With the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence fast approaching, Americans are badly in need of a sense of hope and renewed opportunity. Our solution is one deeply rooted in our history but aimed at the future: a new Homestead Act for the twenty-first century.

The Homestead Act — proposed by President Abraham Lincoln and signed into law during 1862, at the height of the Civil War — was a brilliant and farseeing effort to oppose the Southern slave economy with a Jeffersonian vision of a continent-sized nation of independent property-holders, stretching from ocean to ocean. The device Lincoln created to establish this vision was simple: Allowing any American citizen, or prospective citizen, to file a claim on the millions of acres of surveyed but unappropriated public lands. Applicants for a homestead had to be at least 21 years of age, to be the head of a household, and to swear that they had never taken up arms against the US government.

Lincoln’s Homestead Act didn’t favor educated classes or elite financial institutions at the expense of ordinary people. Lincoln’s goal was for as many Americans as possible to become self-sufficient, raise healthy families, and pursue opportunity. Upon payment of a small filing fee, applicants to the Homestead Act received a grant of 160 acres of public land upon which to live, build a home, and farm. After five continuous years of residence and cultivation, and after the payment of a second small fee, applicants were deeded full ownership of their land. Instead of being slaves or slave-masters, or the captives of urban political machines, Lincoln’s new Americans would be free men and women — people who could shape a new and better American future.

In practice, of course, Lincoln’s plan did not always go the way the Great Emancipator hoped. Much of the land distributed by the Homestead Act wound up in the hands of speculators and big railroads. Many would-be farmers failed and quit, went bankrupt, or worse. But for millions of Americans who pursued the opportunity to own land, the Homestead Act proved itself a spur to independence and became a fantastically successful device in settling the West. In fact, the Homestead Act was so successful that it remained the law of the land for well over a century, until it was repealed through the passage of the Federal Land Policy and Management Act of 1976. The last claim under the Homestead Act was granted in Alaska, twelve years later.

We at County Highway don’t favor a massive giveaway of America’s remaining public lands. In most cases, their climates are too inhospitable for viable agricultural homesteads, and are too remote for commercial endeavors. The Grand Tetons are doing just fine the way they are. We do believe, however, that America and Americans would be well served by a wise investment in programs that would make it possible for individuals and families to support themselves outside of large cities, where the housing stock is largely owned by banks and giant corporations, failing schools are the captives of teachers’ unions, the food supply consists of chemically laden and genetically altered Frankenfoods that make us sick — and where the social pyramid consists of a top layer of multimillionaires; a middle layer of their insecure professional retainers and trainers and chefs; and a giant underclass of Uber drivers, healthcare workers, and the dispossessed. 

At the same time as our cities decay, physically and morally, far too many small towns (and the small businesses that once kept them afloat) have been left to die by the predations of large multinational corporations, as well as by the enormous direct and indirect subsidies that produce and promote our urban knowledge-worker classes and their corporate overlords. What’s left behind in large swathes of rural America are empty farms connected by long stretches of highway with McDonald’s and Walmarts serving as the sole community hubs. Local diners and hardware stores in once-prosperous towns have long been shuttered, their former owners forced to move elsewhere or live on Medicare and disability checks.

Our Founding Fathers would be horrified by the vision of a nation of urban, rent-paying corporate dependents who rarely touch grass or trees, have zero idea of how to grow or build or repair anything, and have no shot at determining their own futures. They would likely have a similar reaction to the sight of America’s small towns and rural areas decaying into zombie-movie sets for lack of people to cultivate the land, or build houses, or care for the elderly, or teach the young. Both scenarios would probably strike them as imminent threats to the American character and to our democracy. And they would be right. 

Our proposal is therefore a simple one: Let the US government offer five-year interest-free loans of $100,000 to every American who wants to buy five or more acres of land on which to live, build or rehabilitate a home, and raise a family. During those five years, participating states would pledge to streamline the permitting process to allow families to build and farm, and to open a business — with the Federal government promising to lift the heavy hand of regulation from land that was formerly inhabited and cultivated. If the family is still living on the land and caring for it after five continuous years, then the loan is forgiven. 

That’d be a sweetheart deal for many Americans, especially those barely making ends meet due to the cost of living in major metropolitan areas, or for those barely surviving in squalid dead-end conditions across the urban peripheries. Live on land you own, raise a family there, and pocket $100,000 worth of America. And should a family need to move before completing the five years, they’d be able to sell their land and repay the entire loan (possibly profiting on its appreciation, or at least significantly paying down the principal). Local industries would boom as demand increased and skilled workers moved in. Property values would increase as well. In place of a cycle of depopulation, underemployment, declining tax bases, and physical decay, a virtuous upward cycle would take hold. 

