All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez: The Recipe for Creating America's Happiest City | All-In Live from Miami
Tue, 03 Jun 2025
(0:00) The Besties welcome Mayor Francis Suarez! (0:23) How Miami significantly decreased homelessness and homicides (5:17) Formula for turning Miami into America's happiest and healthiest city (10:32) Addressing overregulation at the local level (17:05) Ambitions for his post-Mayor career (21:39) Partner shoutouts: Thanks to OKX, Circle, Polymarket, Solana, BVNK, and Google Cloud! Thanks to our partners for helping make this happen! Check out OKX: https://www.okx.com Check out Circle: https://www.circle.com Follow Mayor Suarez: https://x.com/francissuarez Follow the besties: https://x.com/chamath https://x.com/Jason https://x.com/DavidSacks https://x.com/friedberg Follow on X: https://x.com/theallinpod Follow on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/theallinpod Follow on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@theallinpod Follow on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/allinpod Intro Music Credit: https://rb.gy/tppkzl https://x.com/yung_spielburg Intro Video Credit: https://x.com/TheZachEffect
Chapter 1: How did Miami become America's happiest city?
43rd mayor of Miami, served two terms since 2017, and his tenure is going to end in September because he's term limited. Although I hear these days that's flexible, please welcome Francis Suarez.
We were ranked the happiest city in America, the healthiest city in America. The formula for success is simple. Keep taxes low, keep people safe, lean into innovation.
How are things going in Miami? Obviously, you know, we talked to you a couple of years ago when we had our first all in summit here. And you had a no nonsense approach that you thought was going to work with the homeless challenges that we're seeing. I think candidly, We discussed a large portion of the homeless problem in these major cities is an addiction problem.
Chapter 2: What strategies did Miami use to decrease homelessness?
And giving a junkie a home doesn't exactly get them off the street. It just doesn't work. And you were one of the first people to say that plainly. How are you dealing with it? Has it gotten worse? Is it an intractable problem? Yeah, take us through it.
So in homeless specifically, we are at an 11-year low. We did our census. We do two census a year. We do one in January, one in the summer. And our January census had us at an 11-year low at 546 homeless, unsheltered homeless in the entire city of Miami. We have a couple thousand sheltered. And I actually raise money on an annual basis as a mayor's ball.
I did my mayor's ball last year, and this year I'll be doing it on May 31st to end homeless. We want to be the first major American city to have zero homeless, and we think we can get there. We call it Functional Zero. Thank you. And frankly, the strategy is not that complicated. Obviously, there's a macroeconomic strategy. We have the lowest unemployment in America.
Chapter 3: What is Functional Zero in addressing homelessness?
We have the highest median wage growth in America. I lowered taxes to the lowest level in history, and we've seen 140% growth in nine years. So the economy is robust. We were ranked the happiest city in America, the healthiest city in America. Frankly, if you're happy, you're healthy and you're working, you're probably not homeless.
And then, of course, we've done innovative things in the homeless space. We've worked with charitable organizations that help people reunify families if they live in other parts of the country. And also we rent homes so that we can get around the building process and give all the same wraparound services. But we sort of hack through that process.
Those 500 individuals who are categorized as homeless, how many of them are suffering from mental illness and or self-medicating slash addicted to drugs?
A very high percentage. I would say 80% plus. That's sort of anecdotal. And I've been out to the streets. I'll be out there before my homeless ball now on May 31st. I'm actually going to spend a night out on the street. And when you talk to them, when you engage in them, a vast majority of them are, unfortunately.
Okay, so let me double click on that. This problem wasn't as acute before the super drugs, meth, like the serious meth. Opioids, yeah. Well, the really serious ones they're making now.
Fentanyl.
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Chapter 4: How does Miami tackle addiction issues among the homeless?
And fentanyl, right? This combination seems to be, you know, we had people addicted to heroin like Miles Davis and like Philip Seymour Hoffman who produced incredible art and were addicts for 30 years and they went in and out of it. But this drug is... Pernicious, different, deadly, super addicting. How much of the problem are those two drugs specifically, if you double clicked on it?
