☆ Advice to Mahan: Expose SJ’s Homeless Industrial Complex

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CA Policy Center’s Edward Ring urges Mayor Mahan, below, to “tell the whole truth” about SJ’s bureaucratic–nonprofit approach to homelessness in his State of the City. Namely, that decades and billions of dollars later, we barely have any (positive) results to show for it. An Opp Now exclusive.

Mayor Mahan is invited to tell the whole truth about San Jose's homeless industrial complex. 

He can admit that the entire city bureaucracy and nonprofit network supposedly created to eliminate homelessness has accomplished absolutely nothing. He can tabulate and report on how much taxpayer support this rent-seeking apparatus has collected over the past decade, and compare that to homeless counts over the same period. He can admit that most of the city's “permanent supportive housing” has not only been constructed at a scandalous, utterly unsustainable price per unit, but in most cases becomes environments no more supportive than sleeping in a park or under a bridge, with the only difference being the billions of dollars and thousands of jobs these projects created for politically connected developers, local government bureaucrats, and nonprofit employees tasked with operating them.

Go Deeper:

• California State Auditor’s scathing report on SJ, state homelessness programs: Where did all that money go?
• The work is mysterious and important
• Expert: How to make Watson Park sanctioned homeless encampment work

He can recommend a new course: construction of low-cost congregate shelters in inexpensive parts of the county; and set a timetable of one year to build and relocate every single one of the city's homeless into these safe, cost-effective environments. The idea that something this radical is impossible is ridiculous. It is a political choice.

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