We’re getting to a point where with enough supply of interim housing, we can get to functional zero unsheltered homelessness, which has been my biggest focus, has been to say — you started, Ezra, with: Well, where did all the money go? Effectively tens of billions of dollars. And I think we made a mistake politically in trying to convince voters that if they invested in something we need, which is the development of new affordable housing, that they would suddenly see all the tent encampments disappear. And it’s not either-or. But the truth is, one solution is very slow and expensive, and only so scalable, frankly, at least with that mechanism. And as the tent encampments persisted, I think we lost a lot of public support for the approach. And so what has worked in San Jose, and I’ve stood in room after room — we have built 23 interim housing sites — and I’ve seen rooms with hundreds of angry neighbors, red in the face, shouting and saying, “We are going to recall you.” And my commitment to them has been: We’re going to make your neighborhood better, not worse off. And this is, I think, the details matter. What we’ve been able to demonstrate to residents around those 23 sites — and we’re not perfect — I’m sure if I say this, someone’s going to tweet at me with a photo of something that’s gone wrong. So I’m just going to acknowledge that up front. But what we’ve done is, we’ve been really radically pragmatic. When we buy that old motel that’s rundown and we convert it into transitional housing, or we buy those modular units, some of which are now stacked and built at 300,000 a unit, and you could live in them long term. They’re very nice. Some of which are literally just tiny sleeping cabins. We made a commitment to the neighbors in a radius around that site that there’s going to be a local preference. If you’re homeless in that area, you get first dibs on that housing. No. 2, after a period of time of outreach and moving people in, in a smaller radius, we’re going to create and enforce a no-encampment zone, because with the early sites, what didn’t work was allowing people to still choose to camp a block away from that interim site, and it completely visually undermines that trust and belief that we’re making progress. Not everybody loves the idea of a no-encampment zone. But that’s how we got community buy-in. And what we’ve seen, and this was the case I made, but we had to prove out and it took — I want to thank my colleagues and others down in San Jose for having the courage to do this — we were finally able to show people, and they felt that when we built interim housing and got people stabilized indoors and connected to case management, calls for service for crime, 911, for blight, 311, plummeted, which actually makes perfect sense. Common sense. You get people stabilized indoors and not in an unmanaged tent encampment with noise and fires and drug use and all the challenges, and everybody’s quality of life is better. But I will say, the thing that we’ve done that has not worked super well is as we have tried to throw local public dollars at building new affordable housing, you pointed it out: Our cost to build is 30 percent higher than the private market. Frankly, if I could go back, I would have encouraged us to buy the older housing stock that’s $300,000 a unit rather than build new at a million a unit, when the private marketplace could have built, if we had just incentivized them at 600,000 a unit. I think we lose public trust when we just keep throwing money in an inefficient way at the problem.
