Latest news with #FreedomCities'
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
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Opinion - How federal lands can be used to ease the housing crisis
Next to inflation, Americans ranked housing as their top financial concern in a Gallup survey last May. Since then, it's gotten only worse. January home sales were down 5 percent from last year's dismal numbers. Record numbers of first-time buyers are stuck on the sidelines as housing affordability stands at its lowest level in 40 years. President Trump must follow through on his campaign pledge 'to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction.' The housing market depends largely on interest rates and zoning — factors outside any president's direct control. But the massive federal land portfolio gives middle- and lower-income Americans a better shot at homeownership. The federal government is the nation's biggest landowner, holding one-third of all property — a land mass six times the size of California. In Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque and other metro areas, federal lands brush up against the suburban periphery. Since President Trump launched the idea of 'Freedom Cities' on federal land, the opening of federal lands for development has entered the policy mainstream. House Budget Committee Republicans have floated the sale of federal lands as an option for closing the deficit. To create affordable homes on federal lands, the federal government shouldn't sell lands for development — it should lease them. The sale of federal lands requires the buyer to comply with state and local regulations once the land is privatized, likely with the same awful result. Leasing the federal lands, on the other hand, cuts through the red tape. Local land-use policies that make housing a luxury good in many parts of the U.S. — such as California's solar mandate and the state's aversion to suburban developments that rely on 'car-oriented transportation' — do not apply on federal lands. Anti-growth locals and density-obsessed planners stay sidelined. For more than a century, federal law has long authorized federal leases for commercial purposes such as mineral extraction. Congress should update its land-use laws, including the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, to authorize federal leases for housing development, subject to standard public health and environmental protections. Call it the New Homestead Act after the 1862 legislation, which — in Lincoln's words — was enacted 'so that every poor man may have a home.' Building homes on leased federal lands will make homeownership more affordable. Instead of buying the house and the land, the homebuyer buys only the house and leases the land. To protect homeowners, Congress can require 99-year leases that can be automatically transferred to new buyers. Critics will warn that land rent can be hiked after the lease term expires, but Congress can put limits on these increases. Federal policies that cut through the red tape by allowing new home construction on leased public lands would alleviate the undersupply of single-family homes. Homebuilders built 300,000 fewer homes in 2024 than in 1985 when there were 100 million fewer Americans. The U.S. housing market is short an estimated 4.5 million homes. Freeing up land and reducing regulatory burdens would allow market forces and consumer preference to exercise their magic, which we can see in Texas metros like Austin, where housing costs are plummeting due to an epic home-building spree. Building 'out' on federal lands is more likely to create affordable housing than building 'in' already established metros. Going from five to ten stories increases the cost of each square foot by more than 50 percent, notes the Manhattan Institute's Judge Glock, largely due to the need for more expensive materials such as steel rather than wood. The most expensive housing markets — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto — tend to have the highest urban densities. A pro-housing development nonprofit recently concluded that California's measures to spur the construction of more apartments and other dense housing developments had 'limited to no impact on the state's housing supply.' Part of the problem lies with the failure of planners — and some builders — to recognize that the last century of data suggests a near-universal preference for suburban homes over urban dwellings. Two-thirds of millennials favor the suburbs as their preferred residence and a greater percentage of Americans aged 18 to 29 view homeownership as 'essential' to the American dream than older cohorts. Even in California — the epicenter of pro-density policies — preference for single-family homes is 'ubiquitous,' according to recent research by Jessica Trounstine at the University of California, Merced. Today, racial minorities are responsible for more than 90 percent of peripheral growth in the U.S. Help for these aspirations seems to be on the way. Trump's Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner recently nixed a federal zoning rule that his Democratic predecessors had deployed against suburbs like Westchester County, N.Y. That's good defense from the former NFL cornerback, but Americans struggling to afford a down payment on a starter home need more help. An 'all-of-the-above' housing policy on federal lands expands homeownership opportunities at a range of price points. That means spacious townhouses as well as single-family homes built on site. It also means more affordable manufactured homes and modular homes, perhaps eventually constructed by AI-enabled robots. Opening up federal lands for single-family development also makes political sense for the new administration. Homeowners are generally more conservative than renters, and the groups trending towards the Republican Party — millennials, Latinos and Asians — are a growing percentage of new homebuyers. Indeed, whether Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress can enact policies that increase homeownership could end up defining the long-run appeal of his movement to younger and more diverse voters. Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin Civitas Institute. Michael Toth is a resident fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and a research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin Civitas Institute. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
