It was astonishing to read in the April 23 news article “As he seeks a second term, Trump touts an authoritarian vision” that former president Donald Trump and his advisers and supporters — including Jared Kushner and Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) — are promoting a plan to build utopian cities on federal land. These crime-free Edens would offer economic opportunity, full employment and a “quantum leap in the American standard of living.” They seem to think this is a new idea. Mr. Vance said: “We have great American cities, but we haven’t really built a new model city.”
Yes, we have. As part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” effort, Congress in 1968 created a program to fund new model cities, similar in concept to Reston or Columbia but financed by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. These communities would offer a sanitized version of real life: They would be architecturally harmonious, their economies would flourish, all of the schools would be excellent, and there would be no crime or racial discrimination. A few of these supposedly ideal communities were built, including St. Charles, Md., and Jonathan, Minn.
But HUD killed the program in 1975 because it didn’t work. It didn’t work because it was completely unrealistic: Except for national capitals such as Washington, Canberra in Australia and Brasilia in Brazil, cities develop organically at locations of opportunity such as ports or rail junctions. Commercial and residential development proceed side by side, not in discrete areas dictated by master planners.
Thomas W. Lippman, Washington