A big part of the problem, heroin or opioids. He's asking for a friend, by the way. Yeah. I'm asking if you have a hookup. Clearly, clearly.
No, but I'm being deadly serious because we had these homeless individuals in New York, you know, back in the day, in the 70s, 80s. They were kind of like... hobos and vagabonds not seriously addicted, you know, suffering where they're folding over and curled up in a ball from fentanyl.
Well, to your point, I mean, meth and the opioids are incredibly addictive and they're very hard to beat, right? I mean, even people who are wealthy and get addicted to these drugs have a very hard time. The recidivism rate is very high. And so, you know, You just had Antonio on here a minute ago, and he was talking about immigration and the border.
And one of the big problems with the border is the tens of thousands of people that die annually because of fentanyl that gets imported through China and through our border. And so there's a tie-in between federal policy and local policy. But for us, again, in 1980, during the cocaine era, a different drug, we had 220 homicides.
So you had drugs hurting people, but you had the business of drugs very much hurting people, right? Last, so we started recording homicides in 1946 in Miami. 1946, we had 32 homicides. From 1946 to today, the lowest, number we ever had was 24. Last year we had 27. Wow. Okay, we had 220 in 1980. This year we're trending below the 24.
So this may be the safest year in the history, recorded history of Miami.
Can you connect those dots there? Like, I think when people think about social policy, everybody confuses the correlation and causation. Yeah. But you've been in the seat now for a long time. Yeah, 15 years, frankly. So you've seen what hasn't worked, what has worked, what maybe has been correlated.
But if you had to sort of like lay out the roadmap for other cities, but frankly, for other states, the rest of the country, what's the roadmap, the Francis Suarez roadmap?
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Chapter 5: What is the relationship between local taxes and city safety?
And also famously in California, you had a, I guess it was a legislator that said F Elon Musk. Yeah, Elena Gonzalez. Exactly. And he replied, message received, and he left.
And then she went to run a union, right? Yeah, probably.
Where she ended up?
Yeah, I think she went to work for a union. She's the CEO of one of the big unions now.
But the issue is, what I tell people is, look, it's bad enough to kick out a trillion dollar company from your city, or the richest person arguably in the world from your city. But think about the signal. The signal to me is much, much greater. The signal is, if you want to bring another headquarters, or if you want to be another company. We just got FC Barcelona.
Two days ago, we announced that FC Barcelona moved their headquarters from New York to Miami. Every single day, we announced $900 million of loans in two projects in the last two days in two buildings, our stadium, our inter-Miami stadium. We have the FIFA World Cup headquarters for 2026 in the world. So I mean, this formula for success would seem simple.
Other cities are getting it wrong completely backwards, right? Their taxes are high. It's not safe. And they're not leaning into, they're rejecting innovation.
Are there downsides to growing this fast? Like, are there things that have to keep up that are harder to change? Like building code, housing density, you know, those sort of cost of living things. Like have those, have you guys been able to drive reform there? Or is that not where you want it to be?
So Ken Griffin recently was interviewed in a fireside chat like this and said, I'd rather have the problems of success than the problems of failure. And so there's no doubt that there are problems that stem from success, right? And housing prices, we had a tremendous amount of inflation in the last administration.
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Chapter 6: What are the challenges of rapid growth in Miami?
Wow, what an idea.
Let me ask you. It's like the Hippocratic Oath. Do no harm. Do no harm. How can mayors address... They come into office with a reform motivation and they're elected on, hey, we don't have what Miami has. We got to fix this. We got to get the city working again. We got to attract business. We got to attract growth. And they inherit this regulatory morass, this massive infrastructure.
Like San Francisco recently... I got all caught up in the fact that you can't put these phone booths in your office. You know, a lot of startups, I don't know if any of you guys have these, these phone booths, you got to have someone go in and make a call. You put the phone booth in. And all my startups, all the companies I've ever been involved in. Wait, you can't put one in San Francisco?
