Free Cities

By Wayne Winegarden and Steven Greenhut The roots of California’s housing problems aren’t hard to trace given the reams of house-price and population data going back decades. The Los Angeles Times reported the median price of a California home in 1970 was only 5 percent higher than the national average ...

Bass has done so through a series of executive directives. Upon taking office in December 2022, Bass signed Executive Directive 1, which instructed city departments to complete reviews of 100% affordable housing applications within 60 days of receipt. At the time, it took city officials an average of six to ...

According to its calculation, if all pass the combined hit would be $350 million in direct tax increases and $3.6 billion in bonded indebtedness. The group notes the new debt includes “36 school bonds, 16 transactions and use taxes, 19 parcel taxes, two general obligation bonds, one business license tax, ...

Car-less cities campaign is the latest paternalistic fad By Steven Greenhut | February 16, 2024 Many modern urbanists like to claim the great urban writer Jane Jacobs, author of “The Death and Life of Great American Cities,” as one of their own. It’s easy to understand, given that Jacobs was ...

Watch as Free Cities Center’s Steven Greenhut sits down with Professor William Anderson to discuss whether more subsidies for public transit are the key to improving urban living.

Despite big budgets, homeless agency is clueless in Seattle By Jeremy Lott | February 8, 2024 An optimistic headline topped the joint news release from Washington state’s most-populous city and its most-populous county in December 2019 heralding the formation of the King County Regional Homelessness Authority. This effort would create a “new unified regional ...

I’ve come up with a unique way to measure how well California cities are doing. It shows those with well-run finances grow in population, while those badly run shrink. It’s a generality. There are exceptions. But look at the trend line on this chart. Notice the trend line, the dotted ...

Our guests this week are Steve Greenhut, director of PRI’s Free Cities Center and Wayne Winegarden, senior fellow in business and economics.  The two have joined forces to produce PRI’s latest mini book from the Free Cities Center, “Giving Housing Supply a Boost: How to Improve Affordability and Reduce Homelessness.” ...

Lessons from Africa: Private utilities offer a way forward By Scott Beyer | February 2, 2024 I was exploring a rural Kenyan village last spring when noticing an infrastructure dichotomy – one I later realized is characteristic of Africa. The government in Wamunyu, a farm town two hours from Nairobi, ...