As mayor of San Jose, Matt Mahan has touted his business credentials and his common sense approach to handling issues like homelessness and crime. In 2024, Mahan was reelected to the office with 87% of the vote, and his profile has risen recently as he has criticized Governor Gavin Newsom’s trolling of President Trump. According to Mahan, “As mayors, we don’t get rewarded for clever tweets or inspiring speeches.” Instead, Mahan says he is focused on concrete results. We talk to Mahan and take your questions.
Listen to the full interview at KQED
This partial transcript was computer-generated. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Alexis Madrigal: Welcome to Forum. I’m Alexis Madrigal. We’re joined this morning by San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan, now in his second term in office. Welcome, Mayor.
Matt Mahan: Thank you. Good morning, Alexis.
Alexis Madrigal: Thanks for joining us. So we’re going to jump right in. We all know there are limited resources in every city around the Bay Area to tackle homelessness. And one thing I have admired about your tenure as mayor is that rather than choosing an attenuated version of “all of the above,” you’ve tried to set a direction and pick a path. My understanding is you’re trying to bring a thousand shelter beds into use — and am I right that the key metric you’re trying to drive down is unsheltered homelessness? Are those things right? Is that the plan?
Matt Mahan: You got it. But just to be clear, we’re adding a thousand beds this year — almost all individual rooms with doors that lock — and I can say more about that if you’re interested. We’re actually adding a little over two thousand in all. Four or five years ago, the city had zero shelter beds — they were all on the county side. We have since stepped in and really scaled up the system to try to end unsheltered homelessness. We’ve been laser-focused on that outcome — how many people are actually living outside, in tents, in vehicles, without any infrastructure, services, or rules. And that’s really the most pernicious form of homelessness that we’re trying to end in our community.
Alexis Madrigal: Why did you make that decision to focus funding, tactics and strategy specifically on unsheltered homelessness?
Matt Mahan: It felt to me like it was maybe three things: achievable, aligned with what our residents, voters and taxpayers most wanted to see, and actually the best way to end human suffering and reduce the immense cost of trying to manage chronic homelessness. Once we leave someone outside — for lack of an alternative or, in some cases, by choice, but more often because there’s no alternative — people’s situations deteriorate. Even if addiction wasn’t the reason they became homeless, once you’ve been out there for one, two, three years, it becomes much more likely you’ll develop a behavioral health issue like addiction or depression. And then it becomes really hard to help you turn your life around. The impact on the community is massive. There are different estimates out there, but studies show we spend something like $50,000 to $100,000 per person per year just to manage someone living outside. That’s a really inefficient use of resources. If we can stabilize people earlier — get them connected to loved ones, job training, addiction treatment if they need it — we reduce suffering, increase good outcomes, and prevent massive cost and impact for the broader society.
Alexis Madrigal: Let’s say you’re able to bring on those two thousand shelter beds, with the features you’re talking about, and you’re able to get people into them. One thing you hear from homeless advocates is there aren’t enough places for those people to go next — as they move into more stable housing forms. So let’s say you succeed, you get unsheltered homelessness way down in San Jose — where do the people go from there?
Matt Mahan: We actually don’t have to wonder, because we’re nearly three years into this journey — a little more, actually, because my predecessor Mayor Liccardo began building some of these interim sites. I was a new member of the council then — I remember those first sites opening up. By the end of this year, we’ll have 20 interim housing sites — a combination of converted motels, small modular unit sleeping cabins on publicly owned land, a couple of safe parking sites, and our first safe sleeping sites. Four different typologies — and about 20 of them.
We have a lot of data. Some of the sites have now been open over three years. They’re nearly 100% utilized — we have waiting lists. They’re incredibly effective at preventing people from returning to homelessness. Over 70% of people who enter a unit do not return to homelessness, at least for the period we’ve measured. Twenty to twenty-five percent increase their income while at the site. 25+% graduate to permanent housing. Others reconnect with loved ones, or get to a place where they can work and find their own apartment in a less expensive market.
