"Freedom Cities" Won’t Solve the Housing Crisis

Faced with nationwide housing scarcity, the most recent federal election brought housing center stage. In 2023, then-candidate Donald Trump made his first mention of his novel plan to build homes with a manifest destiny-esque spirit. In a pretaped speech, he promised to hold a contest to charter "up to" 10 brand-new cities—called "Freedom Cities"—that would be raised from scratch on federally-owned land, the majority of which are located in the American West. "These Freedom Cities will reopen the frontier," he said, "and give hundreds of thousands of young people and other people…a new shot at homeownership."

While Trump has said little about Freedom Cities since, the torch has been taken up by tech industry billionaires like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, as well as organizations like the American Enterprise Institute Housing Center, the Charter Cities Institute, and Frontier Foundation. The Freedom Cities concept has evolved to include more than just housing, as it would exist alongside hubs for biotech, energy technology, data centers, and more.

However, an op-ed in Shelterforce notes that much of the government’s 640 million acres are located too far from existing cities, "making it financially impractical for residential construction." But a draft of legislation, called the Freedom Cities Act, provides some clues as to how these shining cities might still be possible. Congress could use its power under the Antiquities Act to "create federal enclaves" on federal land; these enclaves would receive relief from a variety of regulations enforced by agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency and Internal Revenue Service, as well as the Fair Labor Standards Act, in order to "discover more efficient regulatory policies" that benefit industry and development.

Building residential housing on federal land isn’t unprecedented; in fall 2024, Las Vegas’s Clark County purchased 20 acres managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM)—which manages 245 million acres of federal property nationwide—in order to construct 210 affordable single-family homes. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) also created a mapping tool to visualize other locations for potential residential developments on federal land. This is part of their advocacy for "Home Sweet Home," a proposal to sell 250 square miles of BLM land to build starter homes located between two and ten miles from existing developments. Such land deals could be advantageous when done carefully, Shelterforce states, "for tackling affordable housing challenges in the West without jeopardizing the quality of life they create for working families."

AEI has been a vocal proponent for Freedom Cities: they coauthored a letter sent to the White House in April of this year advocating for 600 square miles of BLM land (some bordering state parks) to be sold and given "regulatory relief." Their mapping tool also includes filters for potential Freedom Cities, including an area outside of Grand Junction, Colorado, which the Colorado Sun notes is currently being "investigated" by city staff for its potential. "What keeps Western Slope community leaders from laughing at ideas they consider laughable is the knowledge that the backers of a broad federal sell-off in the West now sit at the political controls," reads the story.

With the Freedom Cities Act making the rounds in Washington, per the Sun, it seems entirely plausible that some of the federal levers required to execute these developments could be pulled. But putting aside rhetoric claiming that American society has become "stagnant," it’s unclear how these places would be governed. The legislation states that the process of establishing these locations would depend on a call for application to developers—defined here as parties that will "establish, operate, and maintain" each city; a board consisting of federal representatives from the department of commerce, treasury, and interior would be solely responsible to "approve or deny applications to develop Freedom Cities," and "waive, modify, or adjust the enforcement" of federal regulations. Further, the legislation, as it is drafted now, would prohibit millions of Freedom City residents from voting in state elections.

Critics have raised many concerns, including the lack of water access or infrastructure that could support such developments, and more troublingly, that special economic zones would allow the appointed board to green light development without environmental or labor oversight. It seems particularly insidious when considering that, as Bloomberg Law reporter Bobby Magill told WBUR in July, some of these proposed cities may focus on using technologies like Small Modular Nuclear Reactors that could have wide-ranging health and safety implications in outside regions.

At the city scale, developers tasked with "operations" will be on the hook not just to sweep streets, but to define how policing might work, tech is deployed for surveillance, and taxes are paid. Wired, quoting political consultant Gil Duran, states that these are not places intended to cultivate democracy. He predicts that "these are going to be cities where the owners of the city, the corporations, the billionaires have all the power and everyone else has no power."

Freedom Cities force us to confront how houses build stakeholders in a city’s future; even if these cities are improbable, they ask Americans to consider the role of democracy in building collective agency. Perhaps the tech giants and their friends in the legislature prefer antisocial experiments that would give them more power, but is the price we’re willing to pay for housing really that high?

Top photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images.

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