Where Trump’s “cities of freedom” to reduce housing costs could go

On the campaign track, President Donald Trump promised to reduce the cost of housing.

Some of the new dwellings he has offered that could help reduce prices would be built in all new cities built from zero on land belonging to a federal government. Trump’s “Cities Freedom Cities would make hubs starring flying cars and abundant unified housing, offering a” quantum jump for the American standard of living, “he said in a 2023 video.

The proposal, which was light on the details, received a mute response and even certain criticisms from the conservatives. But a first conservative reflection group, the American Enterprise Institute, took the idea seriously. The group’s housing center recently published an ambitious plan called “Homesteading 2.0” which identifies hundreds of potential locations for 20 new “Cities Freedom” and sites for 3 million new houses on federal land.

The potential sites of new cities are largely found in Western states, where the demand for houses has increased and the US government controls a large part of the land mass. To encourage the rapid development of houses, infrastructure and private industry, cities supporters say they are exempt from all kinds of government laws and regulations. Although there is bipartite support for the reuse of federal land for housing, Trump’s vision would require local support, including the persons affected by environmental protection.

AEI analysis is largely focused on metropolitan areas of Western states such as Nevada, Oregon, Colorado and Idaho. The report envisages new population centers of new population centers on the outskirts of places like Las Vegas; Bend, Oregon; Salt Lake City, Utah; And Grand Junction, Colorado.

Researchers have created an interactive card showing where they determined the new cities could be built. The dark green locations below are the best suited to the cities of freedom.

“In areas where we have a lot of land, why should we not use it?” Tobias Peter, co -director of the AEI housing center, told Business Insider. “These cities at high prices, they have shown over time that they have little interest in promoting the housing supply.”

Deregulated areas

Some supporters of Freedom cities want them to be designed to attract promoters and private industry by offering incentives and government exemptions from numerous federal and federal laws and regulations.

They would include “targeted regulatory relief, perhaps focused on different emerging and critical technologies,” Bi Jeffrey Mason, Policy Manager at the Charter Cities for non-profit.

Mason worked with AEI and other groups to write legislation that would create a legal framework for new cities. He said they had some informal conversations with the Trump administration.

The administration has so far made some provisional movements in this direction. In March, the Secretaries of the American Interior Department, Doug Burgum, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner, announced a joint working group to explore the opening of federal land for the construction of housing.

“By working together, our agencies can make an inventory of the underused federal properties, transfer them or rent them in states or localities to meet housing needs, and support the infrastructure required to make development viable,” wrote Turner and Burgum in an editorial of the Wall Street Journal.

A White House spokesman refused to comment on the effort and pointed to BI to opinion.

AEI’s proposal focused on finding potential locations for new cities in areas where housing is in demand for jobs and pre -existing infrastructure.

Sin City is among the most attractive contenders. The federal government manages approximately 86% of the land of Nevada and certain districts of the Las Vegas metro are built up to the land of land managed by the Federal Land Management Bureau which is currently empty but could be developed.

AEI has found an area just north of the city has room for around 200,000 new houses – for around 600,000 people.

“Las Vegas is almost entirely linked by this BLM land, it works as a growth constraint,” said Arthur Gailes, director of housing supply initiatives in Aei. “There is no barrier that would prevent this land from building, except that it is made illegal by being managed by the BLM.”

A bipartite solution?

The construction of housing on federal lands, in theory, has bipartite support.

Former vice-president Kamala Harris campaigned on the pursuit of the Biden Administration efforts To open certain plots for dense affordable housing.

“It talks about the underlying agreement there for a problem of housing supply,” said Matthew Murphy, executive director of Nyu’s Furman Center last year. “And then the following logical question being, what can the government do?”

But the opening of federal land for completely new cities has a multitude of criticism, including conservation groups concerned with the negative impacts on wildlife and the natural environment.

There is a precedent for this type of development. Supporters of Freedom City underline the American cities planned by the middle of the 20th century – including Columbia, Maryland and Reston, Virginia – and great developments for mixed use such as Woodlands in Texas and Teravalis in Arizona as models. But these cities were not based on federal land or subject to their own regulatory framework.

Some see the echoes of Trump’s proposal for authoritarian projects abroad. Max Woodworth, an urban geographer with Ohio State University who wrote an article on Trump’s cities in Trump, compared the company to ambitious and not always successful projects.

“The desire to imitate China emerges from a fairly obvious feeling of anxiety that China has led to the United States,” Woodworth told Business Insider. “These are the types of new cities specially designed to short-circuit any type of democratic process for creating a new city, really in favor of the manufacture of descending corporate structures that pretended to be cities.”