Nevada‘s housing crisis is not new, nor is the push by state and local elected officials to open up federal land beyond city limits to build more affordable units.
However, land availability is only part of the equation, and experts say the state would be better off focusing on permanently funding affordable housing projects on available land within city limits.
As President Joe Biden headed to Southern Nevada in March to talk about federal solutions to address the housing crisis across the country, Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo sent a letter criticizing the White House for not making more federal land available to build more homes.
“To address the housing crisis, the state of Nevada and our local communities need access to land that lies within their respective borders,” Lombardo wrote. “Unfortunately, we must rely on congressional laws and severely backward federal agencies to secure the land needed to grow. The federal process to privatize land for development is too slow, too complex, and contributes to higher costs for Nevada families seeking homeownership.”
The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) estimates that Nevada lacks more than 78,000 affordable housing units for extremely low-income households, defined as those with incomes at or below the federal poverty level, which is about $31,000 for a family of four.
“At the end of the day, what makes affordable housing affordable is financing,” said Wally Swenson, vice president of corporate affairs for nonprofit developer Nevada HAND, which builds affordable housing units. “For Nevada HAND and our developers’ perspective, it’s about having strong financial resources to build, having affordable and available land to build on, and having favorable zoning.”
The American Rescue Plan Act, signed into law by Biden in 2021, allocated billions of dollars in federal funds to Nevada.
Former Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak pledged $500 million from ARPA for housing, giving the state the dollars needed to address financing gaps and build or preserve affordable housing projects.
Swenson said it created an unprecedented amount of funding for affordable housing development. But those dollars are finite and will only go so far.
About 3,000 units are being built across the state with federal aid money.
“It’s not going to get us out of our crisis alone,” he said. “What we can do as a community is come together to identify different ways to address this crisis, from land availability to making additional financing available to developers.”
Lombardo did not respond to emailed questions from Current about what specific proposals, if any, his office has considered to address financing gaps in the construction and development of affordable housing projects.
Yonah Freemark, research director of the Land Use Laboratory at the Urban Institute, a D.C.-based economic think tank, said some communities across the country have sought to identify new sources of revenue, such as various tax increases, to finance affordable housing projects.
Maurice Page, executive director of the Nevada Housing Coalition, said the coalition is “looking at best practices across the country” but is not willing to endorse any particular idea.
He said the state could include a review of real estate taxes or property taxes.
“We have to be very creative as to where we can raise taxes without affecting our current workforce,” Page said. “We have to be able to offset some of these costs. “These are issues that we have to be able to look at and analyze to see if that would be a win for us and for the state.”
Another area policymakers should consider is seeking more support for housing from corporations as they set up shop in Nevada, and “seeing if they would be willing to put money into their budgets for housing for their workforce,” Page said.
With the high volume of people in need of housing — Swenson said Nevada HAND receives thousands of inquiries each week — the state has reached “a point where all conversations should be on the table.”
“Talk about tax increases was thrown out by lawmakers in session,” Swenson said. “That has not moved forward.”
“Transportation costs are rising”
Although land is needed to build more homes, not all types of land are created equal.
Most federally owned land is located on the perimeter of the Las Vegas Valley, meaning its development will result in further urban sprawl.
Housing policy experts warn that urban sprawl creates other problems, such as a lack of transportation infrastructure needed to connect people to jobs, food and other resources.
“Land plays a very important role,” Page said. “Let’s also not forget the fact that when we open up more land and try to build housing, we also look at the infrastructure. We have to consider child care, transportation and utilities. We have to examine all of that too. “All of that costs money.”
Alex Horowitz, project director for the Pew Charitable Trust’s Housing Policy Initiative, said that the further people move from work, grocery stores and school, “even if you add more housing, transportation costs increase.” “.
“Transportation is usually the second largest item in the family budget after housing,” he said. “If you add housing further and further away from the places people go every day, that’s often a recipe for extending commutes and increasing transportation costs.”
Freemark added that just because federal lands may be an option “doesn’t mean we should necessarily build housing on them.”
“I approach the use of federally owned lands with a little more skepticism because it will often have negative outcomes for sensitive ecologies,” Freemark said. “And, frankly, it will encourage more driving.”
MJ Maynard, executive director of the Southern Nevada Regional Transportation Commission, warned Clark County commissioners in April that future revenue projections indicate the agency could begin seeing a $156.3 million shortfall as soon as 2028.
Those projections are only to maintain existing roads.
Building housing on new federal land farther from city limits would also require building, and then maintaining, new roads and transportation infrastructure.
While there has been a push to use federal lands, there are no parameters for the type of housing that could be built there if it is freed up.
The Current contacted Howard Hughes Corporation, a real estate developer that has built master-planned communities like Summerlin, to see how the availability of more federal land would affect its ability to develop more housing.
They declined to comment.
Swenson said Nevada HAND’s model is to identify infill development, which uses existing urban spaces. The nonprofit developer, he said, has worked with local governments to address zoning barriers to building more units.
Horowitz said there are still more solutions that cities and states can investigate to address the housing shortage.
“We see states making sure that certain types of housing are not prohibitive in localities that have adopted exclusionary zoning,” he said, referring to laws that restrict the types of housing that can be built. “Nine states have legalized accessory dwelling units when a single-family home or duplex typically has a basement or backyard apartment or can convert a garage into an apartment.”
Horowitz points out that the city of Las Vegas is three times the size of Paris, which he added “has more than three times the population of Las Vegas.”
More housing can be built within the city limits.
“Although sometimes in cities you hear people say that if the city is built because if there is not much open space or green fields to build on, we see that jurisdictions can be successful in adding housing within the city limits” , said. “Often, that means people can live closer to the places they go every day.”
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