What land could the feds sell?

The federal government owns a huge chunk of Southern California. Could selling some of it ease the housing cost crisis?

What federally owned land could be sold off to meaningfully lower housing costs?

For example, Los Angeles County is by far the most populated county in the U.S. with almost ten million residents. And it has very high land costs.

Either 34% or 45% of Los Angeles County is owned by the federal government, depending on which AI’s hallucination you trust.

So all we have to do is just build things, right?

Paywall here.

Well, the first thing to keep in mind is that the United States government had a strikingly populist government until fairly recently, which was extremely encouraging of private ownership of federal lands for much of the last 249 years. Virtually all good farmland was sold, usually at a cheap price, or sometimes given away to homesteaders.

For instance, because Iowa is such great farmland, it has zero federal land.

Out west, granted, there is much more federally owned land. Some of that is due to 20th Century ideological changes, but most of that is either mountains or desert. For example, here is some federally owned land in Los Angeles County that is unpromising for development: 10,064’ tall Mt. Baldy in the San Gabriel Mountains National Monument:

It’s not like Southern California real estate developers really want to develop more than perhaps 1% of the steep Angeles National Forest without massive investment in roads and firefighting by the taxpayers.

They might want to develop 5% of the not quite as steep Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, although that has a tendency to burn down now and then, such as two months ago.

And the California Coastal Commission plus county and local zoning boards would put the clampdown on development within 5 miles of the ocean.

For example, the exquisite Gaviota coast west of Santa Barbara is almost wholly undeveloped despite being mostly privately owned cattle ranches with the 101 freeway running through it for 21 miles, due to many layers of anti-development bureaucracy.

If you lined the Southern California coast with highrises, like in Turkey or South America, you could have housing abundance, but, for some reason, the more Democratic California gets, the less it wants to facilitate affordable housing.

It could be that we will enter into an age of ample electricity due to solar power continuing to get cheaper (along with developments in battery storage) or some breakthrough in fusion or nuclear energy. That would then make massive desalination more feasible. (You don’t necessarily have to run desalination plants when the sun doesn’t shine.)

What would be the most desirable piece of federal land in Southern California?

Note that the climate is extremely mild at the coast and gets harsher the further inland and the more mountain ranges the sea breeze has to cross?

With 17 miles of coastline and 195 square miles total (500 square kilometers), what could add much desirable land to Southern California’s housing stock would be Camp Pendleton, on the border of Orange County and San Diego County.

Camp Pendleton has its own herd of about 100 bison, where the buffalo roam.

It has been the main United States Marine Corps base on the west coast since WWII. If you really want to enlist in the Marines,

my recommendation is to try to do so in the Western part of the U.S. so that you do your basic training at Pendleton rather than at Parris Island in South Carolina, where the humidity and mosquitos are much worse.

On the other hand, the U.S. military tends to chew up terrain, which might explain why it’s hard to find scenic photos of Camp Pendleton.

Here’s one of the few I could find, if you like the disused San Onofre nuclear power plant in the background:

San Onofre was shut down after Fukushima in 2011 for reasons. (Which I’ve never quite grasped, but … whatever.)

Closing Camp Pendleton for redevelopment would require buying and building an insanely expensive huge base somewhere else on the Pacific Coast.

And, my guess would be that the Marines have spilled a lot of nasty chemicals at Pendleton that would require decades of Superfund mitigation.

By way of analogy, consider Naval Air Station Alameda, on a suburban island in San Francisco Bay between Oakland and San Francisco. In the 1990s, I considered buying a nice house in southern Alameda that was for sale for $291,000. One of the appeals was that plans were afoot a third of a century ago for shutting down the Navy base on the northern end of the island, which had been home base to seven aircraft carriers during the Vietnam War, and converting it to upscale housing.

Well, the Navy base was shut down in 1997 … but nothing much seems to have happened in Alameda since then, other than the Wachowski Siblings building their own freeway on the ex-base for use in The Matrix Reloaded a quarter of a century ago. (What’s more innately feminine than building your own freeway for a car chase?)

Wikipedia explains:

Since 2000, the city of Alameda has been planning the redevelopment of the former Naval Air Station, now known as Alameda Point. Complicating the redevelopment are several constraints: land-use constraints consisting of Tidelands Trust; soil and groundwater contamination; wildlife refuge buffer requirements; geotechnical issues; 100-year flood plans; institutional and contractual constraints with Alameda Measure A, the Alameda Naval Air Station Historic District and existing residents and leases.

So …

And then there’s the the 36 square mile Point Mugu Naval Base Ventura County and the Vandenberg Space Force Base just north of Point Concepcion in Santa Barbara County, which is similarly huge (154 square miles).

The problem with investing a million dollars in a Vandenberg house would be that a rocket might fall on it.