Free Cities

SACRAMENTO – One of the silliest things about the urbanism movement is its insistence that suburbanites abandon single-family homes, spacious yards and placid neighborhoods for the excitement of big-city living. In those cities, we can supposedly experience more “community,” reduce our carbon footprint and take a bike to buy overpriced groceries at ...

Watch as the Free Cities Center’s Steven Greenhut interviews the Manhattan Institute’s Judge Glock. They talk about what can be done to stimulate more housing construction, the latest anti-free market efforts of California NIMBY’s to stop new housing, how policymakers can increase housing affordability, and how free market reforms can ...

Converting offices to homes helps ease housing crunch By John Seiler | September 6, 2024 “There is no logic that can be superimposed on the city; people make it, and it is to them, not buildings, that we must fit our plans.” —Jane Jacobs, author As cities in California and ...

  Transit’s failure to recover from the pandemic is due largely to its downtown-centric orientation in most urban areas. Before the pandemic, almost half of all transit commuters in the nation’s 50 largest urban areas worked downtown, and almost half of downtown workers commuted by transit whereas less than 6% ...

Does Oakland show any hope of exiting its doom loop? by Matthew Fleming | August 30, 2024 Even before FBI agents raided the home of Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao in late June, it was safe to wonder: What the heck is wrong with Oakland? Defenders of the city point to ...

As of February 2024, 59 U.S. cities had adopted Vision Zero, including 13 in California. Indianapolis is one of the latest to jump on the bandwagon, and it has already begun implementing some of its strategies. These include reducing speed limits to 20 mph and banning right turns on red ...

Officials reported a 29% decrease in overall homelessness in 2024 compared to 2022. But this coincides with a change in methodology in how people were counted, as well as a discrepancy between the count and what local nonprofits are finding on the ground. And one year does not make a ...

More Californians plan exit as home prices top $900K By Steven Greenhut | August 22, 2024 When I received a job offer to move from Northwest Ohio to Orange County, Calif., in the 1990s, I thought that I had hit the lottery. The 3.1-million-population county has nearly perfect weather, idyllic beaches, ...

Court frees cities to deal with their homelessness crises By Steven Greenhut  |  August 16, 2024 SACRAMENTO – During a recent trip to Grants Pass, Ore., I took a photo of the city’s iconic downtown sign stating, “It’s the Climate” and then posted it on social media as I often do with ...

Conservatives and right-of-center types tend to believe in the Jeffersonian principle that “​​the government closest to the people serves the people best.” As brilliant as Thomas Jefferson was, he couldn’t possibly get everything right, and on this count, he’s only about half correct. Sure, it’s easier to march down to ...