Confronted with nationwide housing shortage, the latest federal election introduced housing middle stage. In 2023, then-candidate Donald Trump made his first point out of his novel plan to construct houses with a manifest destiny-esque spirit. In a pretaped speech, he promised to carry a contest to constitution “as much as” 10 brand-new cities—referred to as “Freedom Cities”—that may be raised from scratch on federally-owned land, nearly all of that are positioned within the American West. “These Freedom Cities will reopen the frontier,” he mentioned, “and provides a whole lot of 1000’s of younger individuals and different individuals…a brand new shot at homeownership.”
Whereas Trump has mentioned little about Freedom Cities since, the torch has been taken up by tech trade billionaires like Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, in addition to organizations just like the American Enterprise Institute Housing Heart, the Constitution Cities Institute, and Frontier Basis. The Freedom Cities idea has developed to incorporate extra than simply housing, as it might exist alongside hubs for biotech, vitality expertise, knowledge facilities, and extra.
Nevertheless, an op-ed in Shelterforce notes that a lot of the federal government’s 640 million acres are positioned too removed from present cities, “making it financially impractical for residential development.” However a draft of laws, referred to as the Freedom Cities Act, supplies some clues as to how these shining cities may nonetheless be doable. Congress might use its energy beneath the Antiquities Act to “create federal enclaves” on federal land; these enclaves would obtain aid from quite a lot of laws enforced by companies just like the Environmental Safety Company and Inner Income Service, in addition to the Honest Labor Requirements Act, with the intention to “uncover extra environment friendly regulatory insurance policies” that profit trade and growth.
Constructing residential housing on federal land isn’t unprecedented; in fall 2024, Las Vegas’s Clark County bought 20 acres managed by the Bureau of Land Administration (BLM)—which manages 245 million acres of federal property nationwide—with the intention to assemble 210 reasonably priced single-family houses. The American Enterprise Institute (AEI) additionally created a mapping software to visualise different areas for potential residential developments on federal land. That is a part of their advocacy for “Dwelling Candy Dwelling,” a proposal to promote 250 sq. miles of BLM land to construct starter houses positioned between two and ten miles from present developments. Such land offers may very well be advantageous when completed fastidiously, Shelterforce states, “for tackling reasonably priced housing challenges within the West with out jeopardizing the standard of life they create for working households.”
AEI has been a vocal proponent for Freedom Cities: they coauthored a letter despatched to the White Home in April of this 12 months advocating for 600 sq. miles of BLM land (some bordering state parks) to be bought and given “regulatory aid.” Their mapping software additionally consists of filters for potential Freedom Cities, together with an space exterior of Grand Junction, Colorado, which the Colorado Solar notes is presently being “investigated” by metropolis employees for its potential. “What retains Western Slope group leaders from laughing at concepts they think about laughable is the data that the backers of a broad federal sell-off within the West now sit on the political controls,” reads the story.
With the Freedom Cities Act making the rounds in Washington, per the Solar, it appears fully believable that a few of the federal levers required to execute these developments may very well be pulled. However placing apart rhetoric claiming that American society has turn out to be “stagnant,” it’s unclear how these locations can be ruled. The laws states that the method of creating these areas would depend upon a name for software to builders—outlined right here as events that may “set up, function, and preserve” every metropolis; a board consisting of federal representatives from the division of commerce, treasury, and inside can be solely accountable to “approve or deny functions to develop Freedom Cities,” and “waive, modify, or regulate the enforcement” of federal laws. Additional, the laws, as it’s drafted now, would prohibit tens of millions of Freedom Metropolis residents from voting in state elections.
Critics have raised many issues, together with the shortage of water entry or infrastructure that would assist such developments, and extra troublingly, that particular financial zones would enable the appointed board to inexperienced gentle growth with out environmental or labor oversight. It appears notably insidious when contemplating that, as Bloomberg Regulation reporter Bobby Magill informed WBUR in July, a few of these proposed cities could concentrate on utilizing applied sciences like Small Modular Nuclear Reactors that would have wide-ranging well being and security implications in exterior areas.
On the metropolis scale, builders tasked with “operations” might be on the hook not simply to brush streets, however to outline how policing may work, tech is deployed for surveillance, and taxes are paid. Wired, quoting political guide Gil Duran, states that these usually are not locations supposed to domesticate democracy. He predicts that “these are going to be cities the place the homeowners of the town, the firms, the billionaires have all the facility and everybody else has no energy.”
Freedom Cities pressure us to confront how homes construct stakeholders in a metropolis’s future; even when these cities are inconceivable, they ask Individuals to contemplate the function of democracy in constructing collective company. Maybe the tech giants and their associates within the legislature want delinquent experiments that may give them extra energy, however is the worth we’re keen to pay for housing actually that prime?
