What Happened to Donald Trump's Promised Freedom Cities?

On March 3, 2023, Donald Trump released a campaign video promising to charter up to ten new cities on federal land, chosen through a design competition and populated by young families, advanced factories and vertical takeoff vehicles. For about eighteen months the idea generated a cottage industry of think tank reports, draft legislation, maps and alarmed op-eds. Then it went quiet. A PolitiFact review in February 2026 found no legislation in Congress that mentions freedom cities, and no record that Trump has said the phrase since 2023, when he made the promise as a candidate.

The Freedom Cities program, as a presidential initiative, is dead. But idea did not vanish. It split into pieces to try to seek viability, and, as it turns out, building the financial and legal means to build new cities in the United States is pretty daunting.

When Trump Proposed Ten New Cities on Federal Land

The original pitch was short on mechanics. Trump said the cities would be built on federally owned land and awarded through a competitive bidding process among submitted master plans, and his campaign advisers compared the proposal to Lincoln's transcontinental railroad, Teddy Roosevelt's national parks and Eisenhower's interstates. The stated goals were housing affordability, manufacturing competitiveness with China and a revived frontier spirit.

It was a compelling concept. As many rapidly growing parts of the world have blossomed over the last several decades, cities from Dubai to Shenzhen have seemingly emerged from nothing and changed the global balance of economic power. America's geographic center of gravity has shifted, but most of the new cities that have emerged are essentially suburbs of the old ones.

Further, over the last several decades America has seen the affordability of housing deteriorate, with the average cost of housing relative to incomes double what it was six decades ago. A big reason America was affordable for so long was that America had an unusually large number of viable places to live relative to other countries - estimates suggest there are over 18,500 incorporated cities in the United States. But as America became an economy dominated by white collar jobs rather than blue collar ones, a land rent premium emerged in many of the largest coastal cities, while it became harder to find one's fortunes in smaller cities like Gary of Dubuque. New cities, if furnished with enough investment to become real centers of economic gravity, could potentially help alleviate the problem.

The press treated the Freedom Cities promise as a novelty. An academic review in Urban Geography noted that the plan was largely ignored after a brief round of dismissive commentary. That changed after the 2024 election, when people with money and an interest in the projects decided to take the promise literally.

The Freedom Cities Coalition and the Draft Federal Enclave Bill

The most aggressive interpretation came from the people who had already built a version abroad. The Freedom Cities Coalition was organized as a project of NeWay Capital, which has been central to Próspera, the private charter zone in Honduras. In March 2025, Próspera chief of staff Trey Goff told WIRED that coalition representatives had been meeting with the Trump administration, that he found it very receptive, and that the goal was not ten cities but as many as the market would bear. The pitch was places where anti-aging trials, reactor startups and construction could proceed without prior sign-off from the FDA, NRC or EPA.

The draft Freedom Cities Act that circulated in Washington was more radical than anything Trump had said. It would establish the cities as federal enclaves exempt from major statutes, including the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act and OSHA. The land would not be sold but leased for 99 years, the cities would self-regulate under a federal board, and the drafters cited the 1906 Antiquities Act as authority for creating the enclaves. Invoking a monument preservation statute to authorize exemption from environmental law is a creative piece of drafting. Critics also noted that as written, the bill would bar Freedom City residents from voting in state elections.

The more moderate version came from the American Enterprise Institute. Its April 2025 "Homesteading 2.0" blueprint proposed selling 250 square miles of BLM land near existing cities for 1.5 million homes, plus 600 square miles for roughly 20 new cities holding another 1.5 million homes over 40 to 50 years. This was a housing supply argument dressed in frontier language, and it had a plausible path: land disposal is something Congress and the Interior Department already know how to do.

The White House Never Picked It Up

The administration's actual land policy went in a different, smaller direction. In March 2025, HUD Secretary Scott Turner and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum launched a Joint Task Force on Federal Land for Housing to find underused land and streamline its transfer for residential development. Their framing was transfers or leases to housing authorities, nonprofits and local governments, which is infill at the edges of existing towns, not new cities. BLM's acting director said the task force was looking at land within up to ten miles of cities and towns larger than 5,000 people.

Even that went dark. The Wilderness Society sued Interior, BLM and HUD in January 2026 to force release of task force records, arguing the agencies had disclosed almost nothing about its work. The memorandum creating it required a report to the National Economic Council by April 15 on parcels identified and housing units built, without specifying which year. No such report has surfaced publicly.

The one serious legislative attempt failed on the Senate floor. Senator Mike Lee's original reconciliation amendment would have mandated sale of at least 2 million acres of BLM and Forest Service land across 11 Western states. The parliamentarian ruled against it, Lee shrank it to BLM land within five miles of population centers, and House Republicans threatened to sink the whole bill anyway. Lee withdrew it on June 28, 2025. The opposition was led by Western Republicans. The constituency for selling public land in the West is smaller in the West than it is in think tanks.

The movement made one last push this summer. The Frontier Foundation, AEI and the Charter Cities Institute urged the administration to unveil the first Freedom City sites on July 4 for the semiquincentennial. The holiday came and went with a state fair on the National Mall and fireworks. No sites were announced.

Starbase Is the Only One That Got Built, and It Used Ordinary Texas Law

The irony of the Freedom Cities debate is that the closest thing to an actual Freedom City was incorporated during it, with no federal involvement whatsoever. On May 3, 2025, Cameron County voters approved incorporating Starbase 212 to 6, and elected SpaceX vice president Bobby Peden as mayor alongside two SpaceX employees as commissioners. The practical payoff was authority to close the beach and roads for launches. The Texas Legislature subsequently granted the new city that beach closure power, and in June 2026 Starbase joined the state municipal retirement system as its 946th member.

