In March 2023, now-President-elect Donald Trump called for the creation of up to ten “Freedom Cities,” new cities built on federal land to serve as hubs for the development of emerging technologies, revitalization of American manufacturing, and lowering the cost of housing for American families. The push to build Freedom Cities calls back to an earlier time, invoking the settling of the frontier, timely execution of ambitious megaprojects, and proliferation of breakthrough technological innovations which changed the face of American life.
However, the frontier was closed long ago, state capacity is in shambles, and innovation is hamstrung by regulation. American manufacturing capacity has been seriously eroded over the past fifteen years, during which time manufacturing productivity growth has declined by 0.5 percent per year and China has surged ahead in manufacturing output. The United States desperately needs to break this malaise, both in terms of tangible innovation and in the public imagination, in order to remain a dynamic economy and the technology capital of the world.
The San Francisco Bay Area is the undisputed center of America’s tech industry. But it exemplifies both what remains of American dynamism and also the wasted potential of overall industrial stagnation. San Francisco is home to the Golden Gate Bridge, the world-renowned engineering marvel which opened in 1937 and was built in just four years. Today, extending the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) by a single station in San Jose is delayed by a decade with no end in sight.
The proliferation of regulations which make biomedical, energy, transport, and other emerging technological innovations more difficult and costly to research, develop, and commercialize, when combined with the Bay Area’s extreme restrictions on the development of new housing, pose a grave threat to the long-run health of the world’s leading innovation ecosystem. The region’s extreme homelessness and public drug abuse crises, which prompted a dedicated cleanup effort before the arrival of Chinese President Xi Jinping and other leaders for a summit in 2023, pose a further challenge to the region’s long-run potential.
This is the very same Bay Area that, with its concentration of elite universities, scientific and technical talent, government and private research labs, and venture capital ecosystem created the modern world as we know it. Both the personal computer and the internet revolution found their home here, and entrenched the United States as the world’s leader in every aspect of computer software and as the place to be for aspiring entrepreneurs. Despite San Francisco’s many problems, it is also the home of new technological revolutions today as well—with AI companies such as Anthropic and OpenAI headquartered there, and Waymo’s self-driving taxis transporting passengers around its urban landscape. This is reflected in economic figures, with the San Jose-San Francisco-Oakland area boasting a 2022 GDP of $1.383 trillion—surpassing the nominal GDP of entire nations, including wealthy countries such as Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands.
Implemented effectively, a San Francisco Bay Area Freedom City will launch a tidal wave of scientific and technological breakthroughs which can restore American economic dynamism and produce profound improvements in American life, while ensuring the United States remains the world’s innovation capital.
The San Francisco Bay Area, and by extension the United States, risks losing out to a different Bay Area: China’s Guangdong-Hong Kong-Shenzhen Greater Bay Area. Already termed the “Silicon Valley of hardware”—a title formerly held by Silicon Valley—the region exemplifies a Chinese brand of innovation fueled by focus on technical excellence, state support, and favoritism for homegrown over foreign companies. China now boasts giants such as DJI, BYD, and ByteDance all taking the lead in crucial products and services such as drones, electric vehicles, and even social media.
While San Francisco remains the world’s leading hub for venture capital investment in startups and the development of new technologies, China continues to emerge as a competitor, and is a global leader in not just in these but other technologies such as automobile production, modular nuclear reactors, and telecommunications infrastructure, and already making substantial gains in AI, robotics, pharmaceuticals, and others in which the U.S. and its allies are currently at the forefront.
China’s meteoric economic and technological rise was driven in part by its own form of Freedom Cities, most notably Shenzhen. Neighboring Hong Kong, what is today a metropolis was originally one of four city-sized special economic zones established in 1980 by paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to liberalize the Chinese economy after the disastrous effects of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. While China’s economic success is often broadly attributed to its integration into global trade, the decentralized nature of governance in Shenzhen is the real driving force behind the transformation.
