When Donald Trump was running for president, he pledged to build 10 new US cities, dubbed “freedom cities,” from scratch, designed to improve the quality of life for Americans.
These new high-tech communities were to be created on public land, and they were going to be free of the “nightmare of red tape,” including lengthy environmental reviews, that had hampered the development of affordable housing in many parts of the US.
Freedom cities aren’t really a new idea. They are a rebranding of charter cities, which have been around since the late 1800s. Still, Trump’s proposal won the gung-ho support of many of Silicon Valley’s tech bros, whose backing helped tilt the last US presidential election in his direction, and many of whom — e.g., the PayPal mafia consisting of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan — were also