Free Cities

Hailing a flight: Cities drone on about advanced air mobility By D. Dowd Muska | February 27, 2026 It’s time to talk about flying taxis. Snicker all you want, but serious people — and deep pockets — are committing considerable resources to making airborne intra-city travel a thing. What the ...

Last fall, the Los Angeles Times reported that “Almost no one is building new apartments in Los Angeles.”  Fewer than 19,000 apartment units were under construction in the third quarter of last year. It was a 30% dip from three years earlier, the Times reported, based on a review from real ...

Who will win the battle between robots and public-employee unions? By Rafael Perez | February 20, 2026 For decades, artificial intelligence has been heralded for its potential to revolutionize the labor market and the creation of goods and services. Recent advancements in large language model (LLMs) performance by developers such ...

Many California cities will not fare so well on the fiscal roulette wheel. They’re not in Silicon Valley. Their local companies do not include Apple, NVIDIA, Meta/Facebook or Alphabet/Google (whose co-founders are leaving the state, while corporate HQ will remain). Those and many other companies’ rising stock valuations shed tax ...

Reality-television stars are rarely consulted on matters of public policy. But in April, Realtor.com asked Tarek El Moussa to comment on the White House’s “Liberation Day” tariffs.. The Southern California entrepreneur, who rose to fame on the popularity of HGTV’s Flip or Flop franchise, warned that higher import taxes would harm “new-home builders” ...

A simple few steps to provide more affordable, safer housing By Sal Rodriguez | February 6, 2026 Over the past few years, states and cities across the country have moved to cut red tape around their housing markets in order to spur greater supply and, in the long run, control ...

The top reason ex-Californians cite for leaving is housing costs — 890,000 exiters over the past decade named the cost of housing as their primary reason for leaving, compared to 514,000 for work and 329,000 for family. The National Taxpayers Union estimates outmigration costs California $4.5 billion in lost tax revenue each ...

Congestion in 2025: US cities fare well by international standards When measured by the amount of hours each commuter wastes in traffic per year, Lima, Peru, was the most congested city in the world in 2025, according to TomTom’s traffic index ranking. This was followed by Dublin, Ireland; Mexico City; and ...

A glaring example of such obtuseness is the report recently issued by the California State Transportation Agency’s Transit Transformation Task Force. Established by “the transit recovery package signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom as part of the 2023-24 state budget,” the panel’s mission was to make “recommendations to grow transit ridership, ...