Ezra Klein

And what tends to happen is that they have an income shock or a health crisis, or something happens where they can no longer pay their rent and they're evicted.

Over half of California renter households spend at least 30% of their income on housing, puts them in danger of that kind of thing happening.

We've talked a lot here about increasing the supply of housing to reduce costs.

In the best case, that takes time.

So what is a policy that you want to see to help people afford the home they already live in, in a time of stress or strain, whether they're an owner or a renter?

How do we help people not fall out of the housing situation they're in now?

Let me ask you about that.

Let me ask you about that fractured nature of California's homelessness and income support and rent support programs.

I remember talking to someone who had run homelessness prevention in LA.

And I remember saying to me, look, everybody thinks I have a billion dollars to spend.

I wish I had a billion dollars and you would let me spend it.

There's a billion dollars and I can't spend it because it's coming in so many sources and it's audited in so many ways.

And I hear this again and again and again from public servants.

That if you would let me do my job, I could do it.

But instead, I spend all my time managing these overlapping authorities and these different people I report to.

So how do you actually unify some of these authorities and give the people we have tasked with these incredibly moral, important, difficult jobs the authority to do them?

Mayor Mahan, you have in San Jose done quite a lot in flexible housing to try to help with homelessness.

And so I want to ask you a sort of open-ended question here.

What have you seen work better than you thought that should scale statewide, that if you were governor, you would really put resources behind it?

And what have you tried or what does the state support that you have not found is effective and you would like to somewhat move away from it?