Matt Mahan

So San Jose, by pivoting and looking at the data and thinking differently, has led the state of California in reducing the number of people living outside in tent encampments by about one third.

And for the first time in our history, a majority of people who are homeless in San Jose will be living indoors, not outdoors.

And it's very rich of folks to criticize this, but they're not the ones living and dying in misery in a tent encampment without even access to a bathroom.

And the truth is cities like New York and Boston and Chicago have similar rates of homelessness, but the difference is they build shelter capacity.

They don't leave people to die on the streets because you can't do that in a place with a cold winter.

But in California, we've been complacent.

We never built the shelter capacity to bring people indoors.

Well, look, yeah.

I mean, the data is so clear, Chuck.

I mean, we are 12% of the nation's population.

We have over 40% of the people who live outside in the country.

on our streets we haven't built enough shelter we haven't built enough treatment capacity and even when we have those beds we have been reticent to hold people accountable for coming indoors now i do want to note something else here we can get into all the addiction and mental illness points but a place where i agree wholeheartedly with the advocates in this in this case

is that we have broken the housing market in California and the rent is too damn expensive.

So we actually agree on that.

Yeah, so I mean, look, that's part of the overarching problem here is that we don't have enough housing that is affordable.

But I would also say that's largely a public policy failure.

We have the slowest permitting times, the most aggressive environmental laws, the highest impact fees.

I mean, we've made it so slow and expensive to build that the housing market isn't keeping up with demand and actually building housing affordably for people.

Yeah, no, I agree with you.

I don't think it needs to be either or at all.