Find the Land

Communities across the country own far more developable land than their records readily show, scattered across agencies that rarely coordinate. The first step in any public land strategy is a clear inventory of what a community owns and an honest assessment of which parcels are right for housing, which are better suited to green space, and which can do both.

The Challenge

Public land is owned by dozens of agencies operating under different mandates, with no shared inventory and no common picture of the whole. A single transit corridor might include parcels held by the transit authority, the state DOT, the city, the county, and several special districts, each with its own records and its own disposition process.

“You can’t come up with a good policy to convert land into housing or anything else if you don’t even know what’s out there.”

—Reina Chano Murray, Associate Director, Center for Geospatial Solutions

Most communities have zoning boards, planning departments, and land use commissions, but no single body responsible for the entire portfolio of land they own. The result is an ad hoc, parcel-by-parcel approach that misses how one site might be better suited than another for a given use, and leaves a community’s most valuable opportunities unrecognized.

The Solution

A public land strategy begins with two steps: a comprehensive, cross-agency inventory of publicly owned land, and a suitability assessment that classifies each parcel by what it can best support.

Parcels can be mapped with the attributes that determine their potential. A suitability analysis assesses zoning, infrastructure, environmental constraints, and proximity to jobs and transit, and sorts parcels into clear categories:

Housing-first sites: transit-adjacent, already developed, with minimal environmental sensitivity. The highest priority for affordable housing.

Resilience-first sites: flood-prone, heat-vulnerable, or ecologically sensitive land better suited to green infrastructure, water storage, or open space.

Dual-benefit sites: parcels where housing and green infrastructure, recreation, or open space can share the same ground.

Portfolio management treats public land as a single, coordinated asset across agencies rather than a scattering of parcels managed in isolation. Housing priority sites that are not development-ready can be transferred to land banks, and reserved for future housing development.

Colorado: A statewide inventory mandate

In 2019, Colorado enacted HB 19-1319, requiring every state agency and public university to inventory its non-developed land with potential for affordable housing. The Colorado Department of Personnel and Administration maintains the resulting inventory, which feeds directly into a state Public-Private Partnership Collaboration Unit that moves sites into development. The inventory now supports an active pipeline, including Golden Range at Lookout Mountain — where the state is seeking 300 to 400 homes on a 41-acre state parcel under a 99-year ground lease — and an 11-acre mixed homeownership and rental project in Lakewood. A separate 2022 measure, Proposition 123, has since pushed more than 100 local governments toward housing needs assessments and parcel-level inventories of their own.