
Andrew Mikula
In recent years, a widespread surge in home prices, rents and mortgage interest rates has made housing affordability a national political issue. Both major party candidates in the 2024 presidential election addressed housing costs during campaign speeches and proposed solutions, from down payment assistance programs to large-scale deportation operations.
Federal solutions to the housing crisis are limited by the fact that most laws and procedures that guide housing development are controlled at the state and local levels. Still, there’s one idea supported by both Republicans and Democrats that may contribute substantially to housing production and affordability, albeit modified from its original form: facilitating housing development on federal lands.
At campaign rallies last fall in Nevada and Arizona, President-elect Donald Trump said his administration will “open up new tracts of federal land for large-scale housing construction,” an idea he dubbed “freedom cities.”
But instead of focusing on sprawling Bureau of Land Management (BLM) properties in the rural Southwest, the federal government should redevelop some of its properties in expensive urban areas with existing infrastructure.
After all, land costs and availability are probably more likely to impede the construction of modestly-priced homes in urban enclaves, and large urban areas tend to have the most extreme housing shortages.
What’s Available to Build On?
With nearly 95 percent of federal lands managed by the BLM, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service or Forest Service, there is not much low-hanging fruit for urban redevelopment at first glance.
But one agency stands out as a large urban landowner: the United States Postal Service. The USPS owns 179 properties in Massachusetts, including 14 in Springfield and 35 within Route 128. Many of these properties have underutilized parking lots and large strips of grass or dirt.
Others are located in prime downtown locations where housing or mixed-use development is clearly a better way to maximize the property’s value. USPS-owned properties constitute more than 15.3 acres in Downtown Boston alone, including the Dorchester Ave facility sandwiched between South Station and Fort Point Channel, which currently has an assessed value of $294 million.
Redeveloping some USPS properties wouldn’t necessarily displace post offices or distribution centers, and service interruptions can often be minimized by building on existing parking lots. For example, there’s a 3-acre carrier annex property on Ward Street in Revere whose employee parking lot has suitable dimensions for housing. During construction, employees could take advantage of the fact that Ward Street has on-street parking on both sides.
Constructing this housing would require the USPS to partner with a private developer, perhaps under a ground lease arrangement, allowing the agency to keep the land costs low for the developer in exchange for stricter affordability protections on the units. Some observers have even suggested that redeveloping post offices to add housing could help stabilize the USPS’s finances, as the agency had total net losses of $9.5 billion in fiscal year 2024.
The Key Factor: Replicability
An aggressive and holistic approach to redeveloping Postal Service properties alone may result in thousands of additional housing units in Massachusetts. In and of itself, this is not very many considering that the timeline and administrative process for this development would likely be very long and complicated.
However, one major benefit of building housing on federal lands is that the federal government is not subject to local zoning or discretionary reviews that often derail private developments in Massachusetts.
Further, there is potential for greater impact if the federal land redevelopments serve as a catalyst for state and local governments to redevelop similarly underutilized land that they own.
A 2024 study by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy found that Massachusetts has the most buildable government-owned land in transit-accessible urban areas of any state, with 89 percent of it owned by local governments. If all these government-owned properties were redeveloped into housing at 15 units per acre, the same density prescribed by the MBTA Communities law, the state would add 387,000 housing units, enough to solve our housing shortage nearly two times over.
Lastly, it should be noted that federal government disposition of property to facilitate housing and mixed-use development has several recent precedents in Massachusetts, notably the Volpe Transportation Center redevelopment in Cambridge. The General Services Administration (GSA) is currently in the process of selling or transferring a Coast Guard building in Boston and an administrative building in New Bedford. Many more federally owned office and administrative buildings have been rendered obsolete by the post-COVID move to remote work and the recent expansion of online government services.
What’s missing is an effort to facilitate Volpe-like redevelopments at scale across agencies. This higher-level coordination is something the Trump administration could take on; indeed, Congress has already set the stage with legislation reforming the GSA and requiring more transparency over how federal office space is utilized.
While post offices may be disproportionately located in adaptable and village-like locations, they’re just the tip of the iceberg for redevelopment of government-owned properties. The incoming administration has already recognized this potential – here’s hoping they act on it.
Andrew Mikula is the senior housing fellow at the Pioneer Institute in Boston.