Public land, mapped
Public Land Atlas
An inventory of government-owned parcels paired with tooling and resources to turn latent land into a valuable public asset.
- 5.07M
- government parcels
- 846M
- acres
- 55
- states and territories
- 3,225
- counties
Find your jurisdiction
Not a CDBG grantee? Non-entitlement communities are covered by their state's inventory. Or open the full atlas. The atlas asks for the access phrase you were sent.
CDBG grantees now need a public land inventory
Section 104 of the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, effective October 1, 2026, requires that each CDBG grantee "maintains, on a publicly accessible website, a searchable database that identifies all parcels of undeveloped land owned by the grantee." Creating and maintaining that database is itself an eligible CDBG activity, so it can be paid for out of the allocation.
Most jurisdictions do not have such a list. Parcel records are with the assessor, facilities keeps a spreadsheet, and nobody has a searchable inventory of what the city owns that anyone outside the building can see. Assembling one from scratch takes months.
The Atlas holds a preliminary Section 104 inventory for every CDBG grantee in the country: the parcels attributed to the grantee from assessor owner names, the ones that read as undeveloped under a definition stated in the open, a searchable table, and PDF, CSV, GeoJSON and JSON exports. It lives inside the Atlas, and every inventory carries a "preliminary" banner until the jurisdiction has reviewed it.
An inventory becomes a jurisdiction's Section 104 database only after the jurisdiction reviews and certifies it with the Center for Land Economics. Reach out; we walk the list with you, apply your corrections, record the certification, and give you the link to publish — ask about scope and cost. The work is CDBG-eligible.
The data comes from Regrid and county assessors. Ownership is inferred from owner names and "undeveloped" from assessor use and building footprint, so the list needs a human who knows the jurisdiction before anyone should rely on it. That review is what certification is.
Find parcels prime for development
A list of parcels satisfies the statute, but that should only be the beginning. 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. Toggle the thresholds to find the right parcels to develop.
Governments have options for development. Selling is rarely the right one; 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, and keeps the land working for the public benefit. 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.
- The Fiscal Crisis Facing American Cities →
Jeff Fong, Urban Proxima
Why the federal transfers city budgets quietly depend on are about to tighten, and why the assets a city already owns start to matter more when they do.
- Georgism through Land Leasing →
Jeff Fong, Progress and Poverty
Municipal land leasing as the version of land value capture that is already legal, already working, and does not require passing a tax. Battery Park City and West Falls as the worked examples.
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. If you want to bring your own data to the Atlas, reach out.
If you are interested in making your parcels work for your community — whether it be ground leases, a public asset corporation, an RFP you are being pushed toward and are not sure about — we are happy to chat.
Sources. Parcels are Regrid's, licensed through their Data With Purpose program. 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, and Regrid coverage is not perfect. The Atlas knows nothing about zoning, title, easements, existing leases, or what a parcel is currently used for.