Policy in Shenzhen was not dictated from Beijing—local officials were given wide latitude to experiment with new policies, reject what didn’t work, and scale up what did. Local officials on the ground in Shenzhen pioneered the introduction of land and labor markets, among many other policy innovations. Within two generations, a collection of poor villages home to 300,000 blossomed into a global leader in manufacturing, and later advanced technologies, home to over 17 million with a GDP per capita over $25,000. Deng’s famous remark, that one had to “cross the river by touching the stones” embodied China’s approach to policy—new ideas were tried out in places like Shenzhen, and when successful, were scaled up across the country to extraordinary success.
Freedom Cities in the United States can play a similar role, facilitating the development and deployment of innovative technologies under a more permissive regulatory framework which can then safely be deployed at scale. Successful regulatory approaches deployed in Freedom Cities can likewise be implemented by their respective agencies for the entire country, helping to usher in broad-based economic prosperity.
The Presidio is federal land located in the heart of San Francisco at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. The 1500 acres are governed under a unique trust structure created by Congress after the Presidio’s closure as an active military base in the late 1980s. The Presidio Trust Act instructs how the area is to be operated, under a board of directors which includes the Secretary of the Interior and six members appointed by the President of the United States.
The existing trust structure could be reformed, and the board of directors reconstituted, to facilitate the development of the Presidio, or even just a portion of it, as a Freedom City which enjoys broad autonomy, a vastly improved regulatory environment, and preemption over extreme state and local restrictions on construction and emerging technologies. The urbanist embrace of incoming Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who has demonstrated a deep understanding of the history and economic effects of restrictive land use and zoning policies, bodes well for his role in the development of a Presidio Freedom City.
To create a Presidio Freedom City focused on biotechnology and biomedical science, for example, Congress could empower the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, and Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to take action themselves to create more innovation-friendly regulations. These officials could grant exemptions to existing regulations, offer expedited review and approvals, employ greater use of soft law governance mechanisms, and other innovation-friendly practices to create a more permissive operating environment. The governing board of the Presidio Freedom City, in coordination with regulators, can establish the conditions under which the companies, foundations, universities, and other entities operating in the city can access and abide faithfully by this framework.
Prominent venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s Drone Valley might end up being located a bit west of Detroit, but Freedom Cities can make it a reality. There are also other locations specifically within the San Francisco Bay Area where the federal government owns land which could be converted to a similar governing structure as the Presidio Trust, like the Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard—most of which has not been transferred to San Francisco—or the remaining federally-owned segment of the defunct Alameda Naval Air Station.
Beyond a groundbreaking regulatory framework, a Freedom City in the Bay Area which is not subject to strict state and local controls on new construction could be a “yes in my back yard” (YIMBY) movement triumph. By building at greater density than the vast majority of San Francisco, and with more effective policing and maintenance of public order, it would be possible to have a substantial impact on the Bay Area’s exorbitant rents and create a more conducive environment for families. By one estimate, deregulating the supply of housing in New York, San Jose, and San Francisco to the U.S. average would increase nation-wide U.S. GDP by between 14% and 36%, a massive increase.
And in terms of potential Freedom Cities outside the Bay Area which could supply thousands of new homes, land use and housing regulation expert Nolan Gray has identified various sites on federal land across Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, and California which could host a Freedom City. Private land could also be assembled for a Freedom City, which is then turned over to a Presidio-style trust arrangement, which could allow for the development of Freedom Cities at more advantageous sites, closer to existing infrastructure and prospective residents.
With Freedom Cities, the Trump administration can usher in a new era of extraordinary technological progress while delivering economic prosperity to the American people. There is no federal land better suited to the development of a Freedom City than the Presidio, already located at the heart of the world’s preeminent technology hub. For years, the tech community has wished to revitalize San Francisco as the home of American entrepreneurship and innovation, highlighting the need to overcome the region’s extreme cost-of-living and growing public disorder. Now tech has the ear of the incoming Trump administration. Transforming the Presidio into a gleaming Freedom City which mirrors the splendor of the Golden Gate Bridge—perhaps equipped with a new public monument to rival the Statue of Liberty—is the way forward to reinvigorate the idea that greatness is achievable for America’s cities.