Free Cities

Violent crime lessons from D.C., as it faces spike in carjackings Jeremy Lott | September 5, 2025 Editor’s Note: This is the first of two columns addressing crime in Washington, D.C. This one addresses the problem that has grown over the first half of this decade. The next one will ...

According to the 2025 Greater Los Angeles Homeless Count from July, “For the second straight year, homelessness is down across Los Angeles County, falling 4% to 72,308. Homelessness also declined in the city of Los Angeles, falling by 3.4% to 43,699.” That contrasts with a 3% increase in California in ...

Disaster plans: Cities persist with pointless climate ‘action’ “We’ve lost the culture war on climate, and we have to figure out a way for it to not be a niche leftist movement.” — Jody Freeman, Director, Environmental and Energy Law Program, Harvard Law School “We’re not doing that climate change, you ...

Everything in this world does seem nonsensical, especially as we consider the issue of land-use regulation and California’s efforts (led by progressives) to jump-start housing construction by—yes, you heard this right—reducing the role of government in dictating what we can do with our property. Meanwhile, many conservatives have dug in ...

After reforms, Casitas quietly are reshaping California’s cities By John Seiler | August 22, 2025 Although I now live in Irvine, a highly planned community, I weekly drive to Huntington Beach. For most of the 38 years since I came to California, I lived near the power plant now called ...

Although democratic socialism is a fringe position at one extreme of the political spectrum, voters in the country’s two largest cities have been open to electing its proponents. Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for mayor of New York City in July and Los Angeles has four democratic socialists on ...

SACRAMENTO – The Free Cities Center at the Pacific Research Institute – the California-based, nonpartisan, free market think tank – today released a new booklet examining the failures in state and local wildfire prevention and response policies during this year’s devastating Southern California wildfires, offering practical reforms to make California ...

NEW BOOK EXCERPT: ‘PROTECTING CITIES FROM WILDFIRES’ Rethinking land use, housing and rebuilding regulations by Steven Greenhut | August 15, 2025 This is an excerpt from Greenhut’s new Free Cities Center booklet, “Protecting Cities from Wildfires: Improving California’s Land-Use, Water and Brush-Clearance Strategies.” After the Los Angeles wildfires began their ...

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 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 ...