Nevada's Housing Hullabaloo

A Bill, A billion, and A Bunch of Questions

It does appear that Governor Joe Lombardo has loaded a scatter gun with a grand notion–he wants to sprinkle a cool billion dollars across the Nevada landscape like a farmer seeding a field, only instead of wheat, he’s looking to grow houses folks can afford.

The Nevada Housing Access and Attainability Act—a highfalutin’ name—promises to carve out a fund to shovel money toward housing developments, with a tidy $250 million set aside to help folks pay rent or scrape up a downpayment. Mighty generous.

Full of optimism, the Governor assures us that Nevada need not choose between growth and more growth—an assertion that, depending on who you ask, is either forward-thinking or the sort of thing a fella says before his horse steps into a gopher hole.

Now, here’s a curiosity–the proposal claims to expand eligibility for affordable housing to those making 150 percent of the area’s median income. But that raises an interesting question—what exactly became of all that federal gold dust Nevada’s got showered with thanks to Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen?

After all that taxpayer money rolled in, surely there ought to be some housing to point at, or is it like a gambler’s winnings in Virginia City—gone before you know where it went?

One of the plan’s ideas is to remove barriers holding builders from using government-owned land for affordable housing. The Governor points out that public land auctions often send prices soaring higher than a Fourth of July bottle rocket, leaving affordable housing developers to pick through the ashes.

Now, it seems reasonable enough, though one wonders why the state owns all this land in the first place if nobody can afford to build on it.

Lombardo says his office worked with Nevada’s federal delegation and the White House to hammer out the details, but the fine idea has yet to take the form of an actual, numbered bill. In other words, a grand promise sitting on a fence post like Mugwump, waiting to see how the political winds blow.

For now, the folks of Nevada can take heart in knowing that their fearless leaders are thinking about affordable housing, but whether they’ll do anything about it—well, that’s a house of a different color.