When Donald Trump first described Freedom Cities in a campaign video in March 2023, the proposal drew a wave of coverage before largely fading from view. The idea of building up to 10 new master-planned cities on undeveloped federal land seemed to fall into the category of sweeping campaign promises that rarely come to pass.
Three years later, Freedom Cities have not yet been built. No sites have been officially announced. A source with knowledge of White House discussions told NOTUS in January 2026 that the initiative had appeared dormant.
But dormant doesn’t mean abandoned. Behind the scenes, a network of conservative and libertarian policy organizations has spent time doing the detailed work that the original Agenda 47 proposal left undone: identifying sites, drafting model legislation, publishing economic projections, and building a coalition of institutional support.
The result is that Freedom Cities, heading into the spring of 2026, are more developed as a policy concept than at any point since Trump first raised the idea. According to the American Enterprise Institute’s Housing Center, an announcement of potential sites could come as early as July 4th of this year.
What the Proposal Actually Involves
Agenda 47’s original Freedom Cities concept called for a national contest to award private development rights on undeveloped federal land. Trump described the cities as places that would “reopen the frontier, and reignite American imagination,” and offer families a new path to homeownership, though the specifics were thin.
The most detailed implementation plan now on the table comes from the AEI’s Housing Center, which published a blueprint in April 2025 called “Homesteading 2.0.” The plan calls for selling 850 square miles of Bureau of Land Management land across ten western states, divided into two initiatives.
The first, called Home Sweet Home, would sell 250 square miles of land near existing cities to build 1.5 million new homes. The second is Freedom Cities proper: 600 square miles of BLM land sold to private developers to create 20 new municipalities, each averaging about 30 square miles and projected to hold around 100,000 homes when fully built out over a 40 to 50-year timeline.
The 850 square miles total represents 0.3 percent of the roughly 267,000 square miles of BLM land in the lower 48 states. AEI projects the land sales alone would generate $100 billion in revenue to the Treasury over ten years, a figure its researchers have suggested could qualify for inclusion in a budget reconciliation bill.
A draft of the Freedom Cities Act, authored by Chapman University law professor Tom W. Bell, outlines a legal pathway to establish these jurisdictions. The Charter Cities Institute and the Frontier Foundation have both been working to move forward the concept in Washington. Paul Dans, who led the conservative transition-planning project known as Project 2025, described Freedom Cities in April 2025 as the “construction phase” that would follow what he characterized as the administration’s “demolition” of existing regulatory structures.
The Regulatory Vision
The most consequential and contested element of the Freedom Cities proposal is what rules would apply inside them. Some proponents envision jurisdictions that operate largely outside the reach of existing federal and state regulations.
Bloomberg Law, reporting on the proposal in April 2025, described the end goal as high-tech company towns free from state law and most federal rules, including major environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, worker protection statutes such as the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the Affordable Care Act. Agenda 47 specifically called for creating “an ultra-streamlined federal regulatory framework” for Freedom Cities.
The AEI’s framing is somewhat less sweeping but points in the same direction. Its materials portray a “light-touch, rules-based” locale built around “flexible, market-driven growth” and “classical liberalism in the practical sense.” The argument is that the regulatory environment governing American cities is a primary driver of the housing affordability crisis and economic stagnation in many regions. Starting fresh without those constraints would allow Freedom Cities to develop faster and more affordably than any existing jurisdiction could.
Opponents are not convinced. Environmental groups have raised alarms about the implications of privatizing BLM land that currently sits outside development restrictions. The Wilderness Society has called the broader push for privatizing public lands a real threat to federal public lands.
Urban scholars have questioned whether cities designed around deregulation can achieve the economic and social density that makes urban environments productive. Max Woodworth, an associate professor of geography at Ohio State University, has described the push as aimed at creating “government-endorsed libertarian tech hubs.”
Where the Sites Would Be Built
AEI has published an interactive map identifying candidate locations, focusing on BLM land in the ten western states where the agency’s holdings are concentrated: Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, California, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, and Montana. The criteria prioritize land near existing metropolitan areas, access to clean water, and proximity to transportation infrastructure.
Each Freedom City, under the AEI blueprint, would average about 30 square miles of adjacent BLM land. The plan calls for 40 percent of that land to be dedicated to housing, with the remaining 60 percent available for commercial development, public space, and infrastructure. Built out over decades, each city would be sized to function as a mid-tier American metropolitan area.
The Investment Case
While the debates have played out in Washington, a parallel conversation has been growing among investors and analysts about what Freedom Cities would mean as a capital-allocation opportunity if they move forward.
Neel Somani, a published researcher and former quantitative researcher at Citadel Securities, has framed Freedom Cities as a potential answer to a structural problem in institutional investing. In a recent essay, Somani argued that the venture capital model built around software is under considerable pressure from both ends: AI tools have made software cheap to build, reducing the need for outside capital, while the ease of copying any software product has eroded the defensibility of software revenue.
The result, Somani says, is that a large pool of institutional capital is seeking a place to go. His proposed framework, which he calls the BLAST thesis, identifies assets that monetize boredom, loneliness, and physical scarcity as the most structurally durable investment categories available. Land, in particular scarce and well-located land, sits at the center of that thesis.
“The ultimate BLAST investment is an entirely new city or country,” Somani noted. “Land is inherently scarce, particularly oceanfront property. New city development opens the door to building luxury housing, but also luxury services.”
The Political Reality
The gap between the policy infrastructure and actual implementation remains wide. Congressional action would be required for many of the changes that Freedom Cities proponents envision, including amendments to federal environmental and labor laws that would create genuinely deregulated zones. Seventeen of the policies outlined in Agenda 47 require congressional approval, and Freedom Cities in their full form would almost certainly be among them.
The White House has not publicly endorsed any specific site proposal or timeline. When NOTUS asked administration officials about the status of various Agenda 47 commitments in early 2026, a spokeswoman said the president is “fully committed to delivering on every promise he made,” but did not address Freedom Cities specifically. Officials described some initiatives as “low-hanging fruit” that would be easier to pursue now that larger legislative priorities, including tax cuts, have cleared.
Whether Freedom Cities fall into that category or the long-term backlog is not yet clear. What is clear is that the proposal has more institutional infrastructure behind it than it did a year ago, and that a July 4th announcement, if it comes, would mark the moment the idea moves from a blueprint to something that could be put into action.
What Happens Next
The question now is whether the administration will use existing executive power to advance any part of the Freedom Cities agenda without waiting for congressional action. The Interior Department, under Secretary Doug Burgum, has already moved to reclassify some BLM land as available for development as part of a broader push to treat federal land as an economic asset. That framing, if extended, could open a pathway for site designations even before a formal legislative framework is in place.
The AEI’s timeline calls for land sales to be well underway by July 4, 2026, with Freedom City sites announced on that date. Whether that timeline holds depends on decisions being made right now inside the Interior Department and the White House Domestic Policy Council.
For observers like Somani, the political outcome is somewhat beside the point. The structural argument for new cities as an investment category does not depend on any particular administration moving quickly. It depends on the underlying economics of scarcity, and on the continued erosion of software as a default destination for institutional capital.
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