Free Cities
Blog
Read the latest from PRI's Free Cities Center
Urbanists See Portents of Doom: Will floods, fire or earthquakes wipe out Sacramento?
When Gov. Leland Stanford was inaugurated on Jan. 10, 1862, he didn’t walk to the state Capitol, nor did he take a carriage. Instead, he got into a small boat and rowed from the governor’s mansion to the Capitol steps. The Great Flood of 1862 is something that anyone interested ...
Free Cities
Steven Greenhut – Protecting Cities from Wildfires
Free Cities Center director Steven Greenhut joins us to discuss his latest booklet focusing on the lessons learned from January’s destructive Southern California wildfires. They talk about policy-created problems on brush clearing, water, and land use policy that created a perfect storm and made fighting the fires more difficult, and ...
Blog
Cities should forget sport-subsidy hype and focus on basics
Cities should forget sport-subsidy hype and focus on basics By D. Dowd Muska | August 8, 2025 Three years to go. The opening ceremony for the Games of the XXXIV Olympiad is scheduled for July 14, 2028. And the men and women of the organizing committee are working feverishly ...
Blog
Despite ‘pro-housing’ programs, California’s crisis getting worse
Cities including Spokane, Tulsa and Memphis support pre-approved designs to streamline small-scale builds, similar to what California has sought to promote with its Pro-housing Designation Program (PDP). But many question why California’s land entitlement process—getting the zoning, use and building design approval from local governments to comply with state mandates—often ...
Blog
Read the latest from PRI's Free Cities Center
Why are urbanites more likely to embrace zero-sum thinking?
The well-worn stereotypes of urban sophisticates versus country bumpkins took a hit in July when an up-and-coming French economist explained her latest findings in The Economist, a publication with more than 1.2 million subscribers globally and significant influence with policymakers in the English-speaking world. “Some groups are more likely than others to see the world ...
Blog
Teacher shortages, layoffs hit big cities and rural areas hardest
Teacher shortages, layoffs hit big cities and rural areas hardest by John Seiler | July 31, 2025 Even $24,764 average spending per student can’t stop the shortage of teachers in California. The number comes from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2025-26, which began on July 1. For ...
California
Watch the Free Cities Center Interview with Mayor Willie Brown
Watch as Free Cities Center director Steven Greenhut sits down for a wide-ranging discussion with legendary San Francisco Mayor and former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. In this candid interview, they discuss the challenges facing the West Coast’s urban centers including crime, housing, homelessness, education, and transportation. Brown also offers his ...
Blog
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Abundance’ by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Abundance’ By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson By Matthew Fleming | July 25, 2025 “Abundance,” a new book by liberal thought leaders Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, makes the case that a sustainable future doesn’t need to be driven by the politics of scarcity we see dominating America’s urban ...
Blog
Read the latest from PRI's Free Cities Center
California’s obsession with density limits housing growth
Morphing from a once-reasonable requirement that building permit applicants report on the “significant environmental impact” of their construction project and how they intend to mitigate that impact, CEQA is now a process-heavy, bureaucratic beast that delays projects for years and costs developers millions. Of all the ways California’s Legislature and ...
Blog
Legislative whiffs—and a few wins—on state housing reform
Legislative whiffs—and a few wins—on state housing reform In a recent piece for RealClearInvestigations, urban experts Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox lamented that “housing affordability stands at the lowest level ever recorded, while one in three Americans now spend over 30% of their income on mortgage or rent.” Try telling ...
Read the latest from PRI's Free Cities Center
Urbanists See Portents of Doom: Will floods, fire or earthquakes wipe out Sacramento?
When Gov. Leland Stanford was inaugurated on Jan. 10, 1862, he didn’t walk to the state Capitol, nor did he take a carriage. Instead, he got into a small boat and rowed from the governor’s mansion to the Capitol steps. The Great Flood of 1862 is something that anyone interested ...
Steven Greenhut – Protecting Cities from Wildfires
Free Cities Center director Steven Greenhut joins us to discuss his latest booklet focusing on the lessons learned from January’s destructive Southern California wildfires. They talk about policy-created problems on brush clearing, water, and land use policy that created a perfect storm and made fighting the fires more difficult, and ...
Cities should forget sport-subsidy hype and focus on basics
Cities should forget sport-subsidy hype and focus on basics By D. Dowd Muska | August 8, 2025 Three years to go. The opening ceremony for the Games of the XXXIV Olympiad is scheduled for July 14, 2028. And the men and women of the organizing committee are working feverishly ...
Despite ‘pro-housing’ programs, California’s crisis getting worse
Cities including Spokane, Tulsa and Memphis support pre-approved designs to streamline small-scale builds, similar to what California has sought to promote with its Pro-housing Designation Program (PDP). But many question why California’s land entitlement process—getting the zoning, use and building design approval from local governments to comply with state mandates—often ...
Read the latest from PRI's Free Cities Center
Why are urbanites more likely to embrace zero-sum thinking?
The well-worn stereotypes of urban sophisticates versus country bumpkins took a hit in July when an up-and-coming French economist explained her latest findings in The Economist, a publication with more than 1.2 million subscribers globally and significant influence with policymakers in the English-speaking world. “Some groups are more likely than others to see the world ...
Teacher shortages, layoffs hit big cities and rural areas hardest
Teacher shortages, layoffs hit big cities and rural areas hardest by John Seiler | July 31, 2025 Even $24,764 average spending per student can’t stop the shortage of teachers in California. The number comes from Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2025-26, which began on July 1. For ...
Watch the Free Cities Center Interview with Mayor Willie Brown
Watch as Free Cities Center director Steven Greenhut sits down for a wide-ranging discussion with legendary San Francisco Mayor and former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown. In this candid interview, they discuss the challenges facing the West Coast’s urban centers including crime, housing, homelessness, education, and transportation. Brown also offers his ...
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Abundance’ by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Abundance’ By Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson By Matthew Fleming | July 25, 2025 “Abundance,” a new book by liberal thought leaders Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, makes the case that a sustainable future doesn’t need to be driven by the politics of scarcity we see dominating America’s urban ...
Read the latest from PRI's Free Cities Center
California’s obsession with density limits housing growth
Morphing from a once-reasonable requirement that building permit applicants report on the “significant environmental impact” of their construction project and how they intend to mitigate that impact, CEQA is now a process-heavy, bureaucratic beast that delays projects for years and costs developers millions. Of all the ways California’s Legislature and ...
Legislative whiffs—and a few wins—on state housing reform
Legislative whiffs—and a few wins—on state housing reform In a recent piece for RealClearInvestigations, urban experts Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox lamented that “housing affordability stands at the lowest level ever recorded, while one in three Americans now spend over 30% of their income on mortgage or rent.” Try telling ...
