Scott Shafer: Like addressing the city’s large unhoused population, balancing a budget at a time when revenues are down, and how to recover from the lingering effects of the pandemic. We’re going to talk with him about all of that, as well as growing up in Watsonville. I didn’t know that’s where he grew up. And sharing a dorm room with nobody but Mark Zuckerberg.
Marisa Lagos: I don’t know if they were in the room together.
Scott Shafer: Well, the dorm building. They did hang out together.
Marisa Lagos: And now he’s mayor, so who won that?
Scott Shafer: [laughs] But let’s before we get to that, Marissa said last night at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley. Seven of the Republican candidates for president not named Donald Trump faced off for a debate, if you can call it that. It was really kind of a mud wrestling, shouting match.
Marisa Lagos: It was pretty awful. Not only is it, it does feel a little bit like, why are we even watching this, given Trump’s just ginormous lead in the polls. But you know what could happen between now and even the primaries. But yeah, it was like I thought I got excited for a moment. I was like, Oh, these candidates are actually going to go after the former president. And the only thing they really dinged him on was not being there.
Scott Shafer: Donald Duck, that was a good line.
Marisa Lagos: Not getting found guilty of fraud by a judge that very day. You know, it’s like it’s just like it’s a time warp. It’s very weird.
Scott Shafer: Yeah. And no mention of the shutdown, which were like, now, what, 72, 48? How many hours is it? You know, no mention of that whatsoever.
Marisa Lagos: But you know who talked about all of that? Governor Gavin Newsom who was randomly there.
Scott Shafer: Yeah he was in the spin room. Well he claims that the I mean I’m sure it’s true the Biden administration or the campaign asked him to go down there and be in the spin room. And then he was on with Sean Hannity, who apparently he’ll be joining November 30th for a debate with DeSantis. We’ll see if that actually happens.
Marisa Lagos: Yeah, interesting that Newsom told Elex Michaelson down in L.A. that essentially, like he was kind of trolling DeSantis to ask for that. And he feels like, you know, DeSantis is running for president and he’s like, why is he swinging down at me? But yeah, we’ll see. I was a little skeptical until last night that that debate would actually happen. But both of them said so on live TV. So it feels like maybe there stuck there.
Scott Shafer: Well, that’ll be lively, but hopefully with only two of them, they won’t be constantly talking over each other and we might actually hear some stuff. But, you know, the one thing that I did find interesting in that debate was the questions from the Univision reporter, which were like so out of left field and so completely different about LGBTQ rights and gun violence.
Marisa Lagos: Immigration.
Scott Shafer: Immigration, DOCA. Now, of course, they didn’t answer hardly any of those questions, but the fact that they were asked on Fox Business, I thought was fantastic.
Marisa Lagos: Yeah, it was it was a it was a weird debate. But yeah, I do think it’s fascinating seeing Newsom really come out as this like sort of top tier surrogate for Biden. You know, obviously, he’s said a million times he’s not running next year, but he’s certainly relishing this role. And I think it’s interesting that he is sort of, you know, being put out there. I think the Biden administration’s like, great, we don’t have to be at this stuff. But, you know, this weekend, Donald Trump will be appearing in California. He is speaking Friday at the GOP convention in Anaheim. I’m going to be there. And we’ll also hear from DeSantis and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, Vivek Ramaswamy, the tech entrepreneur who really took the most punches, I think, on Wednesday night.
Scott Shafer: And Tik Tok social influencer, according to Nikki Haley Yeah. I mean, it’s you know, Trump is going to suck up a lot of the oxygen, of course. What are you going to be looking for? Because there is also, in addition to the candidates, there’s this big platform fight over abortion and same-sex marriage.
Marisa Lagos: Yeah. I mean, I think that this really illustrates the kind of debate within the Republican Party of like how much do we kind of go to the base and how much are do we need to widen our message, given how poorly we’ve done in a lot of these elections since 2022, around abortion, since, you know, Dobbs and all that, you know, Roe v Wade was overturned. So I’ll definitely be watching that fight, although the truth is, nobody really cares about a party platform. If you recall, the national GOP doesn’t even have one anymore. They just gave up on that. I think what’s going to be interesting is if anybody is even willing to talk about the government shutdown, I know I might have to file some stories on that.
