San José Mayor Matt Mahan Wants to Be Governor. Here’s a Look Into His Signature Homelessness Program

Since San José Mayor Matt Mahan took office in 2023, the city has dramatically shifted the city’s approach to homelessness from building permanent affordable housing to building more temporary shelters, with the goal of getting people off the street faster.

Now, as he eyes the governor’s office, we look into how his signature homelessness program is going.

Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by The Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco-Northern California Local.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:00:00] I’m Ericka Cruz Guevara and welcome to The Bay, local news to keep you rooted.

Matt Mahan [00:00:05] Thank you all for being here today in North San Jose. San Jose’s District 4…

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:00:11] Last week, San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan appeared at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a 200-bed, tiny home community for the city’s unhoused residents. It’s going to be the city 23rd temporary housing site, way up from the seven that were there when Mahan first took office.

Matt Mahan [00:00:33] When I ran, I promised that we would change our approach to homelessness, that we would get more people indoors faster, that we would stop letting the perfect be the enemy of the good because it was costing us lives, threatening the livelihoods of our small business owners, and worsening quality of life for all of us.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:00:55] Mahan turned San Jose’s approach to homelessness upside down when he shifted the city’s focus on building permanent affordable housing to quick interim shelter instead. Now, Mahan wants to be California’s governor and he’s pointing to his track record on homelessness as a success.

Guy Marzorati [00:01:20] I do think if you’re looking at him as a politician based on his time in San Jose, this tiny home program really is a good place to look because this has been really his signature initiative during his time at office.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:01:33] Today, I sit down with KQED politics and government correspondent Guy Marzorati to unpack Mayor Matt Mahan’s signature homelessness program.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:01:50] All right, Guy. So I understand you went to a ribbon cutting ceremony for a tiny home in San Jose yesterday. Can you tell me a little bit about this ceremony you went to?

Guy Marzorati [00:02:01] Yeah, so this was the ribbon cutting for a tiny home community that opened in North San Jose at the Cerone VTA Yard. This is a dirt parcel that’s owned by the Valley Transportation Authority that they’re leasing to San Jose to build a 200-bed tiny home community.

Matt Mahan [00:02:23] Even though we’ve all been together at grand openings like this many times before, this site is very special. It’s also the first site I fought hard for after becoming mayor.

Guy Marzorati [00:02:37] This was a notable ribbon cutting because it marked the last tiny home project in the city’s pipeline. This has been a huge initiative under the current mayor, Matt Mahan and the city council, and the opening of this tiny home community at the Cerone VTA yard was a milestone in that effort.

Matt Mahan [00:02:59] This phase of shelter expansion may be over for now, but our fight to end unsheltered homelessness continues.

Guy Marzorati [00:03:09] The city has basically reached the end of the line as far as the new tiny homes and shelters that they can fund. Mahan has said they just don’t have enough money to continue building this system out. And he’s described it now as a time to optimize these beds that they do have in order to meet the need.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:03:27] I’m curious what these tiny homes actually looked like. Can you describe them for me?

Guy Marzorati [00:03:32] Yeah, so in the case of this new facility in North San Jose, they’re basically just single rooms with a door that locks on top of what looked like large metal risers. So you can almost think of like really large shipping containers on top of these metal riser with individual rooms and then on site different facilities for laundry, communal kitchen, places for staff to work for supportive services to either connect them with medical services they might need. To try to find them housing placements in the future. There’s often also county health workers that will come visit on site as well. Sometimes they’ll also have help with any like pet needs because people are allowed to bring their pets as well, it’s a lot of those kind of like supportive services that are available on site.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:04:18] What is it actually like for folks living in one of these interim housing sites?

Guy Marzorati [00:04:26] You know, I think for the folks that I’ve talked to that are staying in the interim housing communities, I think it’s two things. On one hand, many of the people I talked to and including this man named Miguel Torres who lives at the Rue Ferrari interim housing complex, it’s a lot better than what they had thought of traditionally as shelter.

Miguel Torres [00:04:47] Here it’s like peaceful, you get your own room. You know, for me, because I get like a little anxiety, it’s perfect for me.

Guy Marzorati [00:04:54] These you know images of congregate shelter where people in large facilities and bunk beds and there’s no privacy and there are often cases of abuse or crime. This is something very different. This offers a level of privacy and as Miguel described it just like a way to kind of breathe.

