As the brand new yr began, California’s third-biggest city got a latest mayor.
Matt Mahan took the helm in San Jose on Jan. 1, vowing to curb homelessness, reduce crime and make the town more cost-effective. The previous San Jose councilman won the mayoral election in November with 51.3% of the vote and succeeded Sam Liccardo, who couldn’t run again due to term limits.
“Sam texted me just after midnight on Latest Yr’s Eve and said: ‘Tag, you’re it. Don’t screw it up,’” Mahan told NBC Bay Area.
Liccardo, 52, can be a former city councilman and led the Bay Area city for eight years — through a pandemic, a mass shooting, a homelessness crisis, a horrific flood and more. Just before Liccardo left office, I spoke to him in regards to the city’s housing shortage, his proudest moments and what’s next for him.
Here’s our conversation, flippantly edited for clarity and length:
What are you proudest of out of your years as mayor?
I believe so much in regards to the next generation and what we’ve been in a position to do to speculate in first-generation college students and young adults. To offer you one example: SJ Aspires — we’re using a digital platform to assist guide first-generation students on the trail to varsity, and we offer micro-scholarships to scale back financial barriers to varsity. We completely eliminated the digital divide for low-income students by providing free broadband to greater than 150,000 residents. A program we launched called the Resilience Corps helps a whole bunch of low-income young adults make their way into the work force through work that dramatically improves our communities’ resilience to climate change and the pandemic and other challenges we face.
Frankly, as we take a look at what we’ve left our next generation, they’ve a variety of reason to be pretty upset with us, whether it’s climate change or billions of dollars of unfunded liabilities in pension obligations, or a complete host of other things. It seems to me that it’s the investment that we make of their future that’s going to be our best legacy.
Let’s speak about homelessness. In 2013, the yr before you were elected, there have been roughly 4,770 people in San Jose who were homeless. As of 2022, there are around 6,740.
I believe, for each big city within the western United States, that is enormously daunting. And there are much greater forces at work here than those inside City Hall. The 2 largest forces seem like supply and demand. What we all know from the info is that plenty of high-poverty cities don’t have a variety of homelessness. But really expensive cities like San Jose and San Francisco and L.A. have horrific levels of homelessness. So that ought to tell us something in regards to the extent to which the availability and demand of reasonably priced housing has a extremely large role here.
Fundamentally, for cities, the duty needs to be how will we dramatically expand that inventory of accessible housing. And that’s an even bigger problem than anybody city can solve alone. There’s no doubt we want a much larger role for the state and the federal government to embrace this as a national crisis if we’re really going to tackle it.
Do you see homelessness as your successor’s biggest challenge?
Yes, that’s the most important crisis for each big city within the West. We’re not unique in that regard. The challenge of our generation is that this growing economic divide, and homelessness is one very severe symptom of that growing divide. That divide is driven by very large forces — globalization of technology, of automation. We are able to all see that increasingly more of our residents are being left behind in an economy that doesn’t value the identical skills because it did 30 years ago, and in consequence more will struggle unless we will dramatically speed up our investments in people. So I believe that’s going to be the generational challenge for our city, and for each tech-heavy city within the country.
What would you say was your most difficult moment as mayor?
As mayor, you may have a variety of experiences with residents of their deepest moments of pain. I believe particularly in regards to the time we were on the Red Cross center talking to relations of V.T.A. employees who were slain within the mass shooting in May 2020. The coroner couldn’t confirm the identity of the victims. We sat there for hours with families who weren’t being told that their husband or son had been lost. That was an intensely painful moment.
You haven’t announced what’s next for you. What’s going to you be doing after you step down?
I’m going to duck that query. My wife and I committed that we’d get away and take a while and make some decisions after I’m out of office. I haven’t really had the time to concentrate on it.
Soumya Karlamangla is a reporter with California Today, The Latest York Times. Copyright, The Latest York Times.
