Sen. Mike Lee Says He’s Working To Rein In Housing Costs. His Record Tells A Different Story.
The Utah Republican says selling off public lands would help get Americans into affordable homes. He tried to slash funding for affordable housing programs.
As he pushed to insert a wildly unpopular public land sell-off into President Donald Trump’s sweeping budget bill this summer, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) repeatedly described his proposal as a common-sense solution to America’s housing crunch.
“We’ve got a nationwide shortage of homes, particularly in the Western United States,” Lee said during an interview on The Charlie Kirk Show in late June. “That’s not acceptable in America. Americans need and deserve the chance to buy a home. Now coincidentally, the U.S. government owns about 640 million acres of land, nearly one-third of all landmass in the U.S. And a lot of that goes unused and mismanaged by the federal government. The vast majority of it has zero recreational value.”
But Lee’s record on affordable housing tells a different story. He has long championed public land sales as the key to push down home prices in the West by opening up more lots to boost supply — a strategy that critics say could just as easily spur the construction of unaffordable McMansions or luxury cabins. At the same time, Lee has kept those who work on housing affordability at arms length and pushed legislation that advocates say would make it harder, not easier, for Americans to access affordable homes.
In 2016, shortly into his second term, Lee introduced the Welfare Reform and Upward Mobility Act — legislation that the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a non-profit focused on combatting America's affordable housing crisis, warned would "eliminate nearly all federal affordable housing programs by consolidating them into a state block grant” and undermine proven solutions. The bill, which ultimately stalled, would have cut overall affordable housing-related funding in half over a 10-year period.
Since 2015, Lee has repeatedly introduced the Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act, which would nullify the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” rule, an Obama-era regulation that required cities and towns to document patterns of racial bias and curb segregation in their neighborhoods. The legislation, which Lee reintroduced earlier this year, would also prohibit federal funds from being used to “design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing,” according to Lee’s summary.
The NLIHC has said the legislation “undermines the goals of the Fair Housing Act by making it more difficult for communities to remedy racial segregation on the local level and ensure families have the opportunity to move to the neighborhood of their choice.”
Lee’s office did not respond to Public Domain’s request for comment.
Michael Carroll, the BLM campaign director for the Wilderness Society, told Public Domain that Lee has “consistently tried to make selling public lands the solution to the very real affordable housing challenges Westerners face, while working against measures to address the issue.”
“That doesn’t help families—it just takes away our freedom to hunt, fish, and explore; threatens the clean air and water we depend on; and weakens the outdoor legacy we should be passing to our kids,” he said in an email.
For more than 20 years, Tara Rollins has worked as the executive director of the Utah Housing Coalition. In that time, she never managed to secure a meeting with Lee — only his staff — to discuss the issue of affordable housing, despite numerous attempts, she told Public Domain.
“I don’t know who he’s talked to about affordable housing,” she said. “I don’t know anybody who’s met with him.”
Rollins viewed Lee’s recent public land sell-off scheme as nothing more than a “land grab,” she said, with no guardrails to ensure that lands sold would indeed be used for affordable housing. She raised her concerns with Lee’s staff, who she said seemed receptive to her feedback, but little changed from one iteration of the proposal to the next.
“It was the same language,” Rollins said. “That to me just makes it look like there is no intention of doing affordable housing.”
In a June 27 letter to Lee and other senators, the NLIHC, the National Housing Law Project and other housing and environmental groups condemned Lee’s proposal as “a permanent and misguided step in the wrong direction.”
“This proposal would have devastating impacts on U.S. efforts to preserve America’s most precious resources without making any meaningful gains to address our affordable housing crisis,” they wrote.
Lee ultimately pulled his provision from the bill, but not before infuriating hunters, anglers and public land users of all political stripes. At the time, he blamed the “far-left” for spreading “misinformation” and “outright lies” about what his bill would have done, while pledging to find a “path forward.”
That path is likely to involve another push to garner support for his Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter — or HOUSES — Act, which he first introduced in 2022 and closely mirrors his recent federal land sell-off proposal. It would create a process for state and local governments to nominate parcels of land managed by the Bureau of Land Management for potential sale.
Lee has pitched the bill as an affordable housing solution, but the legislative text does not mention the word “affordable” and would allow for lot sizes for single-family homes to be as large as a half-acre. Conservation groups like the Center for Western Priorities have warned that Lee’s bill is a recipe for suburban sprawl across publicly owned lands.
While Lee seemingly has few allies in the affordable housing space, he’s received strong backing from companies and groups that would likely benefit from a housing boom on federal lands. Some of Lee’s largest contributors in recent years are in the real estate investment and development industries, including Blackstone Group, KKR & Co. Inc. and Utah-based Colmena Group, according to data compiled by OpenSecrets.org. The real estate industry has given Lee a combined $1.03 million over his career, the fourth highest of any industry.
He also has a long record of pushing to wrest control of public lands from the federal government. He’s gone as far as to argue that the mere existence of federal lands within Utah’s border renders the state effectively "occupied" and that "if anything would justify war, it is one country’s continued occupation of another."
"The Senator’s half-hearted proposals aren’t accompanied by any real solutions to the affordability crisis: things like expanded housing assistance payments and regulatory reform to increase developable land within communities,” Travis Hammill, the D.C. director of the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, wrote in an email. “At the end of the day, Senator Lee is attempting to make a deeply unpopular proposition — selling off public lands — seem reasonable when it's not.”
As a Forest Service retiree, I'm waiting for any GOP politician to mention the big obstacle to developing federal lands in the West -- water. The Ogallala aquifer, which supplies water to eight states, is already in trouble. "But according to the Fourth National Climate Assessment (NCA4), producers are extracting water faster than it is being replenished, which means that parts of the Ogallala Aquifer should be considered a nonrenewable resource," according to NOAA. Already, Southwestern states dependent upon the aquifer and the Colorado River are exploring other sources, like a pipeline to the Great Lakes. With rising sea levels, we can expect increased salination of fresh waters to pose problems for East Coast cities. Like Social Security, politicians will ignore the problem until it becomes a crisis.
Mike Lee has serious emotional problems, always projecting his own personal pain outward onto others. The dishonesty of lying is part of his damage. Is he from a gerrymandered district?