Turning the Calendar: One Year Back, Two Steps Ahead…

Although much of our work at City Hall attracts plenty of public attention, some of our most important and impactful initiatives don’t make the front page. Embarking on a new year (and decade) provides an opportune moment to inform the community about our work in 2019, and to articulate my focus in the year ahead:

Homeless, But Not Hopeless

Our most urgent challenge — homelessness — became all the more pressing in 2019, but we’ve gained traction on several long-term efforts that will help us turn the corner. We opened the City’s first two supportive housing projects on Keyes Street and North 2nd — with several more to come — enabling more than 230 homeless individuals to move off the street and into permanent housing. We opened our first “tiny homes” bridge housing community a few blocks from my home near the Berryessa BART station, providing transitional housing to (often working) homeless residents ready for an imminent transition to an apartment. We partnered with the County to create our first shelter addressing the unique challenges of homeless LGBTQ residents, expanded safe parking sites to serve more than 200 residents living in their cars, and have now moved more than 2,400 residents off the streets to apartments that we converted from motels. We expanded our successful efforts to employ dozens of homeless individuals in cleaning up our city, as Goodwill and Downtown Streets Team saw many of their participants move into more stable jobs and housing.

A regional effort that we led three years ago to raise the minimum wage — now at $15.25 per hour — will put a few more dollars into the pockets of low-wage workers, and hopefully help a few more struggling residents stay housed. We also helped our 1,600th homeless veteran to get off the street and into stable housing by partnering with the County and Destination:Home to launch the “All the Way Home” campaign.

What we more fully realized in 2019, however, was that for all of our victories — working with the County and nonprofits to house more than 7,982 people since we launched our coordinated efforts in 2015 — we had been losing the war as homeless census counts continued to grow. High rents and life’s setbacks — including layoffs, divorces, addiction, and illness — push people into the street faster than we’re housing them. So, we’ve doubled-down on prevention. In partnership with Destination: Home and the County, we’ve co-funded efforts to help 1,086 families facing the threat of eviction to stay in their apartments after the loss of a job or health setback to the primary wage earner, using relatively small — on average, about $4,000 per family — grants and basic services. What we’ve learned: 95% of those households stayed housed six months later. In the year ahead, I’ll focus on expanding resources for homeless prevention efforts and affordable housing construction — most notably through Measure E on the March ballot. I’ll also advocate with my mayoral colleagues in Sacramento for a permanent source of state dollars to reduce homelessness.

Accessible, Affordable Housing

Beyond our homeless crisis, San Joséans at all income levels struggle to find affordable housing, so we’re looking for more innovative ways to expand the housing supply accessible to more of our working families. Traditional housing construction has stalled, largely because builders cannot get lenders to finance projects at today’s very high construction costs — exceeding $700,000 per unit in many apartment buildings. So, we pushed to cut fees and eliminate some regulatory roadblocks last year that we hope will get more shovels in the ground. We’ve also adjusted our building codes to allow for new, innovative, and more cost-effective development — such as prefabricated and modular development, co-living, and cross-laminate timber — that will hopefully prod several projects forward.

Promisingly, our efforts to eliminate red tape, reduce fees, and streamline permitting for backyard homes has begun to bear fruit, as we approved 416 accessory units in 2019–more than our prior five years combined. In the year ahead, we’ll focus on building public-private partnerships that will help struggling homeowners finance backyard homes in exchange for enforceable commitments to keep rents affordable.

Environmental Successes

We made tremendous gains for environmental sustainability in 2019, striking historic agreements with two landowners — John Sobrato and Diane Brandenburg — to preserve nearly 1,000 acres of land in Coyote Valley against development. In 2020, we’ll continue our collaborative work with the Peninsula Open Space Trust and the Open Space Authority to begin a community planning process for Coyote Valley while we work to expand the preserved open space. By doing so, we’ll better protect water quality — and the Valley’s vast aquifer — against contamination, provide flood protection, and wildfire resilience. We’ll also prioritize the preservation of key wildlife corridors — providing open space and trails to future generations of San José.

In the largest U.S. city with a community choice energy program, we’ve deepened San José Clean Energy’s commitment to sustainability by boosting the share of green sources of electricity — solar, wind, and hydroelectric — to 86% of the total consumption of nearly every San José resident and business. Leveraging our green grid, San José also became the nation’s largest city to halt the use of natural gas in new residential and municipal construction, and we launched the largest all-electric bus fleet of any US airport.

Getting San José Moving

In 2019, we began to finally win the battle against our potholes — due to our collective efforts passing Measures B & T — repaving more of our streets (about 270 miles) last year than any year in the last quarter century, with more to come. We’ve also completed the first phase of BART construction to San José’s Berryessa Station, a major milestone of the two decades in which I have worked on four ballot measures led by SVLG CEO Carl Guardino, and as a VTA board member. When BART concludes its system testing, we’ll open BART to serve San José this year. We’ve also begun construction on a long-awaited transit line along the Capitol Corridor. When coupled with the now fully-operating bus-rapid-transit (BRT) line along Alum Rock and East Santa Clara Streets — the Bay Area’s first — East San José will see a substantial boost in investment and service from BART, BRT, and light rail. New bus and light rail service operations started in January will focus high-frequency service — with buses arriving every 15 minutes — along key corridors where we find the most riders in East San José and Downtown.

