5-step plan to get D3 back on track
Homelessness — worse. Housing — unattainable. Street crime — endemic. Core services — decayed.
These are the realities of living in SJ’s District 3. Our city government has failed to halt the decline of our neighborhoods. The City is stuck. It’s time for a realistic, no-nonsense D3 Recovery Plan that will deliver visible change.
After talking to thousands and thousands of residents through the primary season and now in the general election, I have developed a simple, clear program to get D3 back on track. I call it my D3 Recovery Plan, and I outline it in this document.
How we got into this mess.
Our failure didn’t happen naturally. Many similar cities across the U.S. do not have our problems https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/homeless/houston-housing-first-portland-homeless-crisis/283-ac7caf6d-2a53-4c32-a4e7-c6085d3887ab. Our failure is the result of systemic problems in San Jose. And D3 in particular pays the price for that systemic failure.
There are three broad areas where we went wrong.
First, our city doesn’t listen to residents very well.
While our elected Councilmembers ostensibly manage our city staff, the reality is that unelected bureaucrats often run roughshod over the council and treat residents’ input as an afterthought.
Second, we’re addicted to Big. Our City government looks for gigantic, one size fits all answers to every problem, creating big costly, unwieldy programs that don’t really solve specific problems. This addiction to bigness privileges other Big power structures — Big Government, Big Business, Big Labor, Big Non Profits, and shortchanges the Little Guy — that’s us — neighbors, neighborhoods and small businesses.
Third, lack of accountability. When a program doesn’t work, nobody gets fired, nothing changes, and the city blithely proceeds to double down on failure. The Housing Department is the poster child for this systemic lack of accountability, burning through over a billion dollars in the last three years while homelessness has actually gone up by 11%. https://sanjosespotlight.com/silicon-valley-santa-clara-county-san-jose-sees-homeless-population-grow-homelessness-unhoused/
How do we fix it? I see five key steps — five radical reforms we can make to get D3 back on track. These reforms address almost every element of how City Hall is run and how D3 gets its problems addressed. Let me walk you through each plank, starting with fixing the Debacle which is our Housing Policy.
Step 1: Stability Now: Meet the encampment unhoused where they are
Here’s why the city’s approach to homelessness is a failure: it’s just a hamster-wheel of allowing, and then dismantling homeless encampments. On top of that, there is a complete lack of financial foresight for new buildings — it is an outrage that some new supposedly affordable units cost $1M per door for brick and mortar. https://christopherrufo.com/the-limits-of-housing-first/
We are failing our unhoused neighbors by letting them live in dangerous, unhealthy, and unsanitary conditions and degrading the D3 neighborhoods around them.
Solution: My Incremental Ladder of Housing Success is an important first step. https://medium.com/@irenesmithd3/incremental-ladder-of-housing-success-5cebce8a88f7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4HSWYac3oo&t=104s
It meets our unhoused clients where they are at and puts an emphasis on Stabilization, Services, and Treatment First, instead of waiting for expensive new housing to be built in a decade. My plan is very similar to San Diego’s Community Action Plan on Homelessness, which has been very successful in cost-effectively and quickly addressing the needs of their homeless neighbors https://www.sdhc.org/homelessness-solutions/community-action-plan/
and Tacoma where encampments are not allowed to start.
We can do this right now.
Step 2: Placement First. We need to radically reform use of existing housing and shelter opportunities.
The City’s response to our affordable housing crisis has been an expensive bust because it has been strategically flawed from the get-go. It has focused almost exclusively on building new subsidized housing, which costs up to $1m/ per unit and a decade to build, leaving people stranded and abandoned on creeks, in their cars, and sidewalks.
The strategy gave short shrift to options besides just building new apartments. We can also focus on using the thousands and thousands of available, unused units and shelters. This means re-purposing and reinventing: vacant office buildings, underutilized government space, vacant bedrooms in houses, vacant motels, hotels, and so on.
San Jose is lagging other major metro areas in exploring these types of options.
New York has already taken formal government action to ease the process of converting office space to residential space.
A study in Los Angeles County conducted in April 2022 found that hotel and office conversions could add upwards of 72,000 units to the area’s housing supply.
In fact, nationwide momentum for conversions is growing. A report from RentCafe found that in 2021, US cities saw more than 150 apartment conversion projects, and 41% of those were from former office buildings. In all, roughly 7,400 apartment units were created from office conversions in 2021, more than six times the number of units created a decade earlier.
https://qz.com/2151800/cities-are-turning-empty-office-buildings-into-apartments/
We should include incentives for owners of vacant houses, rentals, living spaces to join this program, use our existing resources, and house people now — instead of funneling hundreds of millions of dollars into unaccountable nonprofits, like we do now.
Step 3: Vouchers Now. We need to radically expand the city’s role in using and preserving affordable housing.
Many of our hardworking neighbors can’t even enter our rental market because of insane housing prices. It will take us decades to fix this supply problem. So, the answer isn’t just new subsidized housing — that takes too long — the answer is existing subsidized housing right now to prevent further homelessness.
