Affordable housing hunters won’t find a lot of public-land acres in Greater Yellowstone to pursue, despite federal initiatives to push more Bureau of Land Management property on the real estate market.
What they will find reveals a shotgun pattern of federal ownership that has some conservation groups concerned about the intentions of Washington, D.C. land managers.
“We wanted this daylighted for the public to see,” Joel Webster of Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership told Mountain Journal. “These lists were created when the West was a different place, before we had GPS technology and recreation was different. A lot of these acres should not be sold, period.”
This August, TRCP partnered with Missoula-headquartered onX Maps to create an interactive tool pinpointing 6,086,900 acres of BLM holdings that could be sold. OnX collects and organizes land ownership data for display on mobile devices like cell phones and iPads. Thousands of hunters and recreationists buy its mapping service.
The tool draws from data in 160 BLM resource management plans, or RMPs, across 17 western states. OnX notes the lands are eligible, but not known to be identified for imminent sale.
“The land disposal process has historically been opaque — often buried in hundreds of pages of government documents,” onX CEO Laura Orvidas said in a press release. “We created this map with TRCP to bring transparency to the land disposal process, to inform outdoor enthusiasts of nearby parcels, and to encourage lawmakers to uphold existing policies that safeguard the public interest when considering any land sales.”
A BLM proposal announced in March envisions releasing about 535,000 acres of land situated within four miles of existing cities and towns with more than 5,000 residents. Acting BLM Director John Raby told the National Association of Counties in May that a map of the proposed transfer lands would soon be available. As of mid-August, no federal maps have been released.
Several YouTube videos of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner showed them signing a memorandum of understanding to bring BLM lands to sale for affordable housing and viewing potential parcels.
“The wholesale selling of federal land has got some people concerned,” Burgum said in one video outside Henderson, Nevada, in June. “This is a tiny, tiny little piece … The best use for this land is for us to help relieve the housing shortage.”
The DOI/HUD example they videoed would sell the 18.3-acre Nevada land for $100 an acre. It would go to private developers who have a design for 390 housing units worth $120 million, according to Burgum and Turner’s June video. The project would increase availability of affordable housing while “balancing environmental and land use considerations,” Burgum said.
Tracy Stone-Manning, president of the Wilderness Society, suspects a different agenda.
“I think what we are seeing this administration do in managing federal lands, everything points to the end goal of selling them off,” Stone-Manning told Mountain Journal. “Strangling budgets for agencies, making it so agencies can’t do work for the American public — all that leads to the public saying the federal government can’t manage, and somebody should figure out who should manage them instead. There’s little doubt that’s the end game some people are playing toward. And that’s full-on theft from the future.”
In her previous job as BLM director in the Biden administration, Stone-Manning reviewed the backlog of RMP land disposal records.
“The sheer number of acres added together tells an interesting story of how old these management plans are,” she said. “Most are 30 or 40 years old. This is what happens when people don’t invest in the basics of land management agencies.”
During her time at BLM, Stone-Manning said she researched what it would take to bring all the RMPs up to date. Her planning team told her it was $250 million behind in funding.
“That’s years and years of planning budgets,” she said. “It’s a big, giant hole.”
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BLM has tried public land sales before. The Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 directed the agency to identify lands with sale potential to augment community development or improve management efficiency. That’s different from the U.S. Forest Service, which has much less leeway on releasing public acreage for private sale.
But there was no overarching policy driving selection of BLM disposable lands. Webster said some regional planners were very active drawing up lists of potential sales, while others made few suggestions. TRCP looks at the lists with the interests of hunters and anglers in mind, he said, to preserve access and habitat.
The law doesn’t require sales. What it does require is public notice and comment in a review process before a deed changes hands. A 2000 law requires BLM to use revenue from those sales to purchase other lands with high conservation or recreation value.
“We are not opposed to all land sales,” TRCP’s Webster said. “We just want to make sure they’re done the right way.”
A more specific 1998 federal law allowed the bureau to release land in Nevada for affordable housing. That acreage was within a designated zone around the city of Las Vegas, which is directly limited by federal land boundaries. BLM put 17,560 acres of that zone up for auction, but only sold 30 acres. Nevertheless, those and other sales brought the federal government $3.6 billion since 1999, according to Bloomburg Law.
“The affordable housing issue isn’t about a shortage of places to build houses. It’s about a labor market that does not support housing costs.”
tracy stone-manning, president, wilderness society
Nevada presents some unique cases in the public land-to-housing concept. About 80 percent of it is owned or managed by the federal government. In many cases such as Las Vegas, city limits end at federal public land boundaries.
Clark County, Nevada, home of Las Vegas, benefited from two public land sales during the Biden administration. One in 2024 sold 20 acres for $2,000, although the estimated market value of the parcel bordering Las Vegas was $20 million. It has plans for 210 single-family homes. A 2023 deal for senior citizen housing will put 195 apartments on five acres of formerly BLM land.
The affordable-homes-on-public-land issue was supercharged in June during Congress’ budget rescission debates, when Utah Senator Mike Lee offered an amendment requiring the sale of up to 3 million acres of Forest Service and BLM land to offset federal tax cuts. He also framed the idea as a way to provide more affordable housing.
Lee’s move drew fire across the political spectrum. The Sierra Club called it a “betrayal of the American people.” Idaho Republican Senator Jim Risch also rejected it, saying “we do NOT support the sale of our public lands to the highest bidder.” Montana Republican Representative Ryan Zinke called the provision “my San Juan Hill,” referring to a military charge led by Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders regiment in the Spanish-American War.
Lee pulled the provision from what became known as the One Big Beautiful Bill, which passed the Senate 51-50 after Vice President J.D. Vance had to break a tie.
A Mountain Journal review of the onX mapping tool found few examples of Greater Yellowstone sites where the BLM plan might work. The village of Norris, Montana, 40 miles west of Bozeman, would have at least seven BLM parcels within that four-mile zone. But it has only 19 residents, making it the 440th most populated out of Montana’s 469 cities and well below the 5,000-person DOI-HUD threshold. Livingston might have two parcels, and its roughly 8,000 residents clears that bar. Cody, Wyoming could have at least six parcels. The eastern half of Wyoming has vast amounts of BLM land, but not much demand. And the Thunder Basin National Grassland, at 548,000 acres, has more space than the entire BLM proposal but virtually no inhabitants.
“The reason the West is booming is because people want to live near public lands,” Stone-Manning said. “But the affordable housing issue isn’t about a shortage of places to build houses. It’s about a labor market that does not support housing costs. Teachers and nurses and BLM range conservationists can no longer afford to buy a house in the communities they live in.”