10-03-2025
- Business
- The Hill
How federal lands can be used to ease the housing crisis
Next to inflation, Americans ranked housing as their top financial concern in a Gallup survey last May. Since then, it's gotten only worse. January home sales were down 5 percent from last year's dismal numbers. Record numbers of first-time buyers are stuck on the sidelines as housing affordability stands at its lowest level in 40 years. President Trump must follow through on his campaign pledge 'to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction.' The housing market depends largely on interest rates and zoning — factors outside any president's direct control. But the massive federal land portfolio gives middle- and lower-income Americans a better shot at homeownership. The federal government is the nation's biggest landowner, holding one-third of all property — a land mass six times the size of California. In Las Vegas, Phoenix, Albuquerque and other metro areas, federal lands brush up against the suburban periphery. Since President Trump launched the idea of 'Freedom Cities' on federal land, the opening of federal lands for development has entered the policy mainstream. House Budget Committee Republicans have floated the sale of federal lands as an option for closing the deficit. To create affordable homes on federal lands, the federal government shouldn't sell lands for development — it should lease them. The sale of federal lands requires the buyer to comply with state and local regulations once the land is privatized, likely with the same awful result. Leasing the federal lands, on the other hand, cuts through the red tape. Local land-use policies that make housing a luxury good in many parts of the U.S. — such as California's solar mandate and the state's aversion to suburban developments that rely on ' car-oriented transportation ' — do not apply on federal lands. Anti-growth locals and density-obsessed planners stay sidelined. For more than a century, federal law has long authorized federal leases for commercial purposes such as mineral extraction. Congress should update its land-use laws, including the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976, to authorize federal leases for housing development, subject to standard public health and environmental protections. Call it the New Homestead Act after the 1862 legislation, which — in Lincoln's words — was enacted 'so that every poor man may have a home.' Building homes on leased federal lands will make homeownership more affordable. Instead of buying the house and the land, the homebuyer buys only the house and leases the land. To protect homeowners, Congress can require 99-year leases that can be automatically transferred to new buyers. Critics will warn that land rent can be hiked after the lease term expires, but Congress can put limits on these increases. Federal policies that cut through the red tape by allowing new home construction on leased public lands would alleviate the undersupply of single-family homes. Homebuilders built 300,000 fewer homes in 2024 than in 1985 when there were 100 million fewer Americans. The U.S. housing market is short an estimated 4.5 million homes. Freeing up land and reducing regulatory burdens would allow market forces and consumer preference to exercise their magic, which we can see in Texas metros like Austin, where housing costs are plummeting due to an epic home-building spree. Building 'out' on federal lands is more likely to create affordable housing than building 'in' already established metros. Going from five to ten stories increases the cost of each square foot by more than 50 percent, notes the Manhattan Institute's Judge Glock, largely due to the need for more expensive materials such as steel rather than wood. The most expensive housing markets — Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto — tend to have the highest urban densities. A pro-housing development nonprofit recently concluded that California's measures to spur the construction of more apartments and other dense housing developments had 'limited to no impact on the state's housing supply.' Part of the problem lies with the failure of planners — and some builders — to recognize that the last century of data suggests a near-universal preference for suburban homes over urban dwellings. Two-thirds of millennials favor the suburbs as their preferred residence and a greater percentage of Americans aged 18 to 29 view homeownership as 'essential' to the American dream than older cohorts. Even in California — the epicenter of pro-density policies — preference for single-family homes is 'ubiquitous,' according to recent research by Jessica Trounstine at the University of California, Merced. Today, racial minorities are responsible for more than 90 percent of peripheral growth in the U.S. Help for these aspirations seems to be on the way. Trump's Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner recently nixed a federal zoning rule that his Democratic predecessors had deployed against suburbs like Westchester County, N.Y. That's good defense from the former NFL cornerback, but Americans struggling to afford a down payment on a starter home need more help. An 'all-of-the-above' housing policy on federal lands expands homeownership opportunities at a range of price points. That means spacious townhouses as well as single-family homes built on site. It also means more affordable manufactured homes and modular homes, perhaps eventually constructed by AI-enabled robots. Opening up federal lands for single-family development also makes political sense for the new administration. Homeowners are generally more conservative than renters, and the groups trending towards the Republican Party — millennials, Latinos and Asians — are a growing percentage of new homebuyers. Indeed, whether Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress can enact policies that increase homeownership could end up defining the long-run appeal of his movement to younger and more diverse voters. Joel Kotkin is a presidential fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University in Orange, California, and a senior research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin Civitas Institute. Michael Toth is a resident fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity and a research fellow at the University of Texas at Austin Civitas Institute.