Now — the concern is fair. We don’t have enough permanent affordable housing for everyone. We need to do two things at the same time: invest in the short-term solution so no one is living outside in unmanaged, unsheltered conditions, and make the systemic structural policy changes — which we’re pursuing very aggressively — to build housing accessible at all income levels. But that’s a 20-year process. We spent decades under-building relative to job growth — which is a big part of why we’re in this mess — and it’ll likely take a decade or two to really move the needle on supply.
Alexis Madrigal: I think you’re implicitly answering this with the idea that these shelters are highly utilized — but one thing I’ve heard spending time with unhoused people is: why do some people not take help when it’s offered? A persistent question from housed folks is: why do people want to stay outside? Two things you hear a lot: the indoor setting is not matching up with their needs — they have a partner, or a pet, or possessions. Or: they’ve encountered the system many times, and the system has failed them. They go to a tiny homes project, the operator implodes, loses the contract, and they end up back outside minus the community they’d built.
As you move through the set of people you’re trying to bring indoors, maybe you’re encountering more people who have those sets of reasons. How did you design this set of programs to actually meet the needs of people who are there? Did you talk with homeless advocates? What were the things?
Matt Mahan: Great question. Historically what you’re describing has absolutely been the case, and we’re aware of it. We’ve worked hard to respond. We’ve had various committees and groups with individuals with what we call lived experience — people who’ve experienced unsheltered homelessness and gone through the process of coming indoors, stabilizing, trying to reintegrate. And we designed our interim housing system with their input — to make it as low-barrier as possible.
Alexis Madrigal: This is why the locked doors, the sink.
Matt Mahan: Right — individual private living quarters. A room with a door that locks. The ability to come with your partner. Your pets — virtually all of our sites have dog runs, and animal care services visit the sites. Your possessions — storage. Most units even have private en suite bathrooms. We don’t have a strict sobriety requirement. There’s on-site security, personalized case management, three meals a day, laundry. We have worked very hard to create an interim that is not the barracks-style congregate shelter of the past, where the person next to you might be using hard drugs and might become violent or steal your things. We’ve changed that.
We just cleared the largest encampment in the city — Columbus Park. We went out two months before the abatement, did daily outreach, built a by-name list of every single person there, and offered everyone private individual interim housing or transitional housing. We’ve had about two-thirds come indoors. The folks who don’t: generally chronically homeless a very long time with very high vulnerability scores, serious behavioral health issues. The city is not well-equipped for that level of care. The state and county need to be as pragmatic as we are — we need hundreds if not thousands of beds of treatment capacity. Someone seriously addicted to meth for five years — interim housing may not be the appropriate first stop.
And I’ll name this because we should be honest with the public: we also have people who are undocumented who do not trust the government. We don’t ask about status — but we don’t have a great answer for those situations either.
Alexis Madrigal: So your message to those folks?
Matt Mahan: The city is here to serve everyone within our city limits, and we’re low-barrier and we don’t ask about status — just as our police officers don’t. We don’t want to play the role of federal immigration enforcement, just like we don’t ask for your tax returns. The same thing goes for our shelters. But the truth is: we have folks who are registered sex offenders who have nowhere to go. We have folks who are undocumented who don’t feel comfortable coming indoors. And for the most part, when we see repeat service resistance, it’s people who’ve been out there so long and are so deep into a behavioral health crisis that without intervention that only the state and counties can do, cities are pretty helpless. Society is failing these folks. There is no alternative if they’re refusing what the city can offer.
Alexis Madrigal: For people who want to track whether this program is working — is the number basically: “we reduced unsheltered homelessness by 50%”? What’s the number — acknowledging that point-in-time counts are imperfect?
Matt Mahan: We think — and we’ll have updated counts early next year — that in the last three years we’ve reduced the number of people living outside in San Jose by about a third. We have HMIS — a countywide database. It’s not perfect, but with all the outreach and interactions we have, we have a pretty good count. We think we’ve reduced unsheltered homelessness by about a third in the last three or four years. And we believe we’ve gone from just 16% living outside to now 50% sheltered. Half of our homeless folks are indoors now in San Jose — which is huge progress.
Alexis Madrigal: We’ll be back with more with San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan.
