Get Ready for a Real Estate Rumble and a Border Wall

Harvey Sapolsky

Security, Americas

This is the creative real estate deal that will fund Trump's beautiful border wall.

One of the two keys to good real estate deals is location, location, location. The other is having an eager seller. President Donald Trump is probably too busy fighting with congressional Democrats over his promise to build a wall on our Southern border to have noticed that there is a good real estate deal to be made that easily will pay for the wall, perhaps even getting Mexican or Chinese buyers to hand over the needed cash. The eager seller is the U.S. military. And the locations are its many urban and coastal installations being crowded by Trump induced local economic prosperity.

For years, the military has been complaining about the budgetary burden of carrying excess property. The estimate is that more than 20 percent of our domestic bases are surplus, costing billions annually to maintain. The normal process for getting rid of the excess involves convening a Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC), which decides which facilities are surplus or in need of being moved, producing a list the Congress then cannot easily change.

The problem is that past BRACs have given up some pretty terrific locations—Governor’s Island in New York City, Fort Sheridan near Chicago, the Presidio in San Francisco, and El Toro Airbase in Orange County. The local communities got some great parks and civic facilities, a few favorite developers got the deal of a lifetime, and the federal government got bupkis. Well, the federal government did get to pay the environmental clean-up costs and the costs of moving any vital facilities elsewhere, but basically bupkis. When the BRACs closed bases in undesirable locations, the federal government got the task of replacing military employment with other federal subsidized employment—accounting facilities, prisons and colleges.