Starbase is a company town. It is also, legally, an unremarkable Texas municipality. The city reports more than 500 full-time residents, and it is not privately owned in any legal sense. It needed no enclave, no exemption from the Clean Water Act and no act of Congress. It needed a willing county, a small electorate and a state legislature happy to help. That is the American model of special jurisdiction, and it has been available since the nineteenth century.

Próspera: The Template Survives in Honduras

The project that inspired the Freedom Cities Coalition has had a far better 2026 than its American offspring. Honduras's Supreme Court declared the ZEDE framework unconstitutional in 2024, and Próspera responded with an arbitration claim that started at $10.775 billion and later offered $1.63 billion as an alternative. Then Honduran politics turned. Nasry Asfura was sworn in as president on January 27, 2026, and Honduras rejoined ICSID effective August 16, 2026. On September 15, Próspera named its own civil prosecutor on Roatán, which local critics called a modern coup.

For all the geopolitical drama, the city remains tiny. Independent reporting counted about 200 permanent residents in August 2026. Próspera is best understood as a legal product with a small physical plant. Its value to its backers lies in the arbitration claim and the jurisdictional precedent, not the housing.

California Forever Abandoned the New City to Save the Project

California Forever is the most serious city that fits the bill. Its subsidiary began buying Solano County farmland in 2018 and accumulated 62,000 acres. In 2024 it put forward the East Solano Plan to rezone 17,500 acres for a 400,000-person city, then pulled the ballot measure after grassroots opposition, weak polling and a critical county assessment.

The city then retreated into conventional municipal law. The East Solano Plan became the Suisun Expansion Plan and the Solano Shipyard, and having Suisun City annex the land lets the project avoid the countywide vote that Solano's orderly growth initiative requires for urban development on unincorporated land. Suisun City expects to finish its annexation and EIR work by the end of 2026, LAFCO review could take six to eighteen months, and the best case is groundbreaking by late 2027.

The pitch has also shifted from walkable city to defense industrial base. The company hired former Senate leaders Darrell Steinberg and Bob Hertzberg to seek state permission to rely on an 18-year-old environmental report for the shipyard, cap litigation at 270 days and authorize the Suisun annexation if needed. The prospective tenant is Saronic Technologies, an autonomous vessel builder choosing between California and Texas, and a Texas county court has approved substantial incentives to bring Saronic to Brownsville, which sits a short drive from Starbase.

The local politics remain hostile and are about to be tested. A January poll by opponents found fewer than one in five likely Suisun City voters supported the annexation. One of four challengers to Mayor Alma Hernandez in the November 3 election has promised to have allies on the council terminate the at-will agreement with California Forever on his first day. A 22,000-acre expansion plan in a city of roughly 29,000 people could live or die in a municipal election decided by a few thousand votes.

Telosa Remains a Set of Renderings

Telosa sits at the opposite end of the spectrum: all vision, no jurisdiction. Marc Lore announced it in 2021 as a $400 billion city of 5 million people on 150,000 acres, with a first phase of 50,000 residents on 1,500 acres costing more than $25 billion. BIG released new renderings in August 2025, including a timber mobility hub and an "Equitism Tower." There is still no site, and the project still lists Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Texas and Appalachia as candidates while targeting first residents by 2030.

Lore's attention seems to be elsewhere. He is planning to take his $7 billion food startup Wonder public in 2028 and has set a target of 10,000 locations by 2040. Telosa's central idea, a Georgist land endowment that captures appreciation for residents, is the most intellectually serious governance proposal in this entire genre. It is also the furthest from a shovel. A city that has not chosen a state in five years is hard to see coming to fruition. But it is possible.

The Real Constraint Is Political Durability, Not Land or Regulation

The Freedom Cities thesis held that the binding constraint on American city building is regulation, and that federal land plus federal exemption would release it. Every case since has contradicted that thesis.

Starbase got built because it achieved incorporation under existing state law. California Forever is advancing only to the extent it has abandoned the idea of a separate city and attached itself to an existing municipality, a union labor agreement and a defense contractor. Próspera survives because Honduran voters changed governments, which is the opposite of regulatory independence. Telosa, which has asked for nothing because it has nowhere to ask, has built nothing.

There is an older American precedent that the Freedom Cities advocates rarely mention. The New Deal Resettlement Administration planned 100 greenbelt towns and built three: Greenbelt, Maryland; Greenhills, Ohio; and Greendale, Wisconsin. At roughly $16,000 per unit, about ten times the cost of a private home at the time, they became politically toxic, and Congress defunded the program in 1938. After the war the government sold them off to developers and resident cooperatives. Greenhills is a perfectly pleasant suburb of Cincinnati today. It is also a monument to the fact that new towns outlive the coalitions that create them only if they quickly become ordinary places governed by ordinary rules.

New cities are thirty year projects. American federal politics runs on two year cycles and a president's attention runs shorter. A city that depends on continuing federal exemptions depends on every future Congress, every future Interior secretary and every future court declining to revoke them. No lender underwrites that. The new city projects that are moving in the United States, from Starbase to Suisun to the large master planned communities around Phoenix and Austin, share one feature: they reduce political risk by embedding themselves in state and local law rather than escaping it.

The Freedom Cities died as a legal program because the federal government was never really needed to make them administratively possible. The land was always available. The exemptions were never the point. What was missing was a jurisdiction willing to own the outcome, and a campaign video cannot charter that.

But, it is possible that the Freedom Cities concept does turn out to inspire at least one or two new massive developments that could succeed and could be innovative. Not earth-shattering, but one more interesting endeavor in a country that's full of them. And there's nothing wrong with that, so long as they don't expend too many resources chasing an unserious or unnecessary vision.

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