So you put these phone booths in and then you can go in and make calls. So when everyone's in an open desk configuration, but you got to do a private call, you hop them in. So everyone loads up their offices with these phone booths. In San Francisco, they're illegal. Turns out that you need to run, and there's a piece of paper, which I was actually going to tweet because it's insane.
It's like three pages long. All the things you need to know about the phone booths that you want to put in your office. You got to get an architect review, an engineering review, a design review. You got to get sign off from the engineer. You got to submit the permitting fees. It gets reviewed by the city inspector's office. You got to design fire sprinklers that have to go into the phone booth.
It's nuts. In case there's a fire in the phone booth, someone needs to put out the fire. That's hilarious. So I was talking to some folks about like, what are you going to do about this? But the mayor's kind of like, I don't know if there's enough action that I can take because it's in law that there's all this kind of regulatory stuff.
How do you advise mayors that are stuck with this sort of an environment? And this is not just San Francisco. There's a lot of big cities in this country that have books and books of this stuff. And we can talk about philosophically why this has happened, sociologically why this has happened. Books and books are the stuff where the city can't get out of the way. What do the mayors do?
And when you guys get together, is there any advice or are we stuck? What's the solution?
We're not stuck. I think it's cultural at some level. You have to inculcate a culture where you empower your employees to innovate and to de-conflict. I think when people come to me with a problem, I say, look, first issue is if there's something that's blocking it that doesn't make any sense, why don't we just change it? We're legislators. That's what we do. We legislate so we can fix it.
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Chapter 7: How did private sector initiatives improve Miami's transportation?
Maybe it happened. Maybe it made sense 20 years ago. Maybe it made sense 50 years ago. It doesn't make sense today. Let's just change it. I think regulation is the other side of the coin from innovation. So regulation is telling you oftentimes what you can't do or how to do something. Innovation is- To protect loss. It's sort of a first principle thinking. We want to do this, right?
We want to make this work. And I think I always, not always, but I regularly fall on the side of innovation. And I think you as a public official, frankly, who's elected by the people, really are the one that has to push the bureaucrats, the bureaucrat class. The bureaucrat class, they get very accustomed to saying no. They're risk averse. They're not incentivized oftentimes.
There's no incentive structure that says, hey, if you innovate, you're going to get X or Y or Z. And then I think the third piece of it is artificial intelligence. I really feel that there's a breakthrough that's going to come. And it's not just in transportation. We're talking about EV tolls and underground boring and all that. But I think in...
zoning codes and all that, it's gonna be computer to computer, right? So the codes are all straightforward, right? We have the same code for 15 years, right? Probably 97 or 8% of all known decisions have already been made under this code, right? So all you have to do is be replicated going forward, right?
Unless the code changes and then you just change the coding and you make the decisions all over again. So it's not that complicated. You should be able to submit something. The computer should be able to spit it out immediately. If it needs changes, it should tell you what the changes are. a computer could look at that, make the changes and spit it back in, right?
And if you were to do that, you know, it takes to get a permit on a home in most places in America or on a building in most places in America, you know, six months, nine months, a year, a year and a half. I mean, it's insane. It should be done instantly. And it could literally be done instantly with a technology that we already have available to us today.
$100 billion business, by the way, in case anybody wants it. It's a great idea.
It's a killer idea. I think some startups have worked on it, too. I know multiple that are working on it. Yeah, they work on the other side of it. Building on Freberg's point, the two best proposals I heard about regulations, and I'm curious if you could steel mill them or just how practical you think they are, putting a time limit on regulation.
So if you fought for some regulations around these phone booths, Back when foam boots, you know, Superman changed his costume in them from the 60s and 70s. Like back from that era, maybe it lasts for 20 years and then it expires. Or you want to add two regulations to office space regulations. You got to take one off the books, you know. And those were the two proposals I've heard.
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