Miguel Torres [00:05:14] I don’t have to worry about being in the street or anything. So I’m focusing on a career, on a job, trying to just move forward, you know, be independent and get my own spot.

Guy Marzorati [00:05:21] He’d only moved in a little while ago, but he already had it decked out with, you know, 49er blankets everywhere and he had his speaker system set up. He was able to make the place his own. At the same time, he said, like, this is not my ultimate dream for myself.

Guy Marzorati [00:05:39] What’s your dream for your own, like, spot?

Miguel Torres [00:05:42] Oh man, if I told you…a big house, cars, boat, motorcycle, you don’t know.  No – just a regular little house, you know, I got kids so hopefully I can bring them in with me too. That’s pretty much my goal, just to get a stable job, you know, affordable housing and my kids with me.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:06:04] What is supposed to happen to folks who stay in these tiny homes? Like how long are they supposed to be living in these?

Guy Marzorati [00:06:13] I think initially when this plan was envisioned in San Jose, it would be that maybe a six-month stay or thereabouts before people could move on to permanent housing, whether that’s moving into a supportive housing project, getting a rental voucher, and going and finding their own apartment, whatever the case may be, that in practice has not turned out to be a strict rule, and in many cases people do stay at these interim housing facilities for more than six months. But the goal of the program overall is to get people off of the streets so they’re not sleeping in tents or along river beds and move them towards a more permanent form of housing.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:06:57] And you mentioned, Guy, that this project was sort of the last phase of this sort of broader effort by Mayor Matt Mahan to address homelessness by really focusing on interim housing. Can you remind us a little bit how different that focus on interim housing is from San approaches to homelessness in the past.

Guy Marzorati [00:07:23] Yeah, that’s a great question, because when Mahan took office at the beginning of 2023, San Jose, Santa Clara, the South Bay, writ large, public officials were really focused on ending homelessness largely through spending money to build permanent affordable housing. Every year Mahan has been mayor, he’s put forward these plans where he wants to spend more and more of dedicated city homelessness dollars towards shelter. First time he proposed it was the first year he was mayor, it got rejected. He came back the next year, got more money towards shelter, and then it got to a point where last year, where the city council voted to basically spend all of this dedicated homeless money, 90% of it, towards interim housing and shelter. So. It’s gone from when he took office, 90% of this money was on affordable housing, now 90% on shelter. This is now a really robust system of more than 2,100 beds across the city. It’s been a complete turnaround in the way in which local government, and specifically in San Jose, has tried to reduce homelessness, and it has not been without controversy because we’ve seen, again and again, funding fights over whether to use city dollars towards shelter. Or whether to use it towards more permanent affordable housing.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:08:41] And obviously, the goal for someone like Mahan is to very quickly get people off of streets to sort of end that visible form of homelessness. So Guy, it’s been three years since Mahan took office. I mean, how’s it going?

Guy Marzorati [00:08:59] Yeah, I mean, I think when you look at the tiny home program mayhem would point to unsheltered homelessness being down 10% in San Jose since he took office and that being the North Star of success for why the shelter build out is working. That being said, it is still early and I think there are some open questions about this initiative going forward.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:09:26] While visible forms of homelessness have gone down during Mahan’s time as mayor, experts have argued you can’t solve homelessness for good without permanent, affordable housing. It remains to be seen how many people living in these temporary shelters actually move into something more permanent. And that could all depend on whether the city can even continue paying to keep these tiny homes open.

Guy Marzorati [00:10:04] This interim housing system is still not completely funded in the years to come, the operating costs. There was a budget report that came out from the city last week that found this system is about $17 million short in the coming budget year. It’s gonna need $30 million. The following year, it’s gonna need $58 million by 2029. Now, Mahan argues the city can get the cost down at these sites, they can optimize services. Or money will come from the state government or from the county government but if it doesn’t that money to keep these tiny homes operating will come from the city general fund and that’s what pays for all the rest of the basic services of the city like police, like fire.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:10:48] Yeah, that is so interesting. And I wonder what the conversations within local government have been around this. That is such a shift in the region’s approach to homelessness.

