'We're Finally Paving Our Streets': Exit Interview With San José Mayor Sam Liccardo

After eight years as San José’s mayor — and another eight years before that on the City Council — Sam Liccardo is leaving City Hall.

When Liccardo was elected to the city’s top job in 2014, San José was still recovering from massive cuts to city services in the wake of the Great Recession, and city leaders were locked in a bitter fight over municipal employee benefits.

Liccardo was at the helm as the city celebrated the arrival of BART in north San José, the preservation of Coyote Valley and the Sharks’ first trip to the Stanley Cup Finals. During his tenure, the city also grappled with the damaging Coyote Creek flood of 2017, the COVID-19 pandemic and the tragic 2021 mass shooting at the VTA rail yard.

Liccardo sat down with KQED’s Guy Marzorati to reflect on his tenure.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Guy Marzorati: Almost exactly a year ago today, you gave a speech calling homelessness the city’s “greatest failure.” A year later do you still feel that way? This is not a problem that has greatly improved, so what responsibility do you take for that?

Sam Liccardo: Well, as I said last year, I take responsibility because I’m the mayor. And that being said, I think the reality is I think every mayor of every major city west of the Rockies would say exactly the same thing about their own city if they were pressed.

The reality is that homelessness is rapidly rising in far too many cities throughout the country, where we’re seeing rising rents and extraordinary challenges in getting housing built. I’d like to think we’re making a lot of headway in ways that we couldn’t talk about years ago, but that we can say now. We’ve been able to deploy, for example, quick-build housing communities using prefabricated housing on underutilized public land, for example, near a Caltrans off-ramp. We’re able to build transitional housing for our unhoused residents and do that in a matter of months rather than building it in years, which is what it takes for a typical apartment complex.

Were there things that you tried that didn’t work? 

We’ve tried tiny homes, which were really, you know, a much smaller version of quick-build housing. The tiny homes were really just small sheds. And we have those now at two sites and we’re operating them. It’s a very expensive model and, frankly, I don’t believe now that we’ve seen what we can do, I don’t think this is really the way to go. I’d rather see residents in more dignified housing where they have access to their own private bathroom.

I know it ends up always being bad news when it doesn’t work, but cities need to be more innovative. And I hope that’s an ethos that we’ve been able to impart in my eight years here, that we have to take these kinds of risks because we don’t have the resources we all would love to have to tackle these problems, so we’re just going to have to do things differently.

It seems like every time one of those interim emergency housing proposals goes before the council, no matter where it is, you hear the same thing from residents: “We’re all for helping the homeless, just not here. It’s just too close to my house, my kid’s school, too close to a hospital.” For future city leaders, how do they deal with that?

Yeah, it’s going to take courage. And there are those community meetings where you’re going to be there with 300 very unhappy people, all asserting that they are going to vote you out if affordable housing for the unhoused is anywhere in their neighborhood. And the reality is we need to build it in every neighborhood. This is just our reality. And if we don’t build the housing in every neighborhood, it doesn’t mean the unhoused residents go away. I live in a neighborhood where I see unhoused residents every day, and I know that they’d be a lot more safe if they were housed, and I would be more safe if they were housed. So let’s all agree to make everybody safe and get folks housed.

Perhaps the most dramatic turnaround during your tenure has been with the city’s finances. You took office when San José was reeling from a pension crisis — now we could be looking at budget surpluses. Where can residents see that turnaround? 

We’re finally starting to be able to provide some of the basic services residents deserve. We’re finally paving our streets. We’ve got every street in the city now on a seven-year cycle, and we’re seeing dramatic improvements in street conditions. We’re opening libraries on Sundays in our poorest neighborhoods. Not all of our libraries are open, but we prioritize the 16 libraries serving our least affluent neighborhoods. All of that is a reflection of the budget.

The real success story is really from what happened in 2015 and 2016 when we were able to negotiate with 11 of our unions on a pension reform plan that would ultimately save taxpayers about $3 billion over the next three decades. And, you know, everybody came together. We went to the ballot. We had to get voter approval for it because it was a change to the charter and the voters approved it. Because we were able to do that, all these other possibilities emerged.

One of your last major initiatives as mayor was a push to move investigations of police officer misconduct from inside the San José Police Department to the Independent Police Auditor. The ultimate fate of that idea will be left to the next mayor and council. But we’re coming off a mayoral campaign in which frankly there was a lot more discussion about police staffing than about police accountability. Does that leave you worried about the political desire to get reforms like this done?

I don’t think anyone really views police misconduct as internal affairs anymore. It’s very public [and it] has severe ramifications on a community. A single act can create ripples of mistrust that can last for years. And so we have to have an independent authority that does this investigation.

Look, I think we all know, unfortunately, the reality of this, which is inevitably there’s going to be another officer-involved shooting that will be questioned publicly. And when that happens, there’s going to be an uproar. And at some point, I think we want to think in advance of the problem rather than simply dealing with the crisis after the fact, so we have to grapple with this.

And, you know, the aftermath and the civil unrest from George Floyd certainly taught many of us an important lesson, which is that we have to listen with different ears and perhaps see with different eyes on this. I would expect that the council will get that. Now, I know a lot of these new council members were not around to be part of much of that aftermath, but I think they were in the community and they saw it. So I would hope that they learned the same lessons we did.

Matt Mahan takes office next month as the city’s next mayor. You were his most notable supporter in the course of the campaign. What’s going to be the biggest challenge facing him?

Well, you mentioned I was the most notable; I guess you might say I was the only. That was part of the challenge. You know, there were nine council members who supported somebody else. And so he’s going to need to develop a working majority on the council to get things done.

And the good news is, I think Matt is a very collaborative guy. He’s very, very bright. And I think he’s going to be very effective at doing this because he’s pragmatic and he’s not going to get ideological about issues. I think he wants to really address the key problems of the city. It is homelessness, it’s crime, it’s all the big city challenges, blight, whatever it might be. I think he’s going to focus on pragmatic solutions, and I think that’s going to bring people along.

You’ve started an advocacy organization, Solutions San José, and a political campaign arm, Common Good Silicon Valley. What’s going to be the role of those groups in city policy and politics going forward?

Those are groups I did help to start but for both political and legal reasons I walked away. I’m not involved in running or managing them. So they will continue to be involved in city politics; I won’t be.

You’re not going to take over a role in either of those organizations?

No, I won’t be directly involved in any of those organizations. And I don’t expect to be spending a significant amount of time in a lot of that. So the short answer is, I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing at this moment. I’d really committed to myself — and I think my wife and I are really committed to each other — that I’d make decisions in January or February, rather than making decisions while I was in office.