When former President Donald Trump announced his plans for a “quantum leap” in the American standard of living last week, it struck many people as an unusually forward-looking platform for a politician whose nostalgic worldview is baked into his campaign slogan. One part was particularly unusual: His proposal to hold a design competition for ten “Freedom Cities,” to be constructed from the ground up on federal land in a manner that recalls China’s manufactured metropolises. When did rural America’s champion suddenly become an urbanist? Actually — when did futuristic urbanism become a conservative policy issue? “Cities of the future” might feel refreshingly nonpartisan, but actually building ideal cities has been a sort of progressive hobbyhorse in America dating back to FDR’s New Deal. For decades that energy focused around new construction, with centrally planned green suburbs and the like. Today, however, things are a little different — progressive urbanism is defined by its love affair with existing cities (which also happen to be very Democrat-friendly), and the ongoing campaign to densify them and make them safer, more convenient and hopefully more affordable. Meanwhile, the idea of all-new cities began to fascinate libertarians — not least because they offer a chance to potentially escape pesky liberal regulators. Right-leaning crypto mavens are attempting to build their own cities abroad, no doubt inspired (and sometimes directly supported) by aspiring seasteader Peter Thiel. An op-ed in the libertarian magazine Reason called the “Freedom Cities” plan “half a good idea,” despite its heavy-handed federal involvement. That conservative vision for urbanism has taken a fresh political turn of late, as Trump’s plan suggests: It’s not just about business opportunity, but middle-class housing. As American cities struggle with a mind-breaking affordability crisis (in part because of Democrat-supported zoning restrictions), wonky Republicans like Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) have begun to propose their own creative solutions for fixing the housing affordability crisis by subsidizing new, family-friendly communities on federal land. “In California it's essentially impossible to build affordable single-family homes, because [Democrats] just want high density and think that's what people want,” said the writer and urbanist Joel Kotkin. “This notion that you can have a single family home, and that people are stopping you from it, is an attractive [political] issue.” So… what are “Freedom Cities,” exactly? And can Trump really get the modern rural-conservative GOP coalition excited about them? The Trump ‘24 campaign hasn’t yet announced any details of the design competition, and didn’t respond to a request for comment. The plan might ultimately be vaporware, like his proposal to buy Greenland, or an unfinished logistical and legal fiasco like the Mexican border wall. But its mere existence reflects how quickly the political polarity can flip around America’s future-oriented policy ideas. It also might just be hard, as actual new-city engineers will remind you. The Charter Cities Institute is a nonprofit, founded in 2017, with a sort of idealist-libertarian project to generate wealth and business opportunity by building new cities mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. Jeff Mason, the institute’s research manager, told me that whatever form it takes, those helming any such initiative in the U.S. will have their work cut out for them. “I definitely appreciate the big vision… but there are definitely some stumbling blocks when it comes to what it would actually take to get it done,” Mason said. For one, as activists on both sides of the YIMBY/NIMBY debate frequently point out, we already have plenty of housing in America — it’s just that much of it is poor quality or unaffordable. There’s also a location problem: In his speech announcing the plan Trump talked about using federal land, but most federal land “would be a really pretty poor location for new cities,” Mason said. Much of it is in the desert. The ultimate fate of a “Freedom Cities”-like project might matter less than the mere fact of its proposal, which intentionally or not reflects a new generation of Republican wonks’ future-minded approach to politics. A parting note, however, for conservatives looking to press fast-forward on the GOP’s plans for the future of cities or anything else: The old-timers who still largely prop the party up might have other ideas. “One of the paradoxes of a political ‘realignment,’ and people don't like thinking about this, is that a pro-natalist housing agenda could indirectly harm another part of the Republican base,” Lars Schönander, a policy technologist at the conservative Lincoln Network, said. “I.e., the boomers — by lowering housing values, and making a lot of people very mad very quickly.”
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