Freedom Cities are back!
And they've been spiffed up for increased political palatability
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
Last August, I wrote an incredulous and somewhat tongue-in-cheek story about then-candidate Donald Trump’s plan, as outlined a year and a half earlier on his Agenda 47 website, to build 10 “Freedom Cities” on “empty” public lands in the West.
I didn’t take it seriously. Maybe I should have. Trump hasn’t said much about Freedom Cities since being elected, but other people have taken the idea, spiffed it up a bit, and run with it. One enigmatic group, for example, wants to convert the Presidio Trust in San Francisco into a Freedom City. And the American Enterprise Institute has incorporated Freedom Cities into its audacious Homestead 2.0 plan to “make housing affordable again.”
Indeed, the cities and similar efforts to hand over federal land to housing developers may be the very tool Western right-wing activists have been looking for to finally transfer public land out of the American public’s hands.
Efforts to privatize the public domain have flared up for over a century. In the early part of the 20th century, Sen. Albert Bacon Fall, of New Mexico, urged his colleagues to turn over forest reserves to states and private interests. In the 1940s, Western lawmakers and the livestock lobby attempted to transfer all Bureau of Land Management lands to private ownership. And in the late 1970s, the Sagebrush Rebellion’s legal arm, the League for the Advancement of States Equal Rights, endeavored to convey federal lands to the respective states, at which point they could be sold off to the highest bidder.
These movements were echoed in the 1990s, the 2000s, and in the 2010s. But each conflagration was ultimately doused. Proponents realized that mining, grazing, and drilling federal lands was much cheaper than doing so on state or private lands, and that they had no support outside of a handful of Western counties.
Over the last few years, the embers have been rekindled in the form of lawsuits, state-level legislation, and far-out campaign proposals. While I certainly have taken note of and written about these bids, I also haven’t taken them all that seriously: They, too, would collapse as it became clear that their flimsy legal grounding couldn’t stand up to public opposition.
More recently, however, I’ve begun to have my doubts.
No, I don’t think Utah will ever win its land grab lawsuit, nor will the Wyoming Freedom Caucus’s bid to seize control of all federal land within its borders — even national parks — succeed, even in the state legislature. But the growing number of proposals from both Democrats and Republicans to use federal land for housing and for siting data centers and associated power generating facilities — while also using proceeds of land sales to offset tax cuts for the wealthy — seem set to come together and make the Sagebrush Rebellion fantasy a reality.
The thing that got me thinking about all of this was a video of a recent AEI conference, in which the right-leaning*, free-market think tank introduced its Homesteading 2.0 plan. In a nutshell, the plan — which is broken up into the Home Sweet Home and Freedom Cities phases — looks like this:
The Bureau of Land Management would sell off 850 square miles, or about 544,000 acres, of developable public land in or near existing metro areas. About 250 of those square miles would fall under the Home Sweet Home phase, with the remaining 600 square miles devoted to 20 Freedom Cities around the West. They say this would generate $100 billion for the U.S. Treasury, which would mean the land would sell for an average of about $183,000 per acre.
Under the Home Sweet Home phase, a total of 1.5 million new homes would be built on that newly privatized land within existing metro areas on the current urban fringe.
Another 1.5 million homes would be built in Freedom Cities, which would lie outside — but not far from — existing metro areas’ peripheries.
After getting this far, I was ready to shut off the video and go back to watching reels of mountain biking wipeouts. There’s no way that such a grandiose plan could garner the necessary support to actually occur, even if it had been stripped of Trump’s nuttiest embellishments. No matter how these folks spin it, 544,000 acres is a lot of public land to transfer, especially given the fact that high profile Republicans such as Sen. Steve Daines and Rep. Ryan Zinke have come out strongly against large-scale public land transfers.
But under our current bizarro political regime, anything is possible, especially the zany and grandiose. I wouldn’t be surprised if the AEI folks threw in the Freedom Cities just to spice up their Home Sweet Home plan and to grab Trump’s attention. Because if you get Trump’s support, you automatically gain the backing of 95% of the Republicans in Congress. Get Elon Musk on board and it’s a slam dunk, especially if it raises $100 billion to offset tax cuts to the wealthy. (Zinke and Daines will back down from their stances instantly if bullied by Trump to do so).
AEI senior fellow Ed Pinto said the initiative would gain access to the land via the existing authority of the Interior Secretary to dispose of public lands, plus the congressional reconciliation bill, and “emergency” presidential powers. “We’re talking basically undesignated BLM areas,” Pinto said, “some of it may be designated as conservation areas, some of it may be ranch land …” (So much for the “undesignated” part).
