San Jose Mayor-elect Matt Mahan gets ready to take office, speaks on matters of interest to business community - Silicon Valley Business Journal

Dec 30, 2022, 12:16pm PST

I'll be out in the community in a hands-on way focused on the core themes of the campaign in a very direct way. I plan to start the day going over to the Police Department, thanking our officers for working on a holiday, meeting with our chief and then heading over, I believe to Martha's Kitchen. We'll see how the rest of the day frames up, but I plan for it to be a hands-on day out in the community focused on those core issues.

Right now we have a 25% vacancy rate in that department. We talk a lot about streamlining when we're running for office and then very little happens once we're in governance mode and I aim to change that. Now that you're on the other side of the election, what do you make of the divisions within the political community on the perceived business versus labor divide?

In terms of housing, do you think the city’s requirement of having developers who want to build downtown either agree to create affordable housing or pay an in-lieu fee is the right approach? Well, my view being a more market-oriented person philosophically is I don't think that we should just set a target for market and a target for affordable and say..."Oh, we've hit our targets, so we're good. Check." That's not really how markets work.

One of the things that you had campaigned on dealt with good government and transparency. You said that contracts for private companies need to be rigorously audited for results. How do you balance that with being too onerous? In the short run, we need to just do better blocking and tackling around safety and cleanliness. The bigger thing we need to do is improve our street outreach programs and we need to partner with the county and nonprofit providers.

I think it's both. To my point about the longer term solution, being residential density, I don't think you have enough of a built-in consumer base to support a lot of the retail uses we'd like to see downtown. You need more people living downtown, particularly at a time when many of our commercial buildings have vacancies or have people working from home.

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