Skeptics may point to the impossibility of small farmers competing with large agribusiness and commercial dairies by cultivating small plots of land. We don’t expect them to compete with Del Monte or Kraft. Recipients could become subsistence farmers, if they choose to, or they could cultivate an acre towards some value-added crop, like tomato sauce or flower-essence tinctures, to help pay their bills. Or they could work remotely while owning a few sheep or goats. Perhaps, at scale, these new communities would become resilient enough to create their own internal economies over time that bypassed mass-market supply chains — should enough of us commit to this vision. But the immediate goal is simply to provide families with a stable foundation from which they may construct a happy life.

One may also wonder what purpose might be served by inducing millions of people to move from technologically advanced urban areas that host “the jobs of the future” to rural areas. First, incentivizing people to move from cities to rural areas is likely to be a powerful engine of economic growth for those areas, increasing the value of land and of the local GDP while offering newcomers and their children a chance to play outdoors, care for animals, grow food, breathe clear air, and enjoy other healthy activities. If the COVID years had a silver lining, it was that they showed us it was possible for large numbers of people to work remotely from rural areas while making big-city wages. Indeed, millions of people left cities for places where their children could play outdoors, and many of those people made those moves permanent when COVID restrictions ended — including some of us here at this paper.

This is hardly a Federal welfare plan for professionals who have the luxury of working remotely. Rather, it is a way of repopulating rural areas while giving a real shot at the American Dream to anyone with the gumption to venture into the unknown and make a new life for their family. Public services (schools, hospitals, transportation) and local industries (grocers, diners, meaderies) will become necessities for areas being repopulated — as well as for developers, small business owners, and public servants. Create demand, and supply — and tax revenues — will follow.

As for the jobs of the future, advances in AI suggest that they will mainly be located not in gender studies or even STEM but in fields that require a human touch, starting with healthcare. As rural hospitals continue to fail at record rates due to a lack of doctors and nurses, America is looking at a future in which millions of additional people will soon be forced to move from rural areas to cities — where they will need to be housed in urban hospitals and nursing homes. How is that supposed to work, exactly? With the aging of America on the horizon, it seems wiser to shift our resources towards places where both elders and caretakers can affordably live, and in the process offer large numbers of American families a chance at healthier, more independent lives.

Most important of all, perhaps, a new Homestead Act would help to revive the American spirit, which has long depended on the idea of the frontier. In 1893 — three years after the superintendent of the US Census announced “there can hardly be said to be a frontier line” following the rapid pace of Western settlement after the Civil War — the historian Frederick Jackson Turner advanced his thesis that the conquest of the Western frontier had given American society its unique character. In his essay “The Significance of the Western Frontier in American History,” Turner argued that the presence of the frontier accounted for American optimism and independence, and for the country’s stress on adaptability, ingenuity, and self-reliance. The closing of the frontier therefore marked the end of a chapter in American history and a significant challenge to the country’s founding values. 

What Turner got wrong was not his declining to view the settling of the frontier from a Eurocentric perspective, as subsequent generations of academic historians have charged. He misidentified the motor behind Western settlement: The West was won not by individual grit but by the Federal government. The frontier shaped America thanks in large part to the Homestead Act, which allowed millions of Americans to move there and become independent. Today, younger Americans despair at the possibility of ever owning a house, getting married, or being able to afford to have children — and the math of life in big cities is impossibly cruel. With normal avenues to adulthood seemingly blocked, it is no wonder that America is seeing plummeting birthrates, record rates of mental and physical illness, and declining lifespans.

Opening up a new frontier would be a solution to all of that. The New Homestead Act would not be cheap: 200,000 homesteads a year at $100,000 each would cost $20 billion a year over 15 years, to equal the three million homesteads issued under Lincoln’s bill. On the other hand, Federal subsidies to higher education currently total over $450 billion per year, compared to which a $20 billion loan program is merely a drop in the bucket. The SNAP program currently spends nearly $100 billion to help lower-income people buy food. Why not pay people to grow their own food and become self-sufficient? Instead of directing billions of taxpayer subsidies into the pockets of our failing higher-education establishment for worthless degrees that leave students in debt in exchange for skillsets that will soon be made obsolete by AI anyway, why not use those funds to create demand for trade schools in rural and exurban areas that teach skills that can’t be performed by iPhones, like construction, plumbing, electrical work, farming, fishing, mechanical repairs, baking bread, caring for children and the elderly, and animal husbandry? 

Making home ownership possible makes adulthood possible by reviving a capable, self-sufficient citizenry. It is the surest way to reconnect individuals and communities to the promise of the American future.

Repealing the original Homestead Act was a bizarre way to have celebrated America’s Bicentennial — which those of us who were alive back then recall for its flotilla of tall ships, and also for leading Americans into the musical inferno of disco. The time has therefore come to undo that mistake with a New Homestead Act that will renew the country’s promise for all Americans, regardless of where they now live. We can’t imagine a better way to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation’s independence than by renewing Lincoln’s pledge of independence for every American who wants it.