Much of that are involves forests far away from where people would want to live anyway. Often without roads.

When people say the issue is land, that usually implies a very particular smaller subset of land which is in proximity other populations, economic centers, and with certain features and infrastructure.

There are also plenty of houses in recently a abandoned ghost towns. The catch is that they were mostly abandoned due to lack of jobs nearby, meaning nobody could afford to live there.

I don't know that that is what they were claiming. Land use policy != Land availability. If it was, Russia would have ended homelessness 500 years ago.

This is not actually true.

There are only 5 states with federally owned land over 50% (Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Alaska and Oregon). Other states west of the Mississippi don’t necessarily have a large percentage of federal land. For instance, Texas only has 1.78% that is federally owned, Arkansas at 9.38%, Oklahoma at 1.59%, Kansas at 0.52%, and the Dakotas at 3.91% and 5.41%. In fact, there are only ten states with over 30% of federally owned land in the Union, granted they are all in the Western part of the States.

2024 https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/federal-lan...

These have a cleaner interface but are from 2018

https://wisevoter.com/state-rankings/federal-land-by-state/

https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_land_ownership_by_state