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.

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