History suggests there won’t be enough political will for ‘freedom cities’ to achieve their promise

As the United States approaches its 250th birthday on July 4, a coalition of libertarian think tanks is pushing the Trump administration to mark the occasion by unveiling the first sites for “freedom cities.” These privately developed towns built on federal land would fulfill Trump’s campaign promise to charter 10 such cities. They’re intended, in his words, to “reopen the frontier, reignite the American imagination, and give hardworking families a new shot at the American dream.”

Groups such as the Frontier Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Charter Cities Institute have run with what seemed like a far-fetched campaign promise. They have drafted proposals to hand public land to private developers for single-family homes and high-tech enclaves free from state and federal oversight. These groups have latched onto the idea of “freedom cities,” because the towns tap into a cluster of contemporary American anxieties about housing affordability, stagnant social mobility and global economic competition, especially with China.

Trump and his allies see these cities as an innovative solution to major American problems, but they’re hardly new. Freedom Cities continue a long history of Americans looking to their vast endowment of public land as a safety valve for social and economic pressures. This is a “supply-side” solution for perceived scarcity, whether of housing or freedom from regulatory red tape.

Yet, while tapping public land is a common move, the history of such undertakings — especially government-engineered colonies on public land in the early 20th century — suggests that the Freedom Cities face long odds of achieving their promise. Traditionally, the political will has faltered and such projects have collapsed long before the crises they’re designed to address abate.

The Homestead Act of 1862 remains the most famous of Congress’ many attempts to underwrite opportunity through grants of essentially free land. But striking the right balance between acreage and price — while preventing speculation and corruption — proved difficult. In the two centuries between 1789 and 1976, when the Federal Land and Policy Management Act effectively ended private sales of public land, Congress passed hundreds of land laws and amendments. Most historians today would agree that the results were mixed at best.

Government colonies emerged from a similar impulse to use public land to achieve social and economic goals at the state level. In the wake of World War I, legislators across the U.S. West began to fear for the future of the family farm. Modern farming required capital, technology and expertise that often exceeded the capacity of an ordinary individual. In the arid West, farming demanded mass irrigation, which only the government could afford to build. Meanwhile, farmland values grew exponentially, especially in California.

State legislators worried that without farm work, landless Americans would congregate in cities as they had in Europe and Russia, and that this might foment radical ideas about socialism, communism and anarchism. “A prosperous farmer on his land does not turn berserker or run amok,” promised a 1920 California state pamphlet.

The solution was utopia by statue. To keep small farmers in business, five states, beginning with California in 1917, passed Land Settlement Acts, empowering state officials to build planned farming colonies on state-owned land.

In California, the project fell to Elwood Mead, a civil engineer who oversaw the state’s acquisition of 6,239 acres in Durham, Butte County. The site seemed like a good bet. It was fertile, well-watered and close to a highway and rail connections. Mead invited Americans to apply for farm allotments while the state constructed irrigation and officials planned the layout of farm buildings, orchards and gardens. This was not private speculation but the expert-led engineering of a new community from scratch.

For a few years, it appeared to work. Even after costs ran more than double the state’s appropriation of $260,000, forcing residents to take out loans, they were able to keep up with their payments. With European agriculture still recovering from World War I, commodity prices remained high and state officials interpreted those windfalls as a sign of success. Mead reported that “considerably more than half the [Durham] settlers were tenant farmers, and they would still be renters if they had been compelled to buy under ordinary commercial conditions.” The Durham colony, Mead declared, guaranteed “independence, ambition, [and] self-respect” for its settlers.

Emboldened, in 1920 the California legislature authorized $1 million ($16.5 million in 2026 dollars) to purchase 8,400 acres for a second colony in Delhi, Merced County. Delhi’s sandy soil required far more preparation than Durham’s, meaning the state’s investment would pay off only after years of stable yields and favorable market conditions.

But state support didn’t last. Mead, it turned out, had cooked the books at Durham, misleading the legislature. Settlers quickly drained their personal savings to keep up with loan payments. After the nationwide agricultural depression in the early 1920s, both colonies’ finances collapsed. In 1923, Mead skipped town.

The next year, after spending $2.5 million over four years, the California legislature admitted defeat at Delhi. Following extensive litigation, it shuttered its experiment in engineering a utopian farming future. The settlers weren’t bad farmers. It’s just that they required state subsidies, stable global markets and honest accounting to succeed.

Perhaps ironically, to endure economic depression and environmental constraints, California’s utopian colonies needed more government, not less. But in the 1920s, the agricultural downturn and rising fiscal conservatism among voters and their officials, including Friend W. Richardson, elected governor in 1922, eroded the political will for state-directed rural planning.

Yet, that cautionary tale didn’t deter the federal government from trying something even more ambitious a decade later. In 1935, Franklin D. Roosevelt launched one of his vaunted New Deal agencies: the Resettlement Administration, run by Columbia economist Rexford Tugwell. It proposed to build 100 “greenbelt towns” on the outskirts of major cities. The vision was utopian: modern, well-designed communities housing low- and middle-income families in garden settings, shielded from the squalor of unplanned urban growth. They would be cooperative, self-governing and superior to anything the private market had produced.

Three towns were built: Greenbelt, Md.; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wis. They were architectural and planning achievements. Greenbelt, outside Washington, D.C., was admired for its curved streets designed to limit through traffic, communal green spaces and cooperative stores. Life magazine called it a model for the future.

There was a problem, however: the government invested roughly $16,000 per unit — about 10 times the cost of a private home at the time. In a country still climbing out of depression, that figure proved politically toxic.

The backlash was almost immediate. Real estate and homebuilders’ associations, alarmed by the prospect of federally subsidized communities competing with private development, mobilized against the program. They found allies in a new conservative coalition of Republicans and southern Democrats in Congress who began rolling back New Deal initiatives in 1937 and 1938. Critics branded the greenbelt towns “socialist colonies” and “Tugwelltowns,” after their architect. The label stuck because Tugwell had visited the Soviet Union in 1927 as part of a U.S. trade delegation and had praised state planning, making him an easy target.

The 1937 recession drained Roosevelt’s political capital, and in 1938, Congress defunded the program. Tugwell resigned. After World War II, the federal government sold the greenbelt towns to private developers and residents’ cooperatives, washing its hands of the experiment. They survive today as pleasant, somewhat quirky suburbs, fossils of a dream that the government could not sustain as a reality.

Today’s advocates of Freedom Cities present their proposal as a tech-enabled departure from the timid incrementalism of conventional planning. But what they propose is actually part of an American ritual: imagining public land as a blank slate somehow immune from contemporary economic, environmental and political challenges.

A century ago, state-sponsored colonies were going to make land affordable again and save the family farm. Ninety years ago, greenbelt towns hoped to prove that the U.S. government could outbuild the private market. And now, Freedom Cities purport to solve the housing crisis, outcompete China and restore the frontier spirit, all while remaining exempt from the federal management and environmental and labor regulations that, according to advocates, are the source of America’s problems, not hard-won protections against them. In the past, however, the crises that give rise to these so-called utopias — whether agricultural collapse or housing scarcity — outlasted the political will required to build the utopias meant to solve them. Freedom Cities depend on the same fragile arrangements: federal land transfers, regulatory exemptions and sustained political protection by the very government their boosters claim to escape. History suggests that arrangement won’t hold.

Daniela Blei is a historian, editor and book coach who helps writers develop and finish their books. Find her at Daniela-blei.com/writing and scholarsandwriters.com.

Tamara Venit-Shelton is Professor of History at Claremont McKenna College.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of The Inquirer.