Building Homes for Veterans: A Dual Solution

Housing is too expensive.

There. That’s it. That’s the post.

No, it’s not, but wouldn’t that be funny?

Anyway, originally I intended this post to discuss the housing crisis in-depth. However, as I dove into research on that subject, something crucial came up: I was bored. Don’t get me wrong, discussing the housing crisis in America is anything but boring to me. What was boring me, though, was what I was writing. You don’t need me to tell you via charts and graphs what your eyes see and wallets feel on a monthly basis as you pay your mortgages or rents: housing costs have risen dramatically over the last 20 years, and continue to do so.

I still want to publish a blog post on the larger housing crisis, its various causes, and its overall effect on the economy at some point. However, today I feel more like discussing solutions than problems. And just as I don’t believe the housing crisis has any one cause, I think the solution is also bound to be multifaceted.

It is with this mindset, then, that I want to discuss one potential fix: housing our nation’s veterans.

Homelessness amongst the veteran population is an issue that continues to persist, though thankfully the numbers are getting better. At this time, approximately five-percent of the homeless population in America are veterans, amounting to 32,000 people.^[1] Still, that is a significant number. More significant are the number of veterans living below the poverty level, even though they may be housed at the moment: 1.2 million.^[2] Thus, even if a veteran is not homeless, they may well be struggling financially and, as with everyone else, housing can be a major source of this struggle.

It is my assertion that we can kill two birds with one stone when it comes to the issues of homeless and indigent veterans and our nation’s struggle with ballooning housing costs. We can do this by fusing government incentives with private industry to build housing and start communities for military veterans all over the country in lower cost-of-living areas. This will drive down the homeless population of veterans while simultaneously driving down the cost of housing in the United States through increased construction of new single-family residences.

To start, the idea of granting land to veterans is not an original idea by me—shocking, I know, given my towering intellect. No, I was inspired by retirement programs for military veterans dating back to the days of the Roman Republic. During the days of Julius Caesar those who served in the Roman Legions for a set number of years would be rewarded with a small plot of land.^[3] This practice was done for a multitude of reasons, but a large benefit was this allowed the Roman Senate to pay those who had fought on the empire’s behalf in something that would mean a lot to them but it had an abundance of: newly conquered land.^[4]

It may surprise you to learn that the United States military is not regularly going out on expeditions of conquest to grow our empire, so we don’t have a lot of new land available like our Roman predecessors. However, our country is already very land rich. In fact, only three-percent of the 3.8 million square miles of our nation are urban areas, where the price of housing is most expensive.^[5]^[6] The rest of that land is either being put to use for farms, crops, ranching, or else is either meeting some other purpose, or sitting fallow. The chart below from the USDA Economic Research Service breaks down the numbers easily enough so that even a lawyer can understand them:

A pie chart with text

AI-generated content may be incorrect. ^[7]

Focusing on solely the contiguous United States, we have 1.9 billion acres of land to work with.^[8] About 800 million acres of that land is in use for grazing or growing food for livestock, while about 400 million is cropland.^[9] 85 million acres are dedicated to our country’s national parks.^[10] Using the three-percent figure from the chart above, we can estimate that 57 million acres is allocated to urban areas.

Added together, that means that approximately 1.33 billion of the 1.9 billion acres of land in the United States is currently being put to use in some way. What is the rest of the land doing? Some of it is dedicated to industry or military purposes, but according to the chart above those only constitute about one-percent of land use. That means over 500 million acres of contiguous American land is available for housing development.

Although America is land rich, we are poor when it comes to housing. In 2023, 1.4 million new housing projects were begun in the United States.^[11] While this may sound like a lot, supply is still not keeping up with demand as prices for single-family residences continue to outpace income growth by a significant margin. According to the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies, “Nationally, median single-family home prices rose by nearly one-half (48 percent) between 2019 and 2024, at more than twice the rate of median income, which rose by 22 percent.”^[12] Again, the reason for this housing crisis is multifaceted, and lack of supply is only part of the problem. However, basic economics teaches us that an increase in supply will drive down price, so increasing the rate of construction should assist in reaching this goal.

To recap: we have a large homeless veteran population and a housing shortage. One solution to these issues would be to take advantage of the large tracts of undeveloped land we also possess and use it to construct single-family housing for veterans. The idea here is not to build random houses scattered across the United States, but rather, to build communities for veterans who have served for a certain amount of time, wherein they would live in homes they had earned through their service.

As with almost everything, this certainly seems easier said than done. And as with almost everything, I have no doubt I cannot account for every variable in this single post. However, I do intend to lay out the rudimentary blueprint for how this plan could be made not only viable, but successful.

