When Nevada wrote its constitution in 1864, the state specifically relinquished any right to land that settlers hadn't already claimed.
That probably sounded like a great idea at the time. The vast tracts of federally owned land provided room for livestock grazing, mineral exploration and extraction, as well as recreation.
However, many people argue that the federal government's ownership of that land today hinders development, especially the development of affordable housing.
Nestled between Reno to the west and the Virginia Range to the east, Sparks is home to more than 100 thousand people. It traditionally served as a bedroom community for Reno. Nowadays, more and more people who work at the nearby Tahoe Reno Industrial Center call it home. That's causing some growing pains.
"It looks like in about 10 years, we will not be able to build another house without going vertical," Sparks Mayor Ed Lawson recently told KNPR's State of Nevada.
Sparks, like many communities in Nevada, is facing a boundary issue.
According to a 2021 study by the Economic Development Authority of Western Nevada, communities across Northern Nevada could start running out of parcels for residential development within the next few years.
An issue that has caught the attention of one of the country's highest policymakers.
"We have so much land and we want to put it to use," said President Trump, speaking to a group in Las Vegas while on the campaign trail last year. "So we're going to have land released and on that land we're going to build housing. We're going to have housing built, and it'll be great for Nevada, and it'll be great for other areas."
Since taking office, his administration has initiated an assessment of all federal land within 10 miles of communities with more than 5,000 people to determine which land would be best suited for housing.
However, it still requires a literal act of Congress to sell the land outright, and there are still questions about whether Western communities actually need the land at all.
"There are really very few places in the West where national public land makes sense to build housing, especially when it comes to affordable housing," said Aaron Weiss, Deputy Director of the Center for Western Priorities, a nonpartisan conservation advocacy organization based in Colorado.
His group is among those that have been skeptical of recent pushes to open federal land over concerns about sprawl.
"The things you need for affordable housing, you need to be close to an existing city," he said. "You need to be near the infrastructure, the roads, the sewers, the internet lines, the water, in particular in the West, to do that in an affordable way, because the more of that you're building, the more sprawl you're adding, the less affordable the housing gets."
Still, Weiss admits that some areas of Nevada likely do need a land deal similar to one passed in 1998 by the late Senator Harry Reid and known as the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act or SNPLMA. The law is considered by many to be landmark legislation. It opened thousands of acres of land for development and conservation, sending money from land sales to local communities.
"[The] most successful bill in the history of the nation, public lands bill, is here in Nevada," said Rep. Mark Amodei, Nevada's sole Republican in Congress. He is the sponsor of the Northern Nevada Economic Development and Conservation Act, which aims to replicate SNPLMA's success in rural areas of the state.
It's one of three public land bills currently before Congress. The others would sell off land around Truckee Meadows and Clark County.
However, critics argue that those bills aren't needed.
A report released late last year by the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada found that there are more than 82,000 acres of vacant and underutilized land in the Las Vegas metro area available for infill development. That's an amount of land larger than the city of Henderson, the state's second most populous city.
"There are a number of parcels, a lot of parcels, that need to be considered for rezoning and what folks refer to as up zoning," said Olvia Tanger, Executive Director of the Toiyabe Chapter of the Sierra Club, one of the groups advocating for more development on land already allotted through SNPLMA.
"You can build multi family housing on tracks of land, because a lot of the land in Southern Nevada and in Northern Nevada is zoned for single family housing, and so that is a problem, and is an inhibitor to developing in an affordable way."
But for politicians like Amoedi, public land bills are the only way communities in the state can continue to develop.
"Whether that's Las Vegas or Winnemucca or Ely or Fallon, if you want your communities to have the ability to evolve, it's always been this way, you've got to pass a public lands bill to remove portions of the federal estate out of the federal estate and into the ability of local counties and city councils to do their planning and zoning on how they want their community to grow up."
Congressional hearings on both the Southern Nevada Economic Development Act and the Northern Nevada Economic Development and Conservation Act were slated for this month. Both were canceled due to the current federal government shutdown.