Guy Marzorati [00:11:01] Yeah, it’s certainly not been without controversy. I think at the city level, Mahan and the city council got to a point where they had committed themselves to building out this system. Once that became the case, they were stuck looking for, okay, we need to find a way to pay for it. And this Measure E money, this money that’s raised every year through attacks on real estate transactions, that became pot they were looking for to build out this shelter system. There have been a lot of criticism of that.

Sylvia Arenas [00:11:28] I think to build tiny homes and then you forget, oh, we needed to also put in some money to operate is not respecting the taxpayers and also not being true to what you’re actually providing.

Guy Marzorati [00:11:42] And I talked to supervisor Sylvia Arenas who said she honestly felt like it was a mistake or perhaps irresponsible to build out a system without a clear way of paying for it in the years to come.

Sylvia Arenas [00:11:55] Are operating costs of interim housing, like those costs were going to outrun the revenue that we were receiving. So how on earth were we going to continue to provide the service?

Guy Marzorati [00:12:09] What Mahan has said is, well, I need to see other parts of government come in and help support these costs. I need the state to help me. I need a county government to come and help me, and county leaders have said, well wait a second, we never agreed with building out this system in the first place. I will say that there has been more collaboration between Santa Clara County and San Jose in recent months on providing services to people living in temporary housing. But there’s still no guarantee that the county is going to help pick up the tab, pick up the operating costs for these tiny homes.

Sylvia Arenas [00:12:42] It is not meant for a permanent place for folks to live. And so unless we are going to feed the pipeline and the pipeline at the end of this is more affordable housing, we’re just creating more places for people to live, not interim, but for a longer period of time. So the question is, is this really interim or is this more permanent housing for folks who are unhoused?

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:13:12] Yeah, it sounds like Matt Mahan is sort of celebrating the media and stuff, but it does sound like there might be some sort of long-term impacts that we have yet to see in San Jose.

Guy Marzorati [00:13:27] Yeah, and I think this is, you know, experts that I’ve talked about with this, about building out shelter systems. And I heard this from Benjamin Henwood, who leads the Homelessness Policy Research Institute at USC, is that these shelter systems, once they’re built, can really be costly.

Benjamin Henwood [00:13:47] I think the question becomes, are we designing a shelter system to sort of permanently manage a homelessness problem?

Guy Marzorati [00:13:55] If you think about an affordable housing project, the people who are living there are contributing some portion of the rent, or maybe if they’re unable to, they’re having a federal voucher that’s gonna pay for some portion the rent. So the operators of those apartments are getting some kind of revenue. When you look at a shelter or a tiny home, no one is paying anything who’s staying there. So there’s really no revenue that’s coming in to support this, yet the city has committed itself. To pay these operating costs year after year after year. And so Henwood said, yeah, look, this is one of the risks of building out a shelter system like this is that you end up with these kind of ongoing escalating costs for years to come.

Benjamin Henwood [00:14:36] The issue is that we just don’t have enough housing, and so I think people have struggled with how best to address that, because I think that people want something done in the short term, but those short term solutions are not going to lead to kind of a long-term resolution of the problem. So it’s an important dilemma when you have limited resources on how you’re going use them.

Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:14:58] Well, that’s really interesting, Guy, because now you have Matt Mahan running for governor of the state of California. I mean, how does that change the way that you are looking at this program, really his signature program on homelessness in San Jose?

Guy Marzorati [00:15:18] Yeah, no, that’s exactly it. Like this is his signature program as mayor. Some mayors have bridges, tunnels, others have downtown arenas. Matt Mahan has tiny homes. This is going to be fascinating to watch in the context of the governor’s race, because I do think Mahan will frame much of his campaign as a story of San Jose.

Matt Mahan [00:15:36] I want to lead the state in a way that is less focused on partisanship and more focused on results.

Guy Marzorati [00:15:44] Look to San Jose for a place that actually has achieved results on something that we set out to achieve. Voters, elected mayhem, unsheltered homelessness was probably the biggest issue in the campaign. He vowed to reduce it. It’s coming down. But I do think if you’re looking at him as a politician based on his time in San Jose, this tiny home program really is a good place to look because this has been really his signature initiative during his time office. The question now is, how much more progress can be made? Because as I said, this was kind of the end of the line for building out the shelter system, yet roughly 4,000 people are still sleeping on the streets in San Jose every night. So if this is the finish line, what other steps are gonna be taken to reach that goal of actually ending unsheltered homelessness?