First, it is not my intention that the United States government get into the construction business. We actually already tried that at the end of World War II, with millions of Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines returning home fully grown and ready to begin adult life. To ease the strain on the housing market and to ensure those servicemembers would not go homeless, the Truman Administration pushed through the Veterans’ Emergency Housing Act of 1946, which gave the federal government “extensive controls over construction materials, housing prices, and rents.”^[13] Unfortunately, such strong controls actually had the opposite of their intended effect, resulting in far fewer houses being built than promised by the Administration.^[14] Rather, it is my intent that we look to one of our nation’s greatest strengths, its private market, to assist in pushing through this program.

A marriage of public incentive and private capital could certainly meet the demands a program of this sort would have. Right now, there are 77,455 residential homebuilders in the United States.^[15] What they need is a reason to build. The United States government, through credible legislation, could provide that by simply buying houses.

Another monetary investment on the government’s part will be the land. Although, as mentioned, there are hundreds of millions of acres to potentially be developed in the United States, much of it, although sitting fallow, is privately owned. This means the federal government will need to buy up land in the areas it wants to construct this housing. The question is, where should this veteran housing be located?

You may have noticed that earlier, when discussing available land for development, I excluded urban land from my calculus (or clumsy arithmetic). The reason for that is twofold. First, the average single-family house in the United States requires approximately .188 acres, so we theoretically have room for about 2.6 billion single-family houses for veterans on the non-urban land we currently possess.^[16] Given that there are only 15.8 million veterans in the United States, this should be ample room for our purposes.^[17] Second, though, urban land development is extremely expensive compared to rural, for a variety of reasons.^[18] To keep the cost of this program down, then, it would make sense for veteran housing to be built further from urban areas.

Additionally, it would make sense to construct this veteran housing in a communal environment, again for two reasons. First, cost effectiveness. Part of the reason housing in urban areas is so expensive compared to rural is because of the infrastructure. Cities are already on the electric grid, have access to clean water, and perform many services we rely upon such as garbage and recycling collection. To build a house in the middle of nowhere would require a large amount of resources to be dedicated for just that lot. If that house stood alone, the costs associated with such construction would be staggering when done on the scale we are hypothesizing for this program. Because one-off housing in rural areas would be so expensive, then, we should consider building communities of houses rather than standalone ones. By building houses in the aggregate, all the expenses associated with providing the abovementioned services would be diffused amongst all the properties built so that the cost per house would be significantly cheaper.

The second reason this veteran housing should be built in a communal environment is more humanistic: for the support of its inhabitants. The veteran community deals with mental illness at a high rate, with studies showing up to 41% of veterans requiring some form of mental health care.^[19] Housing veterans in small-knit communities with one another would allow them to be around likeminded individuals and make veteran mental and physical health services easier to collocate.

So we have answered the “who,” the “what,” the “where,” and the “why.” High housing prices and a large veteran population living below the poverty level are two imminent issues in the United States. By building veteran housing communities throughout the rural and suburban United States and doling it out to veterans upon completion of active duty, we can attack both of those issues at the same time. In my next post on this topic, we will tackle the “how.” As you can imagine, a project this ambitious will require guardrails to ensure both reasonableness of cost, as well as protection from abuse.

^[1] https://nchv.org/veteran-homelessness/

^[2] https://usafacts.org/articles/who-are-our-nations-veterans-and-how-is-their-standard-of-living-changing/

^[3] Rodgers, Nigel (2013). Ancient Rome: A Complete History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire. Southwater.

^[4] Truthfully, I have read a great deal on the late-Roman Republic, and I can’t credit one source for this. However, if you have time and want to learn more about ancient Rome, I highly recommend Mike Duncan’s podcast series The History of Rome. It’s about 250 episodes; each episode is approximately half-an-hour long and extremely entertaining.

^[5] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/is-the-united-states-bigger-than-the-european-union.html#:~:text=The%20United%20States%20is%20approximately%203.8%20million%20square%20miles

^[6] https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2024/december/ers-data-series-tracks-major-uses-of-u-s-land-with-a-focus-on-agriculture#:~:text=In%202017%2C%20about%2029%20percent,3%20percent%20of%20U.S.%20land

^[7] Id.

^[8] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/26/745731823/the-u-s-has-nearly-1-9-billion-acres-of-land-heres-how-it-is-used

^[9] Id.

^[10] https://www.nps.gov/subjects/lwcf/acreagereports.htm

^[11] https://www.consumeraffairs.com/homeowners/how-many-houses-are-built-every-year.html

^[12] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/blog/home-prices-surge-five-times-median-income-nearing-historic-highs#:~:text=Meanwhile%2C%20a%20record%20low%20number,Jose%20at%20over%20$1.9%20million.

^[13] https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/w12-5_von_hoffman.pdf

^[14] Id.

^[15] https://eyeonhousing.org/2025/07/residential-remodelers-outnumber-single-family-builders-in-the-u-s/

^[16] https://www.ameristarhomes.com/how-much-land-do-you-need-to-build-a-house/