Matt Mahan

But we hobbled government to the point where it can't actually just go deliver the thing that we want.

Yeah.

Well, I don't think you can fix the whole thing at once.

I think back to maybe the earlier point, I think when you focus on an issue, so you take something like homelessness and the work we've done in San Jose, and I think this is a model for what we can do statewide, if you commit yourself to the right goal.

So when I came into the office, it felt like we weren't really trying to solve homelessness.

we were trying to sort of right all that was wrong in the world.

Inequality, structural racism, all the ills of society.

And I said, well, if the crisis really is homelessness and what people mean by that is the poor guy living out in a tent down the street, let's just be laser focused on bringing people indoors.

And the first barrier is that we just don't have enough beds for people.

So what's the fastest, cheapest, but still dignified and ethical way to add a lot of beds and give people a real alternative?

And so we started buying sleeping cabins, these prefabricated modular units and building them into little tiny home communities on public land.

We bought old motels and started converting them into transitional housing.

Turns out you can scale up beds a lot faster than we were.

We were

spending a million dollars a door and often taking six or seven years to build a project.

And so San Jose has actually led the state over the last few years in reducing the number of people living outside because we made that the goal.

And we didn't overcomplicate it with a bunch of other things.

We just said, we're going to build a lot of shelter.

And when it's available, we do our very best to incentivize and even require that people come indoors.

You shouldn't be allowed to choose to camp in a public space when we're giving you a dignified