In the wealthy ski towns of Summit County, Colo., where affordable housing is so scarce that some waitresses and ski-lift workers sleep in parking lots, wide-open land is plentiful, as it is across the housing-starved Mountain West.
But much of it is owned by the federal government and off limits for development. And as of Tuesday, it looks like it will stay that way.
Senator Mike Lee, a Utah Republican, had pitched a wholesale auctioning of federal land, in part as a way to build housing, and he planned to include it in President Trump’s far-reaching domestic policy bill.
But it ran into a brick wall of bipartisan opposition even before Monday night, when the Senate’s parliamentarian, who judges what provisions can be included in the bill to avoid a filibuster by Democrats, ruled that much of Mr. Lee’s sell-off proposal would violate the strict Senate rules that Republicans were using to pass the legislation with a simple majority.
Summit County helps show why Mr. Lee’s plan now appears moribund. Even where people are desperate for affordable housing, opposition to selling public lands, potentially for housing, was widespread from voters of both parties.
“There’s no way,” Zyle Yelton, 24, who manages a liquor store that looks out onto the peaks towering over the ski town of Breckenridge, said of the plan.
Mr. Lee pitched a vast sell-off of federal lands as the solution to woes facing so many cities and towns in the West ringed by federal lands, like Colorado Springs and Grand Junction, Colo.; Provo and Salt Lake City in Utah; and Santa Fe, N.M. He proposed requiring the federal government’s two main land agencies to sell as much as three million acres for housing, a footprint the size of a nearly dozen Rocky Mountain National Parks.
That would seem to be appealing to residents like Mr. Yelton, who works multiple jobs and sleeps crammed into pricey rentals. He spent one winter in a 600-square-foot apartment with three other guys, and now shares a $4,000 a month rental up a dirt road with his girlfriend and two other roommates. Meantime, he’s surrounded by $6 million vacation homes
“I’d love to live here for the rest of my life,” he said, “if I could afford a place.”
But Mr. Yelton and other residents also cherish their ability to hike, camp and hunt in their shared backyard, which consists of the national forest and open spaces that cover about 80 percent of Summit County.
“One of the reasons I love living here as much is the beautiful landscape, and all of the hiking trails,” said Justine Smith, 27, a bus driver who pays $2,078 a month for the subsidized one-bedroom she shares with her boyfriend.
Even if Mr. Lee could have surmounted his political opposition, he might have learned from Summit County that his solution to the West’s housing problems wouldn’t work. The reality is, it’s not so easy to pave paradise and put up an apartment block.
Democrats who strongly opposed Mr. Lee point out that the federal government already has procedures that allow land agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, to sell, lease or trade parcels with local governments to build homes or use for other purposes.
Summit County tried to do just that in 2016, when it bought a 45-acre piece of land known as Lake Hill from the Forest Service for $1.75 million. The purchase turned out to be the easy part, even if it took an act of Congress. Ever since, the county has been trying unsuccessfully to build as many as 800 affordable units on the land, near the Dillon Reservoir and the snowy peaks of the Gore Range.
Concerns about wildfires, road congestion and the addition of water and sewer systems have stymied progress. The land still could one day have duplexes, apartments, a senior-living center and a day care facility, but a few local officials question whether the project will get done in their lifetime.
“These things are complicated,” said Michael Carroll, a Colorado-based campaign director at the Wilderness Society.
The demand is undoubtedly there. The county is planning to build 162 apartments on a different swath of federal land that it is leasing from the Forest Service. The town of Frisco is racing to put up a few dozen units here and there on its dwindling supply of available lots.
“We try and build as much as we can,” said Tamara Pogue, a Summit County Commissioner.
But the area is still thousands of units short of the housing needs of a county where prices have soared 86 percent since before the pandemic.
A 2023 housing survey found that nearly 20 percent of people in Summit County, and nearly half of the Spanish-speaking population, lived in homes where someone slept on the couch or floor. Other workers double up in bedrooms, or have resorted to living in cheaper towns an hour’s drive away on treacherous mountain roads. Some even sleep in the woods.
Even if the federal government were to sell off huge swaths of the forests around Summit County, officials said land values and building costs were so high that local governments simply could not compete with deep-pocketed private buyers, and Mr. Lee’s provision would guarantee no special rights to local governments.
“There’s just not enough money to go around,” said Andy Held, a town councilman in Frisco.
For now, that scenario is not likely to be tested. Liberal environmentalists responded to Mr. Lee’s sell-off proposal with well-practiced outrage, but so did many conservative hunters and Western Republicans. Populist Trump supporters criticized selling public lands as a move that would pawn off America’s greatness with no guarantees that the land sales would actually result in affordable homes, instead of more mansions for the wealthy.
In response to the pushback, Mr. Lee said on Monday night that he would take all national forests off the auction block and limit the sale of other federal lands to parcels within five miles of population centers.
Even as he vowed to push ahead, it was unclear whether conservative voters and Western Republican senators who opposed the idea would get on board with Mr. Lee’s scaled-back proposal.
“They’re really going to have to rework the provisions,” said Aiden Buzzetti, a Trump supporter and the president of the Bull Moose Project, a Theodore Roosevelt-inspired group that spent the past week posting social-media images of the American West that declared, “Our heritage is not for sale.”
“Just because there’s space doesn’t mean we need to get rid of it, sell it and develop it,” Mr. Buzzetti said.
The land-sale measure could also still be doomed on procedural grounds. The Senate parliamentarian already determined that the initial land-sale provision was not allowed, nor were provisions to build a mining road in the Alaskan wild or speed up approvals for offshore oil and gas drilling. Mr. Lee said he would submit a scaled-back proposal as soon as Tuesday evening, but that, too, might be out of order.
Democrats have vowed to continue opposing any large-scale land sale, pointing out even under Mr. Lee’s new terms, desert riverbanks and hiking and biking areas in Nevada, western Colorado and the desert playground of Moab, Utah, could end up for sale.
Alex Williams, 19, a ski-resort waiter who sleeps on the couch of his mother’s apartment, said he felt alienated by the entire debate over whether to protect or develop the West’s open spaces. Sold off, he said, they would go to the rich. Preserved, a home would remain out of reach.
“I’m poor,” he said. “I shouldn’t be here.”
Jack Healy is a Phoenix-based national correspondent for The Times who focuses on the politics and climate of the Southwest. He has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan and is a graduate of the University of Missouri’s journalism school.
The post A Plan to Sell Federal Land Near This Colorado Town Looks Dead. Here’s Why. appeared first on New York Times.
