Public Land Atlas

Every government-owned parcel in the country, already inventoried. Federal, state, county, municipal, special district, and tribal — with acreage, assessor values, and a modeled land value for each one.

5.07M: government parcels
846M: acres
55: states and territories
$62T: imputed land value

Open the atlas →Get your jurisdiction’s inventory

If you take CDBG money, you now owe HUD a public land database

Section 104 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, signed in 2026, requires every CDBG grantee to maintain, on a publicly accessible website, a searchable database identifying all parcels of undeveloped land the grantee owns. Creating and maintaining that database is itself an eligible CDBG activity, so you can pay for it out of your allocation. HUD has not yet said how the requirement will reach non-entitlement communities, where the state is technically the grantee.

Most jurisdictions do not have this. Parcel records sit with the assessor, facilities keeps a spreadsheet, and nobody has a list of what the city owns that anyone outside the building can search. Assembling one from scratch is a procurement, a consultant, and the better part of a year.

The atlas already did it, for all 3,230 counties. Pick your jurisdiction and export the inventory — parcel numbers, owner, acreage, assessor land and improvement values, and a link to each county’s own parcel record.

We are not selling you compliance. The data comes from Regrid and county assessors, and a §104 database is your jurisdiction’s legal obligation, not ours. What we can do is save you the year.

An inventory is the floor, not the point

A list of parcels satisfies the statute and changes nothing. Plenty of cities will publish a database, check the box, and go back to fielding unsolicited offers on the parcels in it. The interesting question is what a government does once it knows what it owns.

The atlas answers the next question too. Filter to the land that could actually carry housing: big enough, empty or barely built, in a place where land has value, near transit if that matters to you. Every threshold is yours to move. Then decide how to build.

Selling is the option that forecloses the others. It closes one budget gap and hands the land, the rent, and every condition you might have set to whoever bought it. A ground lease keeps all three. A public asset corporation or a public developer keeps them and builds. The reading below covers how jurisdictions are doing this now.

What it does

Inventory

Every government-owned parcel in your scope — statewide, by county, by city, by CDBG grantee, or by a single owner name. Acreage, assessor values, and a land value per square foot modeled from nearby private parcels rather than taken from the assessor.

Opportunity screens Beta

Start from all your parcels and narrow: housing, transit- oriented housing, solar, parking. A screen fills in thresholds; you can change any of them. Water and road right-of-way are filtered out so you are not looking at submerged tidelands and street slivers.

Report

Export your jurisdiction as a PDF for a council packet or a committee: summary statistics and a parcel table of assessor-reported figures, with links to each county’s own record.

What to do with what you find

Public Assets Corporations Playbook →
National Housing Crisis Task Force
How to stand up a public asset corporation that turns land the government already owns into mixed-income housing, with the governance and financing spelled out.
Public developers →
Center for Public Enterprise
The case for building on public land yourself, and what public agencies need in order to do it.
A Business Model for the City →
Jeff Fong, Urban Proxima
Leasing municipal land instead of selling it, and what that does to a city's incentives once its revenue depends on the land getting more valuable.
Progress and Poverty →
Center for Land Economics + Progress and Poverty Institute
Ongoing writing on land value and who captures it.

Start with your own land

Tell us your jurisdiction and we will send back what we have on it: the parcel inventory in a form you can publish for §104, the developable subset, and what the land appears to be worth. No cost, no procurement. If you want to talk through what to do with it — ground leases, a public asset corporation, an RFP you are being pushed toward and are not sure about — we do that too.

Sources. Parcels are Regrid’s nationwide GeoParquet, licensed through their Data With Purpose program. Ownership level comes from an open-source classifier over assessor owner names, published with the pipeline. Boundaries and hydrography are Census TIGER, transit is OpenStreetMap, and CDBG grantees and entitlement areas are HUD. Land values are modeled from nearby private parcels.

Limits. Assessor data is uneven between counties. The atlas knows nothing about zoning, title, easements, existing leases, or what a parcel is currently used for. A parcel appearing on a screen means it looks underused in the data — not that it should be sold. Check anything you plan to act on with the jurisdiction that owns it.