Jon Slavet

As you know, as everyone knows, we lead the nation in homelessness, 25% of the nation's homeless, 190,000 of our brothers and sisters basically living and dying on the street.

It's a total moral tragedy.

And what HUD said under Trump is that they're gonna totally flip the script on the way that funding for homelessness is granted to states.

To date, the way it's been done, and this is a part of democratic ideology in many states and also in California,

Funding for homelessness has been targeted at what's called permanent housing.

Permanent housing is generally a affordable housing unit in an apartment building.

The problem is in California, that takes 10 years to build and cost a million dollars.

We can get into why.

It's insane.

The Trump administration flipped that and said, listen, instead of 80% of the money going to long-term permanent housing, 80% of the money should go to temporary housing.

And I want to give credit to Mayor Matt Mahan, who's a Democrat, moderate in San Jose, who I really like, because he's actually working with Dignity Moves, the founder of which is an advisor to me.

Dignity Moves is the number one organization in California deploying the tiny home communities.

And you've probably seen these in various states.

And other states have done this really well, particularly Texas in Houston and Austin.

But essentially, you get a crayon and you drop in a small unit that locks from the inside.

Right.

And you do 100 to 150 of these on a site.

Usually the land is donated by a wealthy landowner who can get a tax write off for leasing that land to the city for a dollar a year, can write off the taxes.

And then you bring in the services that are needed in that site and mental health services, security, et cetera.

And you triage people who actually can live in a tiny home versus need the mental health system, which unfortunately is more than half of our homeless in California.