Finally, with our partners at VTA, we’ve developed conceptual plans for a world-class transit station in Downtown — across the street from the SAP Center — providing San Joséans access to seven major transit systems. This effort lies at the crux of what we’re trying to accomplish across several key goals, from Downtown’s revitalization to traffic congestion relief. In the year ahead, I’ll be laser focused on securing the final funding for BART’s construction to Downtown San José, and enabling High Speed Rail — well under construction — to connect Silicon Valley’s jobs with the Central Valley’s accessible housing.

Downtown’s Great Emergence — and the Southward Shift of Silicon Valley’s Center of Gravity

In 2019, we saw the signs of Downtown’s long-awaited emergence as Silicon Valley’s urban center, with the groundbreaking of Adobe’s expansion of its world headquarters, Zoom’s successful initial public offering, an unveiling of Google’s expansive vision, and construction underway on another two million square feet of office development. As we welcomed several new employers into San José — including regional or global headquarters for such tech leaders as Bill.com, Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Infiniera, Micron, Roku, Verizon, and Western Digital, we are seeing Silicon Valley’s center of gravity shift to the south once again — a relief to the many exhausted San José commuters who’ve spent too many hours on 85, 280, and 101 to workplaces along the Peninsula.

Education and Skill-Building That Can Bridge Our Valley’s Divide

The inequitable impacts of our economic growth make it imperative that we do more to help thousands of families drowning in high rents actually benefit from the success of our Valley. Recognizing that nearly 100,000 residents lack broadband access to the internet, we launched the nation’s first Digital Inclusion Fund in 2019 using private-sector dollars and fees to help bridge the digital divide. For the many students who cannot do their homework at home, we concluded the first phase of our partnership with East Side Union High School District, connecting more than 6,000 students and their families to free broadband around James Lick High School, and embark next on neighborhoods surrounding Overfelt High School. To help more of our youth build the digital skills they’ll need to succeed, our 5K Coding Challenge now serves over 7,000 students in libraries citywide. In 2019, we expanded our San José Learns after school learning program to include summer learning for hundreds of students from underserved families, and we’ll push to continue its expansion. We’ve continued our efforts to secure summer jobs for thousands of teens living in gang-impacted neighborhoods (“San José Works”), and cover the cost of tuition, fees, and books for 1,500 low-income community college students (“San José Promise”). We’ve also launched a new program, San José Aspires, that helps low-income high school students chart a path to college, and provides them with funding to lower the barriers to postsecondary education.

Making San José Safer

Our efforts to rebuild San José’s Police Department — enabled by our residents’ strong support for Measures B & F in 2016–have gained traction, and we’ve restored staffing to our budgetary capacity, nearing 1150 officers. To continue the momentum, we’ll work in the coming year to identify the dollars we need to hire more officers. As Chief Eddie Garcia has restored key investigative units, we’ve seen our burglary and auto theft rates decline sharply. Although aggregate crime dropped slightly in 2019, worrisome rises in sexual and other assaults have us redoubling our efforts at violence reduction — with the participation of many community partners through our Mayor’s Gang Prevention Task Force. In 2020, look for us to secure a site and begin design of our new police training center, which will enable the use of the Bridges Station for rapid patrol deployment to calls in South San José. You’ll also see novel initiatives to reduce gun violence, as we introduce a first-in-the-nation requirement for gun insurance.

The rebuilding of our Fire Department has resulted in dramatic improvements in emergency medical response. For the first time in many years, the combination of hard work by the entire department, strong leadership by Chief Robert Sapien, and the use of innovative technologies to reduce response times has exceeded the County’s response standard for twelve consecutive months. Due to our voters’ support for Measure T, we have begun design of a new — and long-promised — fire station in Willow Glen, and will identify sites in 2020 for the rebuilt Station 8 east of Downtown–which is currently teetering on the edge of Coyote Creek — and a new station in south-central San José.

Our emergency preparedness efforts have begun to take shape under Director Ray Riordan, as quick response through two near-disasters last year — the threatened flooding along Guadalupe River in the Winter, and PGE’s Public Safety Power Shutoffs in the Fall — showed that City staff and dedicated volunteers were up for the task.

Looking Forward

In the year ahead, we’ll continue pushing on these priorities, and some new ones. As PG&E’s bankruptcy and poorly maintained infrastructure curses California with blackouts and devastating wildfires, I am working with a coalition of more than 190 mayors and local elected officials who demand the transformation of PG&E. Collaborating with other stakeholders, we have proposed converting the investor-owned company to a private, customer-owned utility to create a company more responsive — and responsible — to the ratepayers. In the weeks ahead, expect us to present a financing plan with several financial institutions that will enable a $60-billion customer-led takeover, and a push to secure key approvals from the bankruptcy court, the CPUC, and Sacramento.

In short, we’ve got plenty of work to do in the year ahead. I feel blessed to work with an incredibly talented, passionate, hard-working team in the Mayor’s office — and throughout City Hall — and I’m confident that we’re collectively up for the task. We look forward to working with you to make America’s best city even better.