Free Cities

Parking deregulation helps cities and promotes property rights By D. Dowd Muska | July 11, 2025 You can fight city hall. But if the dispute involves parking, don’t expect the battle to be brief. That’s the bitter and expensive lesson learned by Azael “Oz” Sepulveda, an auto mechanic in Pasadena, Texas. For ...

When it comes to its perennial housing crisis, the city of Los Angeles will seek out any scapegoat it can find if it means avoiding having to admit the city’s own policies are at the root of the problem. It should come as no surprise that the city permitted just ...

The Senate voted 51-44 vote to revoke an EPA waiver that allowed the state to set emission standards stricter than those set by the federal government. Earlier this month, President Donald Trump signed the measure as well as two related ones. In 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order ...

Watch as Free Cities Center director Steven Greenhut takes a tour of the city of Roseville’s thriving downtown.  Learn what makes this downtown so vibrant and why it is so important for suburban communities to have downtowns.   We’ll also visit of one of the downtown Roseville’s successful businesses – ...

More than 18,000 structures were burned in Los Angeles County in January. The greatest losses were in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena. While updating the recovery “progress” more than three months ago, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass vowed that she was “committed to rebuilding” this community at “lightning speed.” “I just ...

Regulation bottlenecks impede state’s infrastructure grants by Sarah Downey  | June 26, 2025 Editor’s Note: While the Free Cities Center advocates for regulations that encourage market-rate construction rather than affordable-housing subsidies, it’s useful to look at the status of the myriad grant programs that the state government is offering—and the ...

To be charitable, miners brave enough to go digging can discover occasional nuggets of value in Madrigal’s ponderous, and entirely predictable, jeremiad. For example: Oakland had its own version of the urban-renewal thuggery that would eventually lead to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London. In ...

Irony alert: California Dems tackle ‘cost of living’ Don’t expect high-priced California cities to become more affordable any time soon. By Steven Greenhut  |  June 13, 2025 The latest news about the California Legislature’s efforts to tackle the state’s preposterously high cost of living should cause Californians to snigger. “California ...