TOP REAL ESTATE AND DEVELOPMENT LAWYERS 2025
Eyeing federal land use for new housing and its hurdles By John Roemer
A lunchtime brainstorming and a professor of land use law at Pepperdine University sparked an outside-the-tract idea after President Donald Trump’s announcement in March of a task force to develop affordable housing on unused federal land: Why not repurpose as apartments the historic 17-floor Spring Street Courthouse, which the federal government owns and has announced it will sell? “I wish we had answers for all the housing problems in Southern session by a real estate partner at a Los Angeles law firm California,” said the professor, Shelley Ross Saxer, a fellow of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers. She stressed that the barriers to large-scale developments are formidable. “You have to get past zoning controls and NIMBYism,” she said of siting new housing in cities. “But developments built in the middle of nowhere create sprawl.” The notion of making dwelling spaces out of courtrooms and judges’ chambers may sound far-fetched and wacky. Or maybe it’s inspired and visionary. Conflicting views flowed from boosters and foes as they pondered Trump’s initiative. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner, a co-leader of Trump’s task force, called for “bold, creative thinking” at a rollout of the plan in Nevada in mid-May.
Meanwhile, land conservationists at the Center for American Progress published a lengthy critique whose headline asked, “Will the U.S. Housing Crisis Be Exploited for a Massive Public Lands Sell-Off?” After the January wildfires destroyed 11,500 homes, Los Angeles’ already hyper-stressed housing market spiraled further into scarcity. Statewide, the lack of affordable dwellings and shortfalls in new construction remained at red-alert levels. So, developing federal land for affordable housing “could be a fantastic idea,” said Ellen Kaufman Wolf, the founder of the real estate and business boutique Wolf Wallenstein, PC. But she foresees challenges. “Where are the federal land parcels suitable for building affordable housing nearby to areas where low-to-middle income jobs are available?” There’s an answer to that. California has more than 500 acres of potential buildable federally owned public land in transit-accessible urban areas. More than half, 280 acres, is in Los Angeles County, according to a mapping project by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit. That’s a fraction of the vast expanses of public land across California. But much of it is state-owned or federal property unsuitable for housing. “Simply selling off remote U.S. Forest Service or Bureau of Land
Management lands misses the core objective,” said Mike Kingsella, the CEO of Up for Growth, a national housing supply research group. “Our focus must be on unlocking lands that are most shovel-ready, connected to existing infrastructure, and are where housing demand is today.” So far, the Trump task force’s announced plan to identify federal land suitable for affordable housing has been short on specifics. By the end of May, members of the task force had not been named, though its leaders, Turner and U.S. Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, got as far west as Southern Nevada in late May to meet with officials of the Nevada Rural Housing Authority, a state agency, to discuss options. Turner and Burgum didn’t get to California, leaving local lawyers, realtors and developers to speculate. Requests for comment went unanswered by HUD, the Department of the Interior and the Bureau of Land Management. Builders were intrigued by Trump’s plan. In published reports, the CEO of the California Building Industry Association, Dan Dunmoyer, said, “If there’s land that’s adjacent to urban cores that’s available, that would be of interest to us.” The CEO of the National Association of Home Builders, Jim Tobin, told the New York Times, “Any land that we can make available would help in [the fastest growing] markets in particular, and
then you have the ability to continue to push the suburbs out.” The prospect of developmental sprawl alarmed environmentalists. Linda Castro, an attorney who studies policy for CalWild, a Berkeley-based nonprofit focused on protecting the state’s natural landscapes, spotlighted those fears. “While there is no doubt that California has an affordable housing crisis, we don’t believe that large-scale public lands selloffs are the answer,” she and a colleague wrote in a Capitol Weekly op-ed. In an interview, Castro expressed skepticism that the Trump plan will result in affordable housing because the economics of building road and utility infrastructure to support the development of vacant public lands means that only expensive homes can justify the costs. “We’re worried about a land grab disguised as a public benefit,” Castro said. She listed as potential at-risk locales the Sacramento River Bend Area near Redding, the Merced National Wildlife Refuge, Cow Mountain near Ukiah, the El Paso Mountains near Ridgecrest, Sawtooth Campground near Lucerne Valley and the Joshua Tree National Park “saddle” area near Twentynine Palms. “A developer is going to look and see multimillion-dollar mansions, and think cha-ching,” Castro said.
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