Opinion
In 2025, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah pulled off a true marvel in our modern, echo-chambered, dysfunctional national political arena: He united voters from across the political spectrum on a single issue! Ranchers, climbers, hunters, environmentalists and others formed a brick wall of bipartisan opposition to Lee’s proposal to sell off millions of acres of public lands, even though he had claimed it would provide desperately needed affordable housing in the West. The exercise made clear that our public land, and how it is used, is a sacred issue above the mundanity of the always-expanding human need to build more.
Yet, in Teton County, a historic home of ardent conservation leaders and wildlife activists, nicknamed the “cradle of conservation,” a project proposed at the Bridger-Teton National Forest’s Nelson Drive Trailhead is being presented to the watching nation: a blueprint for how to develop public lands for private sector housing.
And no, Nelson Drive is not the same as Lee’s sell-off proposal, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good direction for public land or affordable housing. Forest Service land deemed “administrative” is traditionally where employees are housed. But the Jackson Hole Community Housing Trust’s 36-unit, 7.5-acre Nelson Drive vision has just 13 units for public land managers and 23 units for non-federal and private sector workers, all overseen and managed by the Community Housing Trust under an unprecedented issuance of Special Use Permit. In Teton County, in Wyoming, and across the West, this should not be welcomed as a new normal. Nor should it be applauded as outside-the-box thinking. Creeping onto public land for private housing is not ingenious — it’s lazy.
The Housing Trust has completed valuable housing projects in Teton County in the past. Parts of this plan, too, are admirable and forward-thinking. Let’s absolutely raise and use philanthropic money from donors large and small to help our beleaguered federal and state public land managers house those who care for and protect the lands, waters and wildlife that enrich our lives.
By promoting the contentious concept of privately employed workers on public land in exchange for building needed federal housing, this small project misses the chance to set a better, more unifying precedent for Teton County and beyond. If the future residents of Nelson Drive were limited to federal workers, Teton County could avoid the uproar over public land uses, inviting lawsuits, roiling neighbors and forcing people to choose between housing or public land values.
Importantly, the Bridger-Teton has stated it needs more than 13 units. What is the point of making a mess of the boundaries of public land uses when there are so many federal workers and public sector employees in need of housing? This should be the opportunity to rally around them in solidarity and put our dollars where our values are. If this project and its funding were to show, rather than say, how much we value our land and wildlife managers, that is a dramatically more attractive precedent than blurring the lines of public land use and profit.
Yet the public was never given that chance. Particularly galling is that these plans were made, and financing developed to build on publicly owned lands, with no public input and no transparency. No public philanthropic ask was made to build all the homes the Forest Service needed. As presented, it’s a needless insertion of private workers onto the Bridger-Teton National Forest. In places like Teton County, critical thinking and the sense of responsibility to public land and wild places are meeting instant death at the mere mention of affordable housing.
A need for affordable housing does not mean every proposal, or every part of a proposal, should see the light of day. Yet the Community Housing Trust has stated this public land project is going to happen and move forward as designed — meaning anyone could live there — without discussion, and with or without public input, support or money. That’s nice.
This was not the only way to help the Bridger-Teton get the housing it needs, or unite communities in support of land managers. Lee and his allies are watching with a smile, and so are future actors across the American West, eager to get a Special Use Permit for “free land.” A hotel owner, a ski resort manager, or whoever wants public land for employee housing could look to a struggling land manager and offer a minority share of the units for agency employees. Instead of upholding western Wyoming’s legacy of stewardship, foresight, and most importantly, restraint, this may just undermine it in front of the whole nation.
Correction: This guest opinion has been updated to correct the year U.S. Sen. Mike Lee put forward his public lands proposal. — Ed.
Excellent article, thank you.
Federal wildland on the quiet periphery of Jackson adjacent to wilderness is not the appropriate place for dense housing. The Forest Service has plenty of land downtown adjacent to it’s Jackson headquarters. Build housing for Forest Service employees there. Allowing non-Forest Service housing on Federal Wildland is a terrible precedent.
This piece collapses under a contradiction it never acknowledges: it treats federal ownership of land as morally unquestionable while simultaneously admitting that the federal government cannot responsibly house, manage, or steward the very lands it claims to own. You cannot have it both ways. Either federal ownership is justified because it serves the public good, or it is exposed as an artificial arrangement that survives only by outsourcing its obligations to private actors.
The opening comparison to Mike Lee is a distraction. Lee’s proposal threatened the myth of federal permanence by suggesting land sales. That is what truly alarmed people—not the loss of “sacred” land, but the possibility that federal ownership itself might be challenged. What this article defends, above all else, is not conservation, but the assumption that Washington should control millions of acres indefinitely, even when it demonstrably cannot care for them.
Calling public land “sacred” is not a serious argument. It is a theological claim smuggled into public policy. Land does not become holy because a federal boundary is drawn around it. Long before federal agencies existed, these lands were lived on, worked, stewarded, and protected by people who had real skin in the game. The modern federal estate is not ancient, natural, or inevitable. It is a political construct, and a relatively recent one.
The article concedes the most important point without realizing it: the Bridger-Teton does not have enough housing for its own workers and cannot build what it needs on its own. That fact alone should force a reckoning. If the federal government cannot house the employees required to manage land, then federal ownership has already failed at a basic level. Partnerships with nonprofits and private entities are not the problem; they are the symptom.
The outrage over “private workers” living on public land exposes the deeper incoherence. If land truly belonged to “the public,” then there would be no moral distinction between a federal employee, a nonprofit employee, or a private worker living there. The only reason the distinction matters is because the land is treated as federal turf first and human space second. The author objects not to misuse, but to loss of bureaucratic purity.
The insistence that administrative land should be reserved exclusively for federal workers assumes that federal ownership is both legitimate and permanent. But if the land were not federally owned in the first place—if it were locally owned, state-held, community-governed, or privately stewarded—housing decisions would not require contortions, special permits, or ideological panic. People would live near the land they care for because ownership and responsibility would be aligned.
Complaints about “creeping privatization” ring hollow when the entire system already depends on private money, private labor, and private nonprofits to function. This is not a slippery slope; it is the logical outcome of an unsustainable ownership model. The federal government claims control while shifting costs downward and outward, then scolds communities when they improvise solutions.
The transparency critique is similarly misplaced. The real lack of transparency is the continued pretense that federal land is meaningfully “public” when ordinary citizens have no ownership stake, no management authority, and no realistic influence over outcomes. Public comment periods are not ownership. They are permission slips issued by distant agencies.
The fear that ski resorts or hotels might seek similar arrangements misses the larger point. If land use must be policed this aggressively to prevent productive human use, that is an argument against federal ownership, not for it. Healthy land stewardship emerges from responsibility tied to place, not from centralized control enforced by permit culture.
The truth is simpler than the article allows. The federal government owns far more land than it can responsibly manage. Housing shortages, staffing crises, nonprofit entanglements, and special-use gymnastics are all downstream consequences of that fact. The Nelson Drive project is not a betrayal of conservation values. It is a quiet admission that the model itself no longer works.
If we actually cared about land, wildlife, and the people who steward them, we would stop pretending that federal ownership is sacred and start asking harder questions about who should own land, who should live on it, and who should bear responsibility for its care. Clinging to a broken system while condemning every workaround is not restraint. It is denial.
That’s your opinion. PUBLIC land is sacred to the citizens of America – because we say so. It doesn’t have to be sacred to you. What will you gain if it’s sold off?
Brigad that is a very well written article and makes total sense. Teton County can be Hypocritical at times.