Latest news with #FreedomCities
Bloomberg
2 days ago
- Politics
- Bloomberg
Washington Should Be a ‘Freedom City,' Not a Police State
As a longtime resident of our nation's capital, and even as I strenuously object to Donald Trump seizing control of our city's police force, I would like to make a suggestion: Mr. President, you took over the wrong department. As a former developer, you should know that the real power to change a city is in its planning office. I am not being entirely facetious. If Republicans are going to treat DC as a vassal state, they should at least have the courage of their convictions and try do something constructive. Specifically, they could make Washington the first of the 10 ' Freedom Cities ' Trump has pledged to build on federal land.
Gizmodo
30-06-2025
- Business
- Gizmodo
Even MAGA Is Pissed Off About Tech Bros' Dream of Bulldozing Federal Lands to Create New Cities
In recent years, a cadre of tech billionaires have become obsessed with a deeply unconventional idea: the creation of new, privately owned cities. Dubbed the 'Freedom Cities' movement, backers say they'd like to create new special development zones in the U.S. that would allow such cities to be built. In these zones, private investors could write their own laws and set up their own governance structures. According to this project's backers, such communities would be corporately controlled and wouldn't involve a traditional bureaucracy. Of course, to do all this, developers will need a lot of land. The 'Freedom City' movement found its legislative champion in the form of Mike Lee, a deeply out-of-touch, politically unhinged Senator from Utah. In recent months, Lee introduced a provision to Trump's 'One Big Beautiful Bill,' that would have brought tech billionaires' dream one step closer to reality: Lee's bill text would have offered up 1.2 million acres of federal land to be sold off by the Bureau of Land Management and then developed for the purposes of 'affordable housing' and other private interests. Much of that land, some of which sits adjacent to some of the nation's most popular national parks, would have been sourced from 11 Western states. Perhaps aware of how unpopular his proposals were, Lee was attempting to cram through the policy without any sort of public comment. American Progress notes that Lee's bill required 'some consultation with local government, governors, and Tribes' but otherwise offered 'no opportunity for public input.' However, Lee's effort has officially floundered. Over the weekend, the Senator pulled his provision from the Trump megabill due to ongoing opposition within Congress—including from conservative lawmakers in Western states. Those lawmakers, including Republicans from Montana, Idaho, Washington, California, and Oregon, were planning to torpedo Trump's whole bill if Lee's provision remained inside of it. 'We cannot accept the sale of federal lands that Sen. Lee seeks,' the legislators wrote in a letter sent last week. Rather than be the reason that Trump's omnibus legislation floundered, Lee put his tail between his legs and withdrew the provision on Saturday. 'Over the past several weeks, I've spent a lot of time listening to members of the community, local leaders and stakeholders across the country,' Lee wrote on X on Saturday. 'While there has been a tremendous amount of misinformation — and in some cases, outright lies — about my bill, many people brought forward sincere concerns.' For the moment, millions of Americans can breath a collective sigh of relief. The National Parks Conservation Association has said that the bill, had it gone through, would have opened up federal lands directly adjacent to national parks for development—a policy that could have resulted in luxury housing or hotels being built right next to iconic vistas like Zion National Park. Almost nobody wanted this thing to happen. In addition to concerns from Lee's fellow lawmakers, a recent poll by Colorado College found that, of several thousand people surveyed who live in Western states, a vast majority of them support protections for public lands, and are more interested in conservation efforts than they are in development. Indeed, even Trump voters have come out to decry the proposal. 'Strong majorities of Western voters – including self-identified 'MAGA' voters – support policies that focus on the protection and conservation of public lands and oppose policies that would open public lands up to drilling, mining, or other development,' the pollsters found. Viral MAGA influencers—many of whom happen to live in rural communities—had been openly badmouthing Lee's plan to privatize public lands. Indeed, one Trump-voting hunter and gun rights YouTuber, Cameron Hanes, has been posting long, detailed videos slamming Lee's bill. 'It's all BS what he says,' Hanes says in one video, claiming that Lee has been spreading 'misinformation' about who is criticizing the bill. Hanes notes that it's 'actually both sides of the aisle—it's left and right' that hate the proposal. Hanes additionally urged his followers to 'please call [Congress] and make us impossible to ignore.' He added: 'The collective voice of the average American is our only hope.' It isn't hard to see why people like Hanes were so critical of Lee's proposal, as American Progress has noted that 'well-loved recreation spots, popular areas for hunting and fishing, prime wildlife habitat, and even sacred or historic sites' could have potentially been privatized under the bill. Despite aggressive disinterest from a majority of Americans, the lobby to create tech billionaires' network of libertarian dystopias is still in place, and efforts to deregulate and ultimately develop public lands are still ongoing. That's concerning, given this is clearly a government that doesn't care much for the environment. Indeed, the Trump administration recently opened up tens of millions of acres in national forests to potential logging. It just goes to show, you can't keep a bad idea down (as long as the idea belongs to a billionaire).
