income.

Ting also introduced AB976, which bans local ordinances that require property owners to live in their ADUs — removing barriers that would have otherwise prevented ADUs from being used as rental properties.

"With the governor’s signature on my bills, ADUs can continue to build on the success of our backyard revolution. Not only will there be more rental units, but this will also open the door to affordable homeownership for many. The impact to the housing market will be positive,” Ting said in a statement.
ADU construction has boomed in California over the past decade. The state’s housing department said that about 20% of the housing units built in the state today are ADUs.
Supporters of both AB1033 and AB976 have said ADUs are a critical affordable housing option. The Bay Area Council, which sponsored AB1033, previously said the bill offers residents an affordable for-sale option. Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, has said ADUs expand the housing supply in the state.

California YIMBY, a pro-housing group, celebrated Newsom’s signature of AB976 in a statement Wednesday. Brian Hanlon, the CEO of California YIMBY, said cities are now promoting ADUs as “one of the most desirable and affordable forms of housing.”
“By forever prohibiting owner-occupancy requirements for ADUs, AB 976 will enable middle-class homeowners to access the financing necessary for building ADUs,” Hanlon said.
Opponents of AB976 argue that the legislation undermines local jurisdictions’ ability to develop their own rules and regulations in creating ADUs.
Reach Sarah Ravani: [email protected]; Twitter:
Oct 11, 2023|Updated Oct 11, 2023 7:42 p.m.

By Sarah Ravani
Sarah Ravani covers Oakland and the East Bay at The San Francisco Chronicle. She joined The Chronicle in 2016 after graduating from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Previously, she covered breaking news and crime for The Chronicle. She has provided coverage on wildfires, mass shootings, the fatal shooting of police officers and massive floods in the North Bay.

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