Scott Shafer: Well that’s a story if they won’t.
Marisa Lagos: Yeah, I think it might be like pulling teeth because I would be surprised if any of them actually bring it up in their remarks. And I think that, you know, a lot of the delegates will also sort of not want to talk about that.
Scott Shafer: Yeah, I mean, it’s not going to look good because obviously there’s no question that this will happen because of those 20 or so Republicans in the House, the right wingers who are just aren’t going to vote for any kind of spending without huge spending cuts. So I just don’t think that’s going to happen. All right. We’re going to take a short break. Before we do, I want to tell you, we’ve got an upcoming live event here at KQED, a conversation. And I will have with Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, if you’d like to submit a question for her. We’ll tell you how to do that later in the show. All right. When we return, we’ll be joined by San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. You’re listening to Political Breakdown from KQED Public Radio.
Scott Shafer: And welcome back to Political Breakdown. I’m Scott Shafer here with Marisa Lagos. And joining us here in the studio is Matt Mahan. The former tech executive was elected mayor of San Jose last year, running as something of an outsider coming from the private sector. But he’s here to talk about running California’s third biggest city. Mayor Mahan, welcome to Political Breakdown.
Matt Mahan: Thanks for having me.
Scott Shafer: Thanks for coming in. Well you know, I don’t know if you’re a fan of the show, but we like to talk about people’s bios, like where you came from. And we know you were born in Watsonville or you grew up in Watsonville, which is an agricultural place. Tell us, you know, what was it like growing up there?
Matt Mahan: Sure. And believe it or not, I was actually born in San Francisco, but we moved down.
Scott Shafer: That’s why I corrected myself.
Matt Mahan: Yeah you’re right, good catch. We moved out to Watsonville when I was about a year old, and I grew up in a little farming town on the Central Coast. Strawberry capital of the world. Driscoll berries, Martinelli’s apple cider. And it was a great place as a kid. I grew up running around the creek in the orchards, but also didn’t have a ton of economic opportunity. Our local high school at a higher dropout rate than graduation rate. We had a very high unemployment rate, quite a bit of crime actually, in the nineties. And when it was time for high school, my mom encouraged me to look at other options. She had grown up in San Jose. I ended up applying to a Catholic school in San Jose called Bellarmine an all boys Jesuit school. I got in, but we couldn’t afford the tuition and they made me a great deal. They said that if I came over in the summers and worked on the maintenance crew, they would forgive my tuition.
Marisa Lagos: I got to ask you, I read that and as somebody who’s not doesn’t have a lot of experience in Jesuit system, it actually struck me as kind of weird, like like you’re coming in as a more low income kid, working class kid, and you’re being told you have to work your way with these guys. And I also wonder if it could be sort of insulting to the maintenance crew. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t know. Was there anything kind of weird about that, that it made you feel more distant from, you know, the rest of your peers?
Matt Mahan: So I will say the school has since discontinued the work study program, but I did not see it as as punitive or other-ising. I grew up out in the country, was used to being outside, using my hands, you know, would mow lawns and do little maintenance projects to earn side money growing up. So I saw it as an opportunity. I loved it. I loved Bellarmine It was it was a really strong sense of community that really believed in educating the whole person. And it opened doors that I didn’t know existed growing up in a little farming town.
Marisa Lagos: And you probably had more respect for the maintenance crew and the folks doing that at the school.
Matt Mahan: I came to campus first day. All my friends were the maintenance crew. I was working on my Spanish and I’m still in touch with some of them, actually, believe it or not.
Scott Shafer: And I think that school has three alumni that are were mayor, right?
Matt Mahan: I believe that’s correct.
Scott Shafer: Sam Liccardo, was it McEnery, Tom McEnery, yeah I thought I read that. And your mom was a Catholic school teacher, too?
Matt Mahan: Yeah down in Salinas. All girls Catholic school.
Scott Shafer: She sort of encouraged you to, to get out of, out of town?
Matt Mahan: Yeah, we all. We were all commuters. I mean, I think that’s the way it is in a lot of small towns is that for for economic opportunity you end up traveling. My bus ride was about 2 hours each way. I had to go over the Santa Cruz mountains every day. So it was about 4 hours a day on the bus.
