My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers,

It’s unfortunate: America has forgotten how to build cities, or maybe it just lost interest. The last major one was Irvine, California, incorporated back in 1971, just as a half-century of Down Wing thinking conquered this country.

Since then, a growing nationwide shortage of now four to eight million homes—driven by restrictive zoning, long permitting delays, and costly regulations—has pushed housing out of reach for too many families. All that, annoyingly, while vast tracts of federally managed land in the American West sit unused despite their potential to relieve pressure.

The case, then, for building entirely new cities seems pretty strong to me. And unlike merely retrofitting congested metros—as the density-obsessed “abundance” folks typically stress—we could unlock this land to expand supply at scale and create affordable, livable communities with all different types of housing from the ground up.

First, what counts as a “city?” The bar should be high: a self-governing municipality with its own housing, infrastructure, job base, and civic institutions. So not a subdivision or exurb, but a true urban entity. By that measure, Irvine qualifies. Planned on the Irvine Ranch—a 93,000-acre tract of farmland once owned by the Irvine Company developer—and anchored by a University of California campus, Irvine was incorporated with municipal powers and grew into a thriving city of 300,000. It has schools, jobs, and an identity distinct from Los Angeles. This is the sort of urban project the US has abandoned.

Freedom on the frontier

Second, how does this big, blank slate build-out actually happen? Two colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute, Arthur Gailes and Edward J. Pinto, recently proposed a smart, workable blueprint, “Freedom Cities: Homesteading for the 21st Century.” (The report leads off with the example of Irvine.)

The idea: Auction 10–100 square mile tracts of Bureau of Land Management land in the West to private developers, and allow incorporation as municipalities. With “freedom zoning”—broad property rights, mixed use, minimal red tape—developers could build 30,000 to 200,000 homes per site. The largest might house 400,000 to 600,000 people, comparable to major metros like Kansas City or Atlanta, by my math.

The top 20 candidates alone could yield nearly 1.4 million homes, creating $500 billion in property value and $5 billion in annual tax revenue, all while using less than 0.1 percent of federal land. Moreover, the plan rests on solid legal ground: the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976 explicitly authorizes land sales for the expansion of communities and economic development when those goals can’t be achieved prudently elsewhere.

Mobility, not monuments

When considering a plan anything like this one, my baseline is informed greatly by the perspective of Alain Bertaud, the veteran World Bank urbanist and author of the Hayekian Order Without Design. For Bertaud, cities are not architectural set-pieces but labor markets. Their purpose is to connect people to jobs and firms to talent. That means two policy priorities above all: mobility and affordability.

Freedom Cities score well on the second. By unleashing dense, market-driven housing on federal land, they could take pressure off constrained metros and allow more workers to live near opportunity.

The challenge is mobility. Bertaud warns that people don’t move to cities for their winning sports teams or abundance of bike lanes, but to join other people. If a Freedom City can’t plug into an existing metro’s job market with a decent commute, it risks becoming an isolated dormitory.

Good news: The paper’s siting criteria—proximity to highways, airports, and regional hubs addresses this concern. By locating within commuting range of established urban areas, these new communities can attract employers, benefit from existing infrastructure, and foster the filtering effects (how housing frees up older units that gradually become affordable to lower-income households) that make housing more affordable across income levels.

(Private ventures are circling similar concepts, by the way. California Forever, backed by Silicon Valley investors, aims—over decades—to build a city of up to 400,000 people in Solano County and has proposed the “Solano Foundry,” the self-described largest advanced-manufacturing park in America, with expedited permitting. Elon Musk has pursued a company-town-style community near Austin (Snailbrook) and has gained official city status for Starbase.)

Lessons from past experiments

Critics will surely note that building new cities is notoriously hard. Washington had a go in the 1970s with HUD’s New Community Development Act. Most of the 13 federally backed towns collapsed once subsidies dried up, leaving little more than empty plots and unpaid debts.

The rare successes tell a different story and provide a lesson for policymakers, as the AEI paper explains. Irvine thrived thanks to the Irvine Ranch’s vast landholdings and the anchor of a UC campus. The Woodlands near Houston survived because its developer, George Mitchell, could absorb losses until demand arrived. Highlands Ranch boomed without federal aid at all, financed privately and buoyed by Denver’s sprawl. When private capital, large land parcels, and market demand align, new communities endure. Planners should provide infrastructure and otherwise step aside.

The strangest fact is how little America has tried since then. For example: Between Los Angeles and San Francisco lies a 300-mile stretch of coast with no major city at all. Planner M. Nolan Gray calls it “a NIMBY paradise anchored by a city whose tallest building is a parking garage.” By rights, two or three million-person metros could exist there. Instead, strict land-use rules have frozen growth.

Time to try again. Unlike the 1970s, housing demand is undeniable. In the ten Western states, home prices have jumped 164 percent over the past decade, compared with 123 percent nationwide. Even twenty Freedom Cities could ease pressure for millions. The prize is not just houses but proof America still knows how to build.