Time for Trump to go all in on Freedom Cities for the midterms
Wonks won’t build the housing we need — but a brash former real estate mogul just might
During the doldrums of the early 2024 Republican primary, Donald Trump released a bunch of oddly specific policy proposals. One of them was to charter ten new “Freedom Cities” on federal land:
We’ve not heard much about this proposal since it was first made in March 2023. But with affordability showing no signs of going away as an issue, it’s time for the White House to dust off this bold Abundance-pilled vision to build the housing the country desperately needs. (And yes, this was the proposal that was paired with talk of flying cars.)
Many liberals this year have latched on to abundance as an organizing principle, bemoaning the failures of the left to build in the cities and states it controls. This criticism, which I heartily agree with, does have a certain honest quality of telling on yourself. Temperamentally, liberalism has hewed towards legalism and consensus. Unlike Trump, they’re not the people you expect to see taking bold action or big risks. At its core, this personality difference is a lot of why you don’t see housing getting built in blue cities and states. Republican governance, on the other hand, is market-oriented and pragmatic, adopting a default posture that building to meet market demand is a good thing.
Blue state paralysis is the temperamental opposite of Trump — someone who tears things down so he can build what he considers something new and better in its place.
In a country facing a housing shortage, this brash rule-bending ethos might be just what we need. Debating abundance at conferences or through white papers won’t get it done. Market pragmatism paired with giving real estate developers free rein to build, build, build is what you need to expand supply and drive down cost.
I’m deeply sympathetic to the liberal abundance crowd, preferring them to far-left progressives — and much preferring it to extremely cringe normie liberals. But many of their proposals for housing are often weak and incremental, consisting of urbanism and infill development in cities. I don’t disagree there should be many more skyscrapers in San Francisco, but the average American who can’t afford to buy a house doesn’t want to live in San Francisco.
Instead, the places where market-driven housing abundance is actually happening are in the Sun Belt, places like Prosper, Texas, where arid patches of land have been transformed from literally nothing in the course of a few years. That’s the same story of how large swaths of Texas and Florida or Phoenix and Las Vegas have been developed: on open land where it’s easy to build, in places where people want to live. These are the places where it’s still possible to buy a 3-bedroom single family starter home on the average salary. This type of abundance may be right-coded, but it is abundance all the same. And it’s the most successful kind.
Matt Yglesias even had a book about this kind of growth: One Billion Americans. America is relatively empty compared to other countries, and can house many more people. The best way to solve the housing crisis is not by doubling down on coastal agglomeration, but by spreading the population out using our surplus of open land, much of it owned by the federal government.
Freedom Cities are where the Yglesias and Trump visions meet.
“Trump will build it”
Donald Trump is immune to outside messaging advice because he has well-honed instincts and much of it is pretty milquetoast. No, Donald Trump doesn’t need to do more to “feel your pain” on affordability. No one believes feeling your pain is what he’s good at.
What he is good at is cutting deals to get major projects done in the private sector. And it’s a skill set that just happens to intersect with the need to build a lot of housing, a goal that spans the political spectrum.
These are his instincts when it comes to the AI buildout. They can also be his instincts when it comes to building housing. And Freedom Cities are just a start.
Trump does best when he is drawing contrasts. As he heads into the midterms, he can do events at major construction sites in red states and then jet off to blue cities to highlight their dysfunction. Have him do events surrounded by hardhat construction workers building real things people want in red states, and then go to LA to visit the blue state engineering marvel that is La Sombrita.
This is a contrast that Trump should greatly enjoy delivering, in contrast to a generic “affordability” message. And it’s something that can rally his voters, who are already quite well versed in the differences between Texas and Florida, and California. “Trump will build it” — and Democrats are too weak to — is the message.