Francis Suarez
speaker
100 appearances
6 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 21 Nov
Francis Suarez’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 1.
Appearances
And then, of course, we've done innovative things in the homeless space. We've worked with charitable organizations that help people reunify families if they live in other parts of the country. And also we rent homes so that we can get around the building process and give all the same wraparound services. But we sort of hack through that process.
A very high percentage. I would say 80% plus. That's sort of anecdotal. And I've been out to the streets. I'll be out there before my homeless ball now on May 31st. I'm actually going to spend a night out on the street. And when you talk to them, when you engage in them, a vast majority of them are, unfortunately.
Fentanyl.
A big part of the problem, heroin or opioids. He's asking for a friend, by the way. Yeah. I'm asking if you have a hookup. Clearly, clearly.
Well, to your point, I mean, meth and the opioids are incredibly addictive and they're very hard to beat, right? I mean, even people who are wealthy and get addicted to these drugs have a very hard time. The recidivism rate is very high. And so, you know, You just had Antonio on here a minute ago, and he was talking about immigration and the border.
And one of the big problems with the border is the tens of thousands of people that die annually because of fentanyl that gets imported through China and through our border. And so there's a tie-in between federal policy and local policy. But for us, again, in 1980, during the cocaine era, a different drug, we had 220 homicides.
So you had drugs hurting people, but you had the business of drugs very much hurting people, right? Last, so we started recording homicides in 1946 in Miami. 1946, we had 32 homicides. From 1946 to today, the lowest, number we ever had was 24. Last year we had 27. Wow. Okay, we had 220 in 1980. This year we're trending below the 24.
So this may be the safest year in the history, recorded history of Miami.
The formula for success is simple. Keep taxes low, keep people safe, lean into innovation, right?
My counterargument would be government is not a good purveyor of those services. It's not an efficient purveyor of those services. So just to double click, I lowered taxes to the lowest level in history. And I took the city in 2009 as a councilman out of bankruptcy. So I got it in bankruptcy. This is sort of the doge before doge. We decided not to raise taxes. We cut costs.
We didn't let anyone go, but we had tiered salary cuts, pension reform, and we balanced our budget, and we had 10 years of prosperity. And that prosperity led to a tripling of the size of our government. So we went from a $500 million government to a billion and a half dollar government while lowering taxes. So we grew 200%.
So the resources that we had to dedicate to these actually went up, even though taxes went down. And then when you have a place where there's prosperity and where people are investing and where people are employed, there's not as many social problems. So they're not out there killing people. They're not out there hurting people. So in the 1980s, we had
You know, we're one of the murder capital of America, and we're not one of the safest big cities in America. And then I think, you know, the how can I help moment that you guys are all familiar with was this juxtaposition with what American cities were doing, right? Famously, New York competes for and wins the Amazon HQ2 prize. Right. And then rejects it. Rejects it, yeah.
And also famously in California, you had a, I guess it was a legislator that said F Elon Musk. Yeah, Elena Gonzalez. Exactly. And he replied, message received, and he left.
Where she ended up?
But the issue is, what I tell people is, look, it's bad enough to kick out a trillion dollar company from your city, or the richest person arguably in the world from your city. But think about the signal. The signal to me is much, much greater. The signal is, if you want to bring another headquarters, or if you want to be another company. We just got FC Barcelona.
Two days ago, we announced that FC Barcelona moved their headquarters from New York to Miami. Every single day, we announced $900 million of loans in two projects in the last two days in two buildings, our stadium, our inter-Miami stadium. We have the FIFA World Cup headquarters for 2026 in the world. So I mean, this formula for success would seem simple.
Other cities are getting it wrong completely backwards, right? Their taxes are high. It's not safe. And they're not leaning into, they're rejecting innovation.
So Ken Griffin recently was interviewed in a fireside chat like this and said, I'd rather have the problems of success than the problems of failure. And so there's no doubt that there are problems that stem from success, right? And housing prices, we had a tremendous amount of inflation in the last administration.
And you sort of couple that with hyper demand here in Miami and you get hyperinflation, right? So housing costs have certainly gone up significantly and we do everything we can to leverage public dollars and public assets like land to try to build projects at a 15 to one or 20 to one leverage rate. So for a hundred million dollars invested, we'll get $2 billion worth of projects.
Showing 41–60 of 100 · page 3 of 5
← Previous
Next →