The Trump administration is creating a task force to identify federal land that would be suitable for building affordable housing. The initiative marks the administration’s first step toward a pledge to unlock vast swaths of federal land to address America’s housing shortage by transferring or leasing the land to local governments. The task force will be run jointly by the Interior Department, which oversees the Bureau of Land Management, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the two agencies’ secretaries wrote in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece on Sunday. Developing even 512,000 acres of the Bureau of Land Management’s lots could yield between three million and four million new homes across western states such as Nevada, Utah, California and Arizona, according to a preliminary analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., center-right think tank.
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