Matt Mahan

Well, first of all, we've broken the housing market, which we should talk about as its own issue.

We've also been incredibly lax when it comes to dealing with cycles of addiction and mental illness.

We've sort of deluded ourselves into thinking that leaving someone to choose to live however they'd like, even if that means suffering in misery on the streets and ultimately dying of an overdose, is somehow more important than intervening and saving

And that's how we've ended up in this horrific situation that frankly has been underreported.

Over the last decade, we've had 50,000 people die on our streets in California, about half from overdose and suicide.

These are people with deep behavioral health issues where we're kind of just watching them deteriorate and die because we're so precious about protecting civil liberties.

It may also be an excuse for not spending money in new ways.

In San Jose, we had to move away from spending a million dollars a door to build a brand new apartment to get someone off the streets and pivot to buying sleeping cabins that can be deployed in small communities on publicly owned land, hooked up to utilities, all in cost of $85,000 a unit.

We've added over 2,000 shelter beds in my first

three years as mayor and led the state in reducing unsheltered homelessness.

But we had to overcome an incredible amount of opposition from advocates, affordable housing developers, and much of it well-intended, maybe some of it self-interested, but we either are going to be committed to solving the problem or we're going to cave to highly organized interests or a progressive ideology that needs to be willing to revise itself when its ideas and practice aren't working.

Look, I think it's fundamentally a supply problem.

We've seen most recently in Austin, we saw in Seattle, we've seen in dozens of markets around the country that when we remove barriers to the market investing in housing to meet growing demand, you slow down cost increases.

It's economics.

101 part of our challenge is that we've also made it impossible to build affordably so part of the challenge was zoning high fees all of the things government imposes that block housing from getting built but we also have a building code

that's incredibly cumbersome.

I mentioned litigation earlier when it came to high-speed rail.

Same thing is true for housing.

We're not building condos in California, partly because construction defect liability allows a trial lawyer to come in in year nine of a project, and if they see that the paint is starting to bubble, they'll file a suit, and they care about the fees.

Their incentive is to generate fees, and we've created a legal framework that allows them