So between the Rockies and the coastal valleys, a lot of the empty land is owned by the federal government, with no plans to develop it or open it to development. Unlike further east, where most land was sold off to capitalize the government or opened to homesteading.

Which means, the BLM in Washington is the region’s absentee landlord.

There’s a lot of tension over this, especially since the 1970s “Sagebrush Rebellion”, tensions continuing today. This is the subtext of the Bundys and Malheur, background of the rural Oregon and eastern Washington Republicans halfway to seceding already. This is what tensions about off-road RVs are about, what Utah trying to get lands transferred to the state is about.

Generally, the complaint is these lands are managed with no regard to local interests, to allow development to ease housing pressure, or create jobs – hell, like with timber logging it’s like they like to kill jobs over shit like owls no one living there actually cares about

All they offer in return is a flimsy outdoor tourism & recreation economy, and not even the motorsports “toys” the locals like to play with but coastal hikers flying in to hug some trees

And to the extent anyone DC cares at all it’s not about that, it’s about like, oh no, how is the grass feeling, are the prairie grasses feeling okay, maybe we should cancel grazing contracts and kill an industry and have a grass preserve.

And mind you as far as these ranchers are concerned those leases were their feudal tenure claim to the land in lieu of the government properly recognizing title in them, this is an enclosure movement

They’d maybe say “well how about we do a trade and you can make Massachusetts a grass preserve”. Cause it’s not like keeping land empty involves any tradeoffs in terms of living there and we’re all in this together, right?

So putting the decisionmaking HQ in a place where it’s employees live and work closely in a place that cares about that local stuff – and less attuned to the rest of the DC bureaucratic scene or the broader East Coast academia-media-government-finance world – matters.

The “other shoe” I’d expect dropping in 10-20 years is transfers to state hands, more resource extraction development, or even a new homesteading wave, and a resulting population shift westward.