Two big projects related to the energy transition are expected to deliver jobs to rural Nevada — and could bring along with them the kind of housing shortages that plague many communities across the West.
Local leaders are eyeing federal lands as a key part of a solution, saying in counties where the Bureau of Land Management is by far the largest land owner that property is an obvious place to build out new housing. It’s a familiar refrain in Nevada, where the federal government manages about 86 percent of the state’s total land mass, and officials in the Las Vegas metropolitan area estimate they’ll run out of non-federal land to build anything within the decade.
While the idea of housing construction on certain federal land has won support from the presidential campaigns of both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, building on federal lands poses significant challenges. Most obvious: BLM moves slowly on these requests, in part because the agency must conduct appraisals and evaluations of the rangelands to ensure a fair-market return on the public’s land.
Vinson Guthreau, executive director of the Nevada Association of Counties, noted that there are several rural counties in the state with small populations — and where BLM controls almost all of the land.