Matt Mahan

speaker

2,299 appearances 5 recordings 5 series first heard Mar 2026 last heard 22 May

Matt Mahan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 3.

Appearances

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The Ezra Klein Show · I Have Some Questions for the Democrats Who Want to Run California · 12 May 2026 podcast

Number two, after a period of time of outreach and moving people in, in a smaller radius, we're going to create and enforce a no encampment zone.

Because with the early sites, what didn't work was allowing people to still choose to camp a block away from that interim site.

And it completely visually undermines that trust and belief that we're making progress.

Not everybody loves the idea of a no encampment zone, but that's how we got community buy-in.

And what we've seen, and this was the case I made, but we had to prove out and it took, I wanna thank my colleagues and others down in San Jose for having the courage to do this.

We were finally able to show people and they felt that when we built interim housing and got people stabilized indoors and connected to case management,

Calls for service for crime, 911, for blight, 311, plummeted, which actually makes perfect sense, common sense.

You get people stabilized indoors and not in an unmanaged tent encampment with noise and fires and drug use and all the challenges, and everybody's quality of life is better.

But I will say the thing that we've done that has not worked super well is as we have tried to throw local public dollars at building new affordable housing, you pointed it out, our cost to build is 30% higher than the private market.

Frankly, if I could go back, I would have encouraged us to buy the older housing stock that's $300,000 a unit rather than build new at a million a unit when the private marketplace could have built if we had just incentivized them

at $600,000 a unit.

So I think we should be buying and preserving the older stock, buying down affordability.

Let's do funded inclusionary requirements and buy down affordability and new market rate units, but not subsidize at the least efficient with no cost controls or innovation.

I don't think it's scalable.

And I think we lose public trust when we just keep throwing money in an inefficient way at the problem.

All right.

So in this audience, this is totally unoriginal, but the truth is I just read Why Nothing Works.

I think you just interviewed Mark Duncan.

I know.

I literally just read it.

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