Marisa Lagos: That’s rough. Well, your dad was a mail carrier. I wonder, I think in a union, I’m sure. Like, what did that impact? I mean, do you remember talking about that? Like, was politics something you talked about? Do you feel like his job and his union membership has at all impacted the way you’ve kind of viewed politics?
Matt Mahan: Yeah, absolutely. We talked about politics, religion, all those things you weren’t supposed to talk about at the dinner table. That’s what we talked about every night. I mean, we had access to health care because my dad was in a union, we were in a working class neighborhood. And my dad’s job was it was a good job. It was a job that allowed us to, even though we were pretty much paycheck to paycheck, it allowed us to get by. So certainly was part of my political consciousness. Also, just reading the local newspaper, you’ll appreciate this as folks and in the media world, I became very politically engaged by reading the Register Pajaronian down in Watsonville and then later the San Jose Mercury News. I had a lot of time on the bus and I would read the paper front page to back page.
Marisa Lagos: And the Merc was an amazing paper.
Matt Mahan: Yeah, yeah, it still still has a lot to recommend it. But yeah, I used to love reading the paper and trying to understand how how we can make things better.
Scott Shafer: We are going to get to your college and also to your, you know, time as mayor and the city council and all that. But I have to ask, you were growing up in Watsonville and I wonder where you were when the Loma Prieta earthquake happened because it was centered right down there in Aptos. You remember that day?
Matt Mahan: I do, very well. I was seven years old. I have two younger sisters reached two years apart and we were home. I think the I believe the World Series was just starting. I was just getting into baseball at that age. I remember my sisters and I were sitting down coloring at the table. I think my mom had just given us a snack and gone out into the backyard. And I will never forget getting my sisters and going out to the doorway as they. Teach you to do as a kid and looking out at my mom in the backyard and literally seen the earth undulating, it was it was terrifying, but kind of amazing at the same time.
Scott Shafer: I bet you pay attention to earthquake drills now that you’re mayor.
Matt Mahan: Absolutely.
Marisa Lagos: That’s amazing. So you end up going to this college prep school in San Jose and then end up at Harvard. We read that you were in the same dorms as Mark Zuckerberg. So are you guys like, you know, going to like keg parties together? I mean, does that happen at Harvard? I don’t know. You’re both kind of overachievers.
Matt Mahan: We were more likely to be the guys going to grab a burrito at 10:00 at night down the street. But, yeah, I got to know Mark and many other amazing people in undergrad, very different from from where I came from, but was just a very energizing place. Everybody was, you know, had had some project they were working on. Mark’s just happened to be truly globally transformative.
Scott Shafer: And you had a chance, I think, to work with him. He could have invited you to join him and you decided not to. Any regrets about that?
Matt Mahan: Well, I think, you know, that was really actually a little bit later, interestingly. So I came back and I don’t mean to go out of order here, but after college, I spent a year in South America and then came back through a program called Teach for America. I wanted to be back home near my parents, who are who are starting to age and I was teaching at East Side San Jose and kind of figuring out what to do next. I was thinking maybe I’d go to law school and I ended up having dinner with Mark Zuckerberg and he asked me why I wanted to go to law school. I said, I want change the world. I want to make the world a better place. And he said, If you want to change the world, don’t be a lawyer. Go into tech. Build something, do something different. And so I did end up joining a startup that was one of the first applications on the Facebook platform.
Marisa Lagos: I want to ask you a little bit about your time at Harvard, though, before we move on, because, I mean, you must be the guest with the most written about you as a college student that I’ve ever read. We found an old Crimson Tide article because you were really involved in student government and you were pretty outspoken about how your kind of political orthodoxy changed at Harvard, but also kind of pushing back. You know, we found this quote where you talked about how a lot of Harvard students are going to go on to these lucrative careers and kind of never do anything about the underlying structures around them. So talk about your political awakening there and what did you take away from that experience?
