When Donald Trump was running for president, he pledged to build 10 new US cities, dubbed “freedom cities,” from scratch, designed to improve the qual
When Donald Trump was running for president, he pledged to build 10 new US cities, dubbed “freedom cities,” from scratch, designed to improve the quality of life for Americans.
These new high-tech communities were to be created on public land, and they were going to be free of the “nightmare of red tape,” including lengthy environmental reviews, that had hampered the development of affordable housing in many parts of the US.
Freedom cities aren’t really a new idea. They are a rebranding of charter cities, which have been around since the late 1800s. Still, Trump’s proposal won the gung-ho support of many of Silicon Valley’s tech bros, whose backing helped tilt the last US presidential election in his direction, and many of whom — e.g., the PayPal mafia consisting of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan — were also enthusiastic early supporters of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.
In mid-March, the new administration made some tentative moves to make freedom cities a reality. Department of Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner announced a Joint Task Force on using underutilized federal land suitable for housing.
“America needs more affordable housing, and the federal government can make it happen by making federal land available to build affordable housing stock,” they wrote in The Wall Street Journal.
How serious is one to take this idea of new, free-floating cities to be built on federally owned land? The administration says freedom cities are needed to help quell the national housing crisis.
But others suggest that building new communities free from many state and federal laws and rules, like the Clean Water Act or the Endangered Species Act, is to create places that are, in effect, outside of the law — “where the rules are suspended and don’t apply anymore to certain people.” And if so, what does that mean for the rest of the country?
“These are not normal times”
“In normal times, I might say the idea that the US federal government would spearhead a program to build any number of master-planned cities is rather preposterous,” Max Woodworth, an associate professor in the geography department at Ohio State University, told Cointelegraph, adding:
“But these are not normal times, and the current administration seems open to things that might previously have been dismissed, fairly or unfairly, as impossible or misguided.”
Freedom cities have their critics. They have been called a “devious scam,” aimed at bringing back “the bad old ‘company towns’ of yesteryear with a fresh coat of modern cryptofascist varnish.”
Indeed, company “scrip” was the medium of exchange in towns like Pullman, Illinois, built by George Pullman, owner of the Pullman Palace Car Company, in the late 19th century, whereas today “cryptocurrency is a key component of freedom cities,” the New Republic reported.
The history of chartered cities is checkered at best, commented Woodworth, and looking ahead much will depend on how they are designed and managed. “Over the years, there have been ‘new city’ plans intended to manifest fascist, communist, social-democratic, libertarian and post-colonial political agendas. For better and worse, urban space is very commonly used as a laboratory for different overt political projects.”
But maybe these are mischaracterizations. “Anyone who thinks Freedom Cities would be lawless should read fewer comic books and more copies of The Wall Street Journal,” Tom Bell, a professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, told Cointelegraph. “Building cities takes money, and investors don’t like lawlessness.” He added:
“That is not to say that all the usual regulations would apply in Freedom Cities; investors don’t like red tape, either. The goal is not getting rid of all regulation but rather finding new and better ways to guide investment, construction and business.”
Bell, who has been working with others to develop a Freedom Cities Act, would require a city’s board to favor developers’ applications that achieve the same outcomes as applicable current federal regulations, “but through alternative and more efficient enforcement regimes.”
Jeffrey Mason, head of policy at the Charter Cities Institute, also supports enabling federal legislation for freedom cities. “We’ve proposed that a process be created by which freedom cities could propose the waiving or other modification of highly burdensome regulations in sectors of strategic importance or in frontier technologies, much like the regulatory sandboxes adopted by various states in recent years,” he told Cointelegraph.
Others see a model along the lines of New York’s Brooklyn Navy Yard, the former military installation that was later transformed into an industrial park. It now houses more than 300…
cointelegraph.com