And we can do it by expanding the Federal HUD Section 8 Voucher program by creating our own city voucher program to include those who need it most. This voucher program would work the same as Section 8, which currently helps house over 1.5 million low-income Americans.
Section 8 waiting lists are long, people sometimes wait a decade for a Section 8 voucher.
By redirecting Housing Department funds currently earmarked for expensive new buildings, we can provide low-income residents with housing vouchers right now, use currently available inventory and prevent more homelessness.
We can do this in a way that would be more responsive to tenants and make it easier for housing providers.
San Jose is lagging behind other innovative local entities in exploring this type of solution. Portland, Oregon, and the states of Illinois and Wisconsin are the pioneers in providing locally-funded housing voucher programs, and my plan looks to build upon their success.
We can do this right now.
Each of the first 3 steps can be done right now, if we have the political will and agreement to work together.
Step 4: The Office of Public Listening. We need to radically reform our citizen input/response process
Anybody who’s ever tried to give input to City Hall knows this story. You send a letter and get an automated response. You go to a community meeting and have to wait three hours to talk while professional, well-paid, and well-scripted advocates funded by wealthy interests from outside our city, hog the meeting.
nonprofits hog the meeting. You speak at city hall and everybody smiles and votes the way they were always going to vote.
Anyone who works in business knows that customer feedback is a serious, professional responsibility and that SJ City is acting like it’s 1970. We need a single, empowered customer feedback organization that uses up to date technology and techniques to get varied sourced feedback, publicly report back on what D3 citizens are saying and feeling and put in place actions plans based on community input. That organization needs to be centralized and have an independent board overseeing it, not just uncoordinated City Staff departments. I propose that we launch a pilot program for D3, with an emphasis on housing, as the first step in rolling this out citywide.
Step 5: Liberate D3 from SJ’s constraining governance model so we can create policies just for us
D3 has more than 1800 unhoused residents, according to the city’s 2019 Census. That’s a whopping 300% more than District 6, at 568 and D1 has 141. This highlights the fact that D3 has unique urban problems that the rest of the city doesn’t have, yet we govern D3 the same way we do the semi-rural neighborhoods of Almaden Valley. We apply the same restrictions, the same policies, the same funding mechanisms, the same management model to urban downtown as we do for horse farms and 4-acre mansions.
It’s not a successful approach. D3 needs to be able to have greater say identifying, designing, and funding our unique solutions.
The question of how to balance the efficiencies of scale with responsiveness to unique local needs is a longstanding debate in city planning and governance circles. On one hand, we have San Jose’s — and most big American city’s model — which aims to realize cost-effectiveness via a centralized bureaucracy. On the other hand, we have the model championed by Jane Jacobs, in the Life And Death of American Cities, https://www.amazon.com/Death-Life-Great-American-Cities/dp/067974195X which focuses instead on providing hyper-local planning (or unplanning), more on a block by block basis. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2016/5/4/nolan-gray
I will acknowledge up front that I am more inclined toward Jacobs’ vision for D3 — and assert that San Jose’s hypercentralized model does not meet our needs, and in fact does not even realize efficiencies.
Let me give you an example:
Citywide, there is no budget for towing RVs. D3 is overrun by RVs and abandoned vehicles — it’s a critical quality of life issue for residents and small businesses. But D10-and other districts — do not have a RV towing problem, so when it comes to voting for an RV towing budget, it is dismissed.
The same phenomenon — the city choosing a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t work for urban D3 — applies to: the siting policy, vehicle abatement, police foot patrols, encampment abatements, sidewalk management, and a whole long laundry list of other issues.
I believe we need to start the process of exploring the concept of “deconcentration” for District 3.
The World Bank explains the meaning of the term
http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/decentralization/what.htm
Deconcentration — which is often considered to be the weakest form of decentralization and is used most frequently in unitary states — redistributes decision making authority and financial and management responsibilities among different levels of the central government. It can merely shift responsibilities from central government officials in the capital city to those working in regions, provinces, or districts, or it can create strong field administration or local administrative capacity under the supervision of central government ministries.
Here ‘s how we can get started on deconcentrating — on building more local administrative capacity for D3:
Let’s create a Downtown Recovery Caucus.
I suggest that we create a Downtown Recovery Caucus, an organization that comprises all downtowns’ adjoining districts (4, 5, 7, 6), as well as neighborhood and business leaders.
Our first order of business is to, together, create a Downtown Success Metrics Report Card that we will hold City Staff accountable to for improving Downtown.
Some of the items on that report card, for me, might include: garbage cans organized/revitalized, 911 app changed to include mental health option, foot patrol successes and expansion, select 3 city departments for responsiveness training, select 1–2 city departments for full forensic audit and compare with stated objectives, performance plan for city manager, unhoused off streets/sidewalks/parks, finalize MCAT police program).
In summary, the problems in D3 require a radical change agent, a dramatic rethinking of how City Hall identifies, addresses, funds, manages, and holds itself accountable. My D3 Recovery Plan isn’t the full answer, but it’s a good start. And it is a much more honest, objective, and realistic approach to solving D3’s problems than simply doubling down on the failed policies of the past, which is essentially what other candidates offer.
Please visit my website for more info on this plan or feel free to contact me directly.