Matt Mahan: Yeah, you know, I wrote my senior thesis on liberal arts education and this question of of why, why get college education. And I just had this feeling that there was a prescribed path for most of us at Harvard and that you were going to go be a lawyer, a doctor, a consultant, an investment banker or whatever, whatever it might be. And I just wasn’t comfortable with that. It’s why I ended up spending the year in South America and then coming back and being a teacher and frankly, bouncing around a bit in my early career because I’ve always been interested in how you can organize people to create change, create more opportunity, create a better future. And that’s probably why tech ended up appealing to me. It was because people were building new things. They were creative. They were using their imagination to ask, you know, why not? Why can’t we do something differently? And so that was something that, frankly, for me, it was a little missing at Harvard in some ways, as amazing as it was, could be a little prescribed, a little stifling. And I wanted to do something different.
Scott Shafer: So as you said, you were in South America, I think Bolivia for a while. You taught with Teach for America and then you decided to go into the private sector. You went in on an app called Causes, I think, with Sean Parker, then Brigade, which all had kind of a do-gooder democratic bent to them, fair to say. What did you learn from that experience that you think you, you know, use now either at city council or as mayor?
Matt Mahan: Well, you know, what I thought most about during those years of building both of those platforms was really about how to apply something that we’ve done for all of human history offline, which is essentially organizing community organizing. I’d taken a class from Marshall Ganz in college, which was very impactful, and Robert Putnam, the author of Bowling Alone. And I was also thinking about community and social capital and what does it take to build capacity at the grassroots level for people to create a better future? And then had this new opportunity, this digital overlay. I ran one of the first, maybe the first political campaigns on the Facebook platform when I was in college. And so I’ve also thought about how do we create scale around participation? How do we help people to break out of this, this anomie we have in modernity, where we feel very small compared to the problems in our community. And I think the answer to that is collective action is to plug into something bigger than oneself. And technology makes that possible to scale that wasn’t before available to us. And I’ve tried to bring that directly into government. Again, not to skip ahead, but everything we’ve done both in the campaign and now governing, has been about creating opportunities for civic participation at scale. How do we get our community directly involved.
Marisa Lagos: I wonder as somebody who has straddled these worlds and you know who I think even in the tech industry came at it from a slightly different view. What do you think when you see people who have, you know, made been very successful in business who, you know, promise they’re going to come in and fix government, that they’re going to run it like the private sector? As somebody who’s covered government for a long time. It always makes me a little nervous because, you know, you know, being on the city council and as mayor, they are not the same thing.
Matt Mahan: No, they’re not. There are some fundamental differences in government. We have to serve everyone. We should strive to serve everyone equally well and deliver equitable outcomes.
Scott Shafer: You have to serve more people when the economy turns down, with less money.
Matt Mahan: That’s right, we’re in way more lines of business than any any company would ever choose to be in. And even when we knock it out of the park, it’s not like we have a big profit margin and we can invest in more R&D. There are a number of differences. That being said, I think there is something about the innovation economy we have here in the Bay Area and the way that technology companies have pushed themselves to be highly iterative, to be data driven, to set objective measures of success and be less ideological about how to deliver the outcome that I find very compelling and think government can benefit from. When I was in the private sector and we had 18 months of runway before the company was literally out of business, it was very focusing, and we had to prioritize. We had to be honest about what was working and what wasn’t. And I think we could use more of that culture in government today.
Scott Shafer: You ran as an outsider, especially when you ran for mayor, even though you were on the city council, you were not the choice of labor and of course you won. What was that transition like? You know, kind of running in some ways, I would say, against the city council. But, you know, I don’t think you had endorsements from the city council. Now you’re one of them. What did you have to do to kind of, you know, make make amends, if that’s the right phrase?
Matt Mahan: Yeah, I don’t know if it was so much about making amends, but I’ve I’ve tried to be very consistent with my colleagues about why I ran and what I’m hoping to achieve while in office. And I believe there’s a lot of common ground because we all knock on the same doors. We all serve the same constituents. And while I certainly wasn’t the insider pick, I didn’t have a lot of endorsements. I was outspent by something like $3 million. I think at the end of the day, my colleagues and I, for the most part, want to see the same change. I think where we differ is sometimes around how to get there, and this is my own perspective on it, but I’m willing to push harder and maybe make folks a little less comfortable because I feel that on a few issues, like homelessness in particular, I just feel a great sense of urgency to deliver better outcomes. And I think we really have to question if what we’re doing today is working. And I think in some cases it’s not.
