Mike Johnston

speaker

226 appearances 4 recordings 4 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 3 Sep

Mike Johnston’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.

Appearances

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On with Kara Swisher · Three Mayors of Blue Cities in a Polarized America · 3 Sep 2026 podcast

We have to identify a hard problem, develop a solution, fix it when it doesn't work.

And so I think you find a lot of the best innovation happening from mayors, because other electeds are going to share a great idea for a press conference or a

Social post, that's not an actual outcome.

So for me, it was actually a former mayor, which is the mayor of Houston, Sylvester Turner, who's since passed away.

But when I first became mayor, they were really the gold standard for work on homelessness.

And so they were the first place I visited to say what's working for you.

And one of the ideas we stole from them is they had the idea of closing homeless encampments by geography and then keeping that place permanently closed to future campuses.

So in a lot of cities, instead, you just keep a list of people that might be homeless.

And six months ago, you saw John, you took his name and number.

Six months later, when you have an open unit, you now go to try to call John, who's three burner phones and two locations away from where he was the last time, and these units stay empty.

We instead went to the regions where there were an encampment of 50 people, close that encampment, move all those people into housing units that we opened, and then permanently close.

that block from any future camping.

Um, and that is a strategy that has really worked for us.

And that's how we've been able to now close every large encampment.

We haven't had a tent in downtown in more than 18 months and we won't have them again.

And so that was a great strategy we stole from Houston.

Absolutely, Mike.

Yeah, we put a moratorium on any data centers in Denver about five months ago before this got as hot as it is now.

And I think it was the right decision for a number of reasons.

One is there are real concerns about water usage.

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