Matt Mahan

cities, communities, where the truth is the intervention may be too heavy-handed.

We may not be doing enough to actually help people turn their lives around.

We may not be fully valuing the worth of a human being and their potential, honoring their potential either.

Yeah, or where the answer is, well, we'll just jail people and kind of that's their problem.

They screwed up, so it's kind of their problem, right?

Either get out of town or go to jail.

I obviously think that's wrong, but I also think it's wrong to have thousands of people every year dying on our streets because we don't want to intervene and we don't want to interfere and we don't want to judge and

It's kind of just their choice.

And that's why I've really tried to craft this politics of pragmatism.

I don't think there are easy answers.

I don't think it's just as simple as there's a right answer and a wrong answer, but kind of iteratively trying to figure out how do we get the best outcomes with the least coercion?

And how do you like, what's that balance?

And so in San Jose, what we've tried to do is focus first on creating the shelter and the services and the opportunity for people to turn their lives around as we start to expand no encampment zones and enforce our muni code and create a code of conduct and do more

policing but try to do it thoughtfully my goal even in that environment with policing and enforcing our muni code is really to get someone into a drug court so that yes it's more coercive maybe they need the judge to mandate treatment but the goal shouldn't be incarceration

unless someone's really harming others.

At that point, maybe that's appropriate.

The goal should always be the least coercive, most life-affirming path, but we actually do have to intervene and try to get people on that path.

We can't just leave them to endlessly cycle and die on the streets.

So in San Jose, we have now built 23 interim housing and shelter sites.

We try not to make them too big.