Freedom Cities.
According to the American Enterprise Institute's Housing Center, July 4th is the target date for the Trump administration to name the sites of its first Freedom Cities: master-planned municipalities carved out of Bureau of Land Management land in the American West, operating under a radically streamlined regulatory framework and built from scratch on undeveloped federal property.
The proposal has been part of Agenda 47 since Trump first floated it in March 2023, and for most of that time, it has been in limbo between a policy ambition and a thought experiment. The White House has not formally responded to site proposals. The BLM's acting director said as recently as last year that the bureau had not seen a specific proposal. A source familiar with internal discussions told NOTUS in early 2026 that the idea had appeared dormant.
And yet the policy infrastructure around Freedom Cities has continued to build. The AEI published a detailed blueprint in April 2025, "Homesteading 2.0," that identified sites for 20 new cities on 600 square miles of BLM land, projecting 1.5 million homes and $100 billion in land-sale revenue to the Treasury.
A draft Freedom Cities Act, authored by Chapman University law professor Tom W. Bell, outlines a legal pathway for these jurisdictions. The Charter Cities Institute and the Frontier Foundation are both actively promoting the concept. Paul Dans, the former head of Project 2025, described Freedom Cities in April 2025 as the "construction phase" that would follow the administration's "demolition" of the administrative state.
Whether the July 4th announcement comes or not, Freedom Cities have moved from campaign rhetoric into a serious policy and investment conversation. The question worth asking now is not whether it is politically viable. The question is whether the economic thesis underlying it is sound.
Neel Somani has been thinking about exactly that question. His answer, laid out in a recent essay called "The BLAST Playbook," is that new cities represent not just a housing policy but something far more significant: the most structurally compelling large-scale capital allocation opportunity available right now.
Somani's argument starts with a problem that has nothing to do with housing policy. The venture capital model that has dominated institutional investing for the better part of two decades is being squeezed from both ends.
On one side, AI development tools have made software dramatically cheaper and faster to build, which means the best founders increasingly have no reason to take outside capital. They can get to revenue without giving up equity. On the other side, anything that can be built quickly can also be copied quickly, which means software revenue is losing the defensibility that justified the valuations and return assumptions baked into most funds.
The consequence, in Somani's framing, is stark: somewhere between $500 billion and $1 trillion in annual investment capital is flowing through a model that no longer works as well as it did. Funds will underperform. Managers who do not adapt will eventually close. And a significant pool of institutional capital will need to go somewhere else.
Somani's proposed alternative for where that capital should flow is what he calls the BLAST thesis, an acronym for Boredom, Loneliness, and Scarcity. The underlying reasoning is that the most sustainable investment opportunities are the ones rooted in human psychology rather than in any particular technology cycle.
Boredom does not go away because software gets cheaper. People will always spend on distractions, entertainment, and novelties. Loneliness doesn't disappear because platforms multiply. People pay for status, and for the feeling of being seen and valued. Scarcity does not erode because digital goods become abundant. Physical rarity holds its premium specifically because it cannot be replicated.
The challenge with these is not that they lack value. It is because deploying institutional capital into them through existing vehicles is tricky. Buying into incumbent consumer brands does not generate the kind of returns that justify the risk. Investing in existing real estate funds does not provide the upside that venture-scale pools seek. The category is real, but the instrument has been missing.
Somani's answer is that an entirely new city is the purest expression of the BLAST thesis available. Land is inherently scarce. The scarcest land compounds in value over time precisely because supply cannot grow to meet demand. A new city built on that land is not just a real estate play. It is the infrastructure through which every other BLAST asset can be delivered at scale.
The asset stack he describes is deliberate and layered. Luxury housing generates the capital density at the foundation. Elite private schools, exclusive fitness facilities, high-end wellness clinics, and curated social venues layer on top. Each of these absorbs meaningful investment while directly serving the loneliness and boredom legs of the thesis. A resident paying for membership in a private club is not paying for a physical space. They are paying for access, status, and community, which are among the most ironclad products in the economy.
The mechanism Agenda 47 foresees is a contest that awards private development rights to build on federal land. The AEI's Homesteading 2.0 blueprint, the most detailed implementation proposal publicly available, calls for selling 600 square miles of BLM land to create 20 new cities, each averaging about 30 square miles and capable of housing around 100,000 homes when fully built out over a 40 to 50-year timeline.
The locations identified by AEI are primarily in the American West, near the outskirts of existing metropolitan centers in Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, and Colorado, as well as other states with BLM holdings. The 850 total square miles involved represents just 0.3 percent of the BLM's lower-48 landholdings.
Proponents envision jurisdictions operating outside most federal rules, including major environmental laws, labor protections, and existing tax frameworks. Bloomberg Law described the end goal as high-tech company towns free from state law and most federal rules. The AEI's own materials describe a "light-touch, rules-based" backdrop designed to allow flexible, market-driven growth.
For critics, this is the most alarming part of the proposal. Environmental groups have raised concerns about BLM land privatization and the exclusion of conservation protections. Urban scholars have questioned whether cities designed from scratch around deregulation can achieve the social and economic diversity that makes cities function. The Wilderness Society has described the broader public land push as a real threat to federal public lands.
For proponents, it is precisely the point. The argument is that the regulatory environment in existing cities has made housing unaffordable and economic dynamism so difficult to sustain. Starting with a clean charter removes the constraints that have stalled development elsewhere.
With the potential announcement of Freedom City sites now months away, the concept is passing from the speculative into the operational phase. Whatever the White House announces this summer, the policy infrastructure is in place, the site analysis has been done, the model legislation has been drafted, and the investment thesis has been articulated in serious institutional terms.
The question Somani's BLAST framework raises is not whether Freedom Cities will work as a political project. The question is whether the economic logic of building new, intentionally designed jurisdictions on scarce land, layered with services that meet permanent human needs, holds up as an investment thesis. His response is that it does, and that the displacement of software capital will ultimately make that case much harder to ignore.
The capital has to go somewhere. Land that cannot be replicated, communities cannot be copied, and experiences that no software product can manufacture may turn out to be exactly what it's all about.
