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.

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

So we brought on about a thousand units of transitional housing.

That looks like buying hotels, building tiny home villages, doing them from $25,000 to $100,000 a day.

Door and doing them quickly.

We brought them on in less than six months, a thousand units.

Then it's going to where the encampments are, closing those encampments and keeping them closed, and then geographically spreading this parts of the city that have no camping.

So think of them like concentric circles that start in the middle of the city.

Each time we close an encampment, we move you to housing, that block becomes closed, you out farther and farther until the whole city is no longer has encampments.

And then the third is decentralizing.

So they're available at each of these transitional housing sites.

So we have mental health support, addiction support, workforce training, long-term housing.

Because often what you do is you concentrate all of the services for folks that are homeless in your downtown.

And then you're surprised that your downtown is full of folks who are homeless.

What we've done is actually deconcentrated those so they can get access to these services anywhere.

And that's helped us move 9,000 people off the street and

Transitional housing, but more importantly, has moved 8,000 of those folks into permanent housing.

And so I think that's been the key.

But it took that combination of those strategies and taking the political risk to say, yes, we are going to open eight new transitional housing sites.

I did 60 town halls around the city.

Folks weren't always happy about the idea of opening sites next to them.

But once we opened them, we're able to close encampments, make historic drops in homelessness and crime, and then make sure the folks in

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