In a story last week, Review-Journal business writer Patrick Blennerhassett wrote about a common and frustrating trend in Southern Nevada: housing inventory and closed sales are up, and yet housing prices remain high. The article blames mortgage rates and sellers unwilling to lower prices for June’s record $450,000 median home price. Those matter but don’t address the biggest reason prices won’t fall: There’s almost no private land left to build on.
The federal government controls almost 90 percent of Clark County. When land is that scarce, the remaining land gets bid up to extraordinary prices at BLM auctions, sometimes exceeding $400,000 an acre. Builders pass those costs to buyers.
Congress tried to fix this. The 1998 Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act was supposed to release federal land as the valley grew. Nearly 30 years later, roughly 27,000 identified acres still sit locked up in a slow-moving bureaucratic process.
If Nevada is serious about affordability, the conversation can’t stop at interest rates. Gov. Joe Lombardo has pushed federal officials to takes steps to release unappropriated BLM land to the state. No other major American metro area faces a land shortage caused by the government. Until that changes, expect more headlines about housing prices.