Marisa Lagos: Well, you also, though, are governing in a system that does not give you the kind of power that, say, London Breed might have in San Francisco. You know, it’s not a strong mayor system. You’re basically one of 11 votes on the city council. Would you like to change that? Do you think that that would benefit San Jose?
Matt Mahan: You know, I don’t think that there’s actually a that the structure is what prevents us from creating change. There are days when I would like to see a greater alignment of responsibility with accountability. Certainly, I think there would be advantages to strengthening the role. But at the end of the day, what we really need are a systems for accountability, whether or not that is concentrated with the mayor’s office and why I might prefer to have more power, certainly, I think that what would actually create a better governance model is the performance management dashboards that I’m that I’ve put in the budget and that we’re bringing forward. As mayor, I do get to lead the budget process, I run the communications for the city and we will be bringing forward dashboards that take our top few priorities. And that’s been a big priority of mine, is focus taking us from 42 stated priorities and our roadmap down to four.
Marisa Lagos: Which are?
Matt Mahan: Which are reducing homelessness, reducing crime, cleaning up the city and being an easier place to invest, and then creating objective measures for how well we are achieving those things. Identifying every dollar in the budget, how we are programing our solutions for those outcomes, and then measuring the performance of those programs and policies. That can create a system of accountability and the feedback loop we need, whether or not the mayor has more executive authority.
Scott Shafer: If you’re just joining us, you’re listening to Political Breakdown from KQED. I’m Scott Shafer here with Marisa Lagos. We’re talking with San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. This is a fundraising period for KQED. For more information on how to support KQED, go to KQED.org. I’m wondering if those assessments, I know you haven’t been there that long, but have those assessments, have you learned already do you have some indications of things that maybe just aren’t working? Or is it too soon really to say?
Matt Mahan: Well, the big debate, as you’ve probably followed, has been around our approach to homelessness, our use of Measure E funding. One bright spot that I’m very proud of and I think my predecessor, Sam Liccardo, deserves a lot of credit here, has been the success of our quick build interim housing units. We’ve seen an 11% decline in unsheltered homelessness year over year and it corresponds, it tracks quite closely to our expansion of interim housing, these quick build communities where people get their own room, in many cases their own in-suite bathroom and most importantly on site services. We get people into a safe, stable environment as an alternative to encampments and connect them to the supportive services that can really transform their lives. And it seems to be working, and I think we should be doubling down on that and other programs that are working, such as paying homeless individuals to clean up the city. We’re seeing that program work as well.
Marisa Lagos: I mean, this has been a big debate down there, right? Your push really to take some of the money that has been earmarked for permanent housing and move it into more urgent, temporary solutions. I mean, before we go into the details, just talk about your thinking on that, because I think a lot of people would say, yeah, we need to do both. But there is as you’ve run up against, a limited amount of money and resources to do this, right?
Matt Mahan: Yeah, certainly we need to do both. But they’re on two very different timeframes. We have a crisis today. We have thousands of people living outside in terrible conditions. We literally had 246 people die on our streets in Santa Clara County last year. It’s unfair and inhumane for those who have no alternative to these encampments. Right now for our interim sites, we have a waiting list hundreds of people long to get in to an interim site just to get into shelter. People who want shelter and we have nowhere to offer them to go. It’s also unfair to the broader community and it doesn’t even make sense fiscally. It costs us over $65,000 per year to keep someone in an unsheltered, unmanaged condition, a tent encampment. That’s the impact on emergency rooms and 911 response.
So I think for moral reasons, for fiscal reasons, for the benefit of the whole community, we have to be willing to acknowledge that the long run solution of building more workforce housing, more affordable housing is important but insufficient for ending this era of encampments. And I’ve simply argued that we’d be more pragmatic. We could end street homelessness in a matter of a year or two if we were truly focused on it. When the 1906 earthquake occurred here and San Franciscans woke up and found that over 5000 of their neighbors had lost their homes, there were emergency earthquake cottages built in a matter of weeks.
Scott Shafer: In Golden Gate Park.
Marisa Lagos: Some of them are still standing.
Matt Mahan: And some are still standing today. And I think we’re going to need to get back to that sense of urgency and pragmatism.