One thing that struck me was the similarity between these right wing policy folks’ arguments and those made by YIMBY progressive housing advocates. Both blame the housing affordability crisis on a lack of supply, both say the solution is to build more housing, and both agree that the best way to do that is to reduce bureaucratic red tape and to up-zone land. That’s when state and local governments encourage density and multiple use by getting rid of or reducing minimum lot sizes and abolishing sprawl-friendly single-family-only zoning laws. “Zoning gets in the way of the highest and best use of land,” said Pinto.
This could help get Democrats and progressives on board with the plan, even if it means transferring public lands. After all, while almost anyone on the left eagerly pushes back against Big Oil or Big Beef land grabs, they may be far less enthusiastic about fighting Big Housing.
While progressive housing advocates are more likely to combine up-zoning with government subsidies and support, AEI is adamant about letting the market do its thing. “We’re gonna add supply, not with subsidies,” said AEI senior fellow Ed Pinto in the video. “This land is going to be sold at market rate … We’re making it more affordable the old fashioned way: build smaller houses on smaller lots and the price goes down.” Pinto added that he is not necessarily on board with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum’s similar plan to use public lands for affordable housing, because Burgum’s very vague plan is not laissez faire enough.
AEI is shooting for 13 houses per-acre, which is about twice as dense as Las Vegas currently. Yet it’s not clear how the plan would ensure that developers built the small homes AEI is looking for. Also a big question mark is who the hell is going to pay for the infrastructure for these developments, especially in Freedom Cities, which are mostly way out beyond the existing utilities and roads.
Pinto indicated that the Freedom Cities wouldn’t be as much of a reach as they might sound. He pointed to giant master-planned communities as models, including Columbia, Maryland; Reston, Virginia; Villages, Florida; and Sun City/Georgetown, Texas. But his main example was Teravalis, a planned new city on nearly 60 square miles of land in Buckeye, about an hour’s drive outside of Phoenix, where Howard Hughes Holdings hopes to build 100,000 homes and over 50 million square feet of commercial development.
That brings up an important point that the AEI folks barely touched upon before brushing it off: water, and the increasing lack thereof. Teravalis has received its land-use approvals for the whole project. But the state has issued the required 100-year assured water supply certification for just 8,500 of the development’s homes. In 2023, Arizona halted new certifications for groundwater-reliant areas on Phoenix’s fringe, throwing the future of Teravalis’s remaining 91,500 planned homes into doubt. A new Freedom City in the same region would run up against similar limits. And the 1.27 million new homes these guys are planning for Southern Nevada? Umm … hello! They don’t have any more water, folks.
But that seems to be of no concern to the AEI folks or, for that matter, various Nevada leaders who are pushing similar, if less ambitious, plans.
U.S. Rep. Susie Lee, a Nevada Democrat, recently introduced legislation that would make 25,000 acres of BLM land in Clark County, i.e. the Las Vegas area, available for housing over the next 50 years, while also setting aside other public land as wilderness, following the model of similar legislation Congress passed in 1998. It mirrors Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto’s bill introduced last year. Nevada Republican Rep. Mark Amodei forwarded a similar bill for the northern part of the state. And last year Sen. Mike Lee, a Utah Republican introduced his Helping Open Underutilized Space to Ensure Shelter — or HOUSES Act — that would allow state and local governments to nominate tracts of “underutilized” (meaning not actively being drilled or grazed to death) public land for purchase.
These bills and Burgum’s plan lack details. The AEI plan, on the other hand, is more than just an abstract concept. The think tank has actually mapped out specific BLM parcels that would be targeted for development. It’s worth checking out the map to see for yourself, but some of the sites that stand out include:
Three potential Freedom City sites north of Grand Junction, stretching from Clifton to the Utah border;
Another one that would cover Mormon Mesa near Mesquite, Nevada, not far from the iconic land art, Double Negative;
And yet another at Fredonia, Arizona.
This whole Homesteading 2.0 thing, and especially the Freedom Cities part, is a long-shot, maybe even a pipe dream. But these days, anything’s possible.
Where are they going to get the water for all these freedom cities? It does not exist now or in the future.
I have disliked Zinke for a long time following his career, but when he came out in strong opposition to privatizing public lands (at least in his state of Montana), I thought, "Well, he's not all bad."
But there's a catch. I read that he advocates transferring public lands to the state. Okay, good- the lands remain in the public. But in Montana law, such transferred lands can be sold to private bidders! Gotta read the fine print with these guys. Zinke's back on my bad guys list.