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Trump's 'Freedom Cities' promised to bring down housing costs. A conservative think tank has mapped out where they could go.
Trump's 'Freedom Cities' plan aims to build housing and manufacturing hubs on federal land. The American Enterprise Institute identified where millions of homes could be built. Critics compare the plan to China's city-building projects, but there could be bipartisan appeal. On the campaign trail, President Donald Trump promised to bring down the cost of housing. Some of the new housing he's proposed that could help lower prices would be built in brand-new cities constructed from scratch on federally owned land. Trump's proposed "Freedom Cities" would be manufacturing hubs featuring flying cars and plentiful single-family housing, delivering a "quantum leap for America's standard of living," he said in a 2023 video. The proposal, which was light on details, received a muted response and even some criticism from conservatives. But a prominent conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, is taking the idea seriously. The group's housing center recently published an ambitious blueprint called "Homesteading 2.0" that identifies hundreds of potential locations for 20 new "freedom cities" and sites for 3 million new homes on federal land. Prospective sites for the new cities are largely in Western states, where demand for homes has surged and the US government controls much of the land mass. To incentivize the rapid development of homes, infrastructure, and private industry, proponents of the cities say they should be exempt from all kinds of government laws and regulations. While there's some bipartisan support for repurposing federal land for housing, Trump's vision would require local support, including from those concerned with environmental protection. The AEI analysis focuses largely on metro areas in Western states like Nevada, Oregon, Colorado, and Idaho. The report envisions major new population centers in the outskirts of places like Las Vegas; Bend, Oregon; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Grand Junction, Colorado. The researchers created an interactive map showing where they've determined the new cities could be built. The dark green locations shown below are the best fit for freedom cities. "In areas where we have plenty of land, why shouldn't we be using it?" Tobias Peter, co-director of AEI's housing center, told Business Insider. "These cities with high prices, they have shown over time that they have little interest in promoting housing supply." Some proponents of freedom cities want them to be designed to attract developers and private industry by offering government incentives and exemptions from many state and federal laws and regulations. They would feature "targeted regulatory relief, perhaps focused on different emerging and critical technologies," Jeffrey Mason, head of policy at the nonprofit Charter Cities Institute, told BI. Mason has been working with AEI and other groups to draft legislation that would create a legal framework for the new cities. He said they've had a few informal conversations with the Trump administration. The administration has so far made some tentative moves in this direction. In March, the secretaries of the US Department of Interior, Doug Burgum, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner, announced a joint task force to explore opening up federal land for housing construction. "Working together, our agencies can take inventory of underused federal properties, transfer or lease them to states or localities to address housing needs, and support the infrastructure required to make development viable," Turner and Burgum wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. A White House spokesperson declined to comment on the effort and pointed BI to the op-ed. AEI's proposal focused on finding prospective locations for new cities in areas where housing is in demand near pre-existing jobs and infrastructure. Sin City is among the most attractive contenders. The federal government manages about 86% of Nevada's land and some neighborhoods in metro Las Vegas are built right up to the border of land managed by the federal Bureau of Land Management that currently sits empty but could be developed. AEI found an area just north of the city has room for about 200,000 new homes — for about 600,000 people. "Las Vegas is almost entirely bound by this BLM land, it functions as a growth constraint," said Arthur Gailes, manager of housing supply initiatives at AEI. "There is no barrier that would prevent this land from being built on, except that it is rendered illegal by the fact of being managed by the BLM." Building housing on federal land, in theory, has bipartisan support. Former Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned on continuing the Biden administration's efforts to open up certain parcels for dense affordable housing. "It speaks to the underlying agreement over there being a housing supply issue," Matthew Murphy, executive director of NYU's Furman Center, told BI last year. "And then the following logical question being, what can the government do about it?" But opening up federal land for entirely new cities has a slew of critics, including conservation groups concerned about adverse impacts on wildlife and the natural environment. There's some precedent for this kind of development. Freedom city proponents point to mid-20th century master-planned US cities — including Columbia, Maryland, and Reston, Virginia — and major mixed-use developments like the Woodlands in Texas and Teravalis in Arizona as models. But these cities weren't built on federal land or subject to their own regulatory framework. Some see in Trump's proposal echoes of authoritarian projects abroad. Max Woodworth, an urban geographer at the Ohio State University who wrote a paper on Trump's freedom cities, compared the undertaking to China's ambitious, and not always successful, city-building projects. "The desire to emulate China emerges out of a sense of quite evident anxiety that China has gotten a jump on the United States," Woodworth told Business Insider. "These are the types of new cities that are specifically designed to short-circuit any kind of democratic process of creating a new city, really in favor of making top-down corporate structures that masquerade as cities." Read the original article on Business Insider