Scott Shafer: All big cities in California and really around the country are dealing with encampments, certainly here in San Francisco. And the idea of banning them or dismantling them and moving people out has been controversial. There’ve been court decisions that have made it harder to do that. You’ve proposed one in San Jose. Tell us about that, where it stands and what kind of pushback, if any, you’re getting on that.
Matt Mahan: Well, I think we need to stop the blame game. We spent a lot of time blaming different levels of government, blaming judges, blaming the. Homeless. And the truth is, the Martin v. Boise decision, as an example, is not an impediment to us ending the era of encampments. What is the lack of shelter that we have to offer people? City of Boston, for example, has very comparable levels of homelessness per capita as we have in our large cities on the West Coast, but has a place for most people to be. And so there are unsheltered homelessness rate is down around 3%. Most big cities on the West Coast easily 60, 70% unsheltered.
So we are going to have to agree to scale up safe managed places for people to go. I don’t believe it’s one size fits all. Certainly for some people, a first stop might need to be a mental health hospital or a drug treatment center, but we need to have a safe indoor place for everyone in our state. And then we need to compel people to come indoors. And the good news is the vast majority of people who are outside are very willing to come inside if we offer them a safe place to go.
Marisa Lagos: So what’s the hurdle? I know you had set a goal of having 1000 temporary housing units opened by the end of this year, another goal of moving a thousand people into shelter by the end of the year. Is it NIMBYism? Is it money? Like, what are the challenges?
Matt Mahan: Mostly political will. Right now, we’re having a discussion with our transit agency, VTA, and working with them to scope a potential site, 17 acres of empty land next to one of their maintenance yards.
Marisa Lagos: Employees have pushed back, right?
Matt Mahan: Certainly, but everyone pushes back initially. The great news is what we’ve seen with these interim sites is that they actually make neighborhoods better off. We’ve seen calls for service for crime and blight go down. When we get people indoors. It’s common sense, but it’s not always people’s first reaction.
Marisa Lagos: So how do you convince them, like, what’s that conversation?
Matt Mahan: I’m doing a lot of town hall meetings. I was in the maintenance bay with about 150 VTA employees just a couple of weeks ago. And, you know, the interesting thing was, while the vast majority said, we don’t want this and I understand that, I hear that in every neighborhood, as we talked through it and we shared the experience we’ve had and as I was walking out, I had a number of individual employees come up to me and say, you know, we’re just worried about our safety. We understand, we don’t want it. But if you have to do it to end homelessness, we understand, just keep us safe and say, okay, I can work with that. That’s reasonable. It’s reasonable to have doubts. It’s reasonable to have fear. But we have to do something differently. We have to take some risks. We have to try new things. We have to be willing to collectively sacrifice if we want to solve this homelessness crisis and in the long run, we are all going to be better off.
Marisa Lagos: And a lot of people already have homeless folks in their neighborhoods, right. And they’re not getting services.
Matt Mahan: That’s correct, they’re already there.
Scott Shafer: Short on time. Real quick, complicated topic. AI it’s really booming in San Francisco. Do you share the concerns a lot of people have that it’s, you know, needs to be regulated or how do you how do you think about that?
Matt Mahan: Well, any new technology marries opportunity with risk. And I appreciate that we were the first big city in the country to issue guidelines around the use of generative. I remember a lot of conversations about how to spur innovation, including making City Hall a sandbox for civic innovators who want to build new civic applications will be much more conversation in the years ahead. But on balance, I think it’s a huge opportunity.
Scott Shafer: And you see a lot of opportunity for San Jose itself in terms of jobs?
Matt Mahan: In terms of jobs, in terms of better delivery in city services. Absolutely. I think it’s the next frontier. It’s the most significant new technology platform and is likely to be transformative in many spaces.
Scott Shafer: All right, Matt Mahan is the mayor of San Jose, thanks so much for coming in.
Matt Mahan: Thanks for having me.
Scott Shafer: Really appreciate it. That’s it for this edition of Political Breakdown, it’s a production of KQED Public Radio. Before we let you go, we wanted to let you know about a special event happening here. October 10th. Marisa and I are going to be interviewing Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi on stage, the speaker emerita here at KQED in San Francisco.
Marisa Lagos: The event is actually sold out, but you can stream it live. And we want to know your questions. What do you want to ask former Speaker Pelosi? Shoot us an email. I’m at MLagos@KQED.org.
