Matt Mahan

Cities like New York and Boston have comparable rates of homelessness, but they don't have the levels of unsheltered homelessness.

If you're homeless in the Northeast, there's a shelter bed for you.

There is a place to go that is safe and warm and dry.

not always as safe as it should be.

I don't want to sugarcoat this.

I mean, our shelters are not great.

And that's why in San Jose, we've built individual shelter, meaning you have your own room with a door that locks to give people privacy and safety.

But we were never forced in California by some external factor like harsh winters to build the capacity, the shelters, treatment centers that we needed because you actually can survive outside with our weather.

And so you have this confluence of a drug and mental health crisis that's going unaddressed, the fact that we were never forced to build basic shelter and safe indoor places for people, and then probably the overall biggest driver is housing's totally unaffordable, we don't build enough of it, and people get pushed to the edge.

I mean, my dad was born in a little town, mining town in West Virginia, Nitro West Virginia, where the nitroglycerin plant was.

And you go to a place like West Virginia, it's not like they have a lower rate of mental illness or addiction.

But for most people, even struggling with addiction or milder mental health challenges, they can maintain themselves indoors if there's an affordable enough place.

And in California, it's just you can do everything right, have no behavioral health challenges, and you're struggling to just hold on because of how expensive the rent is.

And so I think that macro factor of how unavailable and expensive housing is has huge downstream effects.

By law, by the way, they're called shelter, they're shelter first states.

You have to actually have a place for people because of the winter.

I think there's some of that.

I mean, we certainly see in a place like San Francisco a certain amount of that.

I also think it's true that people come not necessarily just because

It's we've got great weather or maybe the drugs are more accessible or whatever the tropes are.