☆ Advice to Mahan: Time to ditch outdated transportation “solutions”?
Next Saturday, Mayor Mahan delivers his State of the City address. So we exclusively polled Opp Now contributors on what they think he should, and shouldn’t, discuss. For our first installment, Pat Waite, Tobin Gilman, and Marc Joffe request he speaks to housing construction, homelessness, and public transit (like, um, BART’s ill-starred extension).
Pat Waite, Citizens for Fiscal Responsibility president: I admire Mayor Mahan’s laser focus on solving our unhoused epidemic. I would like to see him pivot to addressing the root cause of our problem in his upcoming speech, teeing up how to reduce fees on and increase the construction of housing of all types, not just subsidized affordable options. The San Jose–Sunnyvale–Santa Clara MSA is some 100,000 units short of equilibrium demand, yet only 4,290 new private housing unit building permits were issued in 2024, per data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Housing will never be affordable for our children until we attack that issue.
Tobin Gilman, past SJ Charter Review Commissioner: As an Almaden Valley homeowner, I would be interested in hearing the mayor’s vision for spreading his housing agenda across all council districts in FY 2025–26. Mayor Mahan’s agenda, which enjoys broad support in D10, focuses heavily on building emergency interim housing and accelerating affordable housing construction.
However, D10 has relatively few tiny home communities, safe parking sites, sanctioned encampments, and affordable housing units. Many of these projects are disproportionately concentrated in other districts.
I believe many of my neighbors, as well as residents of other districts, would like to learn more about if and how the city’s housing and homelessness strategy will be more evenly and equitably distributed across all districts in the upcoming fiscal year.
Marc Joffe, Contra Costa Taxpayers Association president: After showing independent, pragmatic thinking on homelessness, I hope Mayor Mahan will apply the same lens to transit. There are some hopeful signs. In April, the Mayor penned a letter supporting Waymo’s rollout of driverless taxis to San Jose in time for the 2026 Super Bowl and World Cup. Before that, he wrote a commentary criticizing the Amalgamated Transit Union over its strike that shut down VTA bus and light-rail service.
The next step in advocating for cost-effective, user-centered transportation in San Jose would be for Mayor Mahan to drop his support for the $12.7 billion BART extension that is not expected to open until 2039. By the time this boondoggle is completed, robotaxis could well be ubiquitous and flying taxis may also be widely available. So the question for the Mayor is whether forward-looking San Jose should continue to invest in legacy transportation solutions like a giant BART tunnel under East Santa Clara Street.
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