Long Story Short…

Here’s what you need to know this week — in 30 seconds or less:

• San José reached a milestone no other major city can claim: we tripled our shelter capacity in under a year — proving that faster, scalable solutions to homelessness are possible.
• We’re betting big on economic growth: launching major cultural events, starting with a Kehlani block party outside City Hall, to ensure San José is at the center of the 2026 Super Bowl excitement.
• And we’re strengthening regional safety: partnering with Bay Area mayors, sharing strategies, and coordinating across borders because crime doesn’t stop at city lines — and neither should accountability.

Keep scrolling for all the data and details.

Dear Neighbor,

Hope fuels action. It’s won presidential campaigns, it’s ended wars, it’s powered scientific breakthroughs. 

The absence of hope breeds stagnation. Because the moment we lose faith in progress, we stop doing the things that make progress possible. 

And in California, we’ve come dangerously close to losing hope when it comes to the greatest humanitarian crisis we face: homelessness.

For years, we’ve poured billions of taxpayer dollars into a strategy that simple math could have told us would never scale. We clung to a rigid, overly narrow interpretation of “housing first” — one that insisted the only solution was the most expensive and slowest form of housing possible.

And meanwhile, we’ve left over 100,000 people to suffer on the streets while a lucky few received keys to brand new apartments that cost too much and take too long to build. 

We’ve been told again and again that with just one more tax, one more bond, or one more measure, we would end this crisis. Until recently, it’s been easier for those in power to cling to the ideal solution and pretend it’s working, even while the population of people living on the streets grows and the conditions of our neighborhoods worsens. 

It’s pretty darn difficult to have hope when the people representing you refuse to acknowledge what you’re seeing every day. Hope starts by being honest about the challenges we face and choosing pragmatic action. 

In San José — and in a handful of other big California cities — we’ve made our choice. We’ve listened to our residents. And while Sacramento clings to ideological purity tests, we’re choosing to act by building out a safe, dignified shelter system that gets more people off the streets faster using fewer taxpayer dollars. We’re choosing not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good.  In fact, this week, we kept a promise we made to you at the start of the year: we tripled our shelter capacity. We opened more than 1,000 new shelter beds in under 12 months — more than any other city on the West Coast, and likely the nation. 

Hundreds of people in San José will get the help they need. They will be able to access the services that will help them graduate to something more permanent – job training, addiction treatment, mental health care, reconnection with loved ones. 

This milestone gives me hope. And I hope you feel it too. 

Because over the last two homelessness counts, we’ve seen an over 20% reduction in the number of people sleeping on our streets each night – and those counts were taken BEFORE we tripled our capacity this year. Reducing homelessness has become a trend in San José— one that not only we can learn from, but one that can and should be modeled across our state. 

Our neighborhoods can breathe a sigh of relief. Not because we’ve solved the crisis, but because we’ve proven it can be solved. And we’re staying the course. Now that we’ve tripled capacity in our shelter system, we’re moving to our next phase: system optimization. Over the coming months, we’re going to dive deep into the data with a goal of reducing operating costs and increasing system throughput so that we can graduate more people out of interim shelter each year and move toward our ultimate goal of zero unsheltered homelessness. 

But the truth is, as I’ve always said, San José can’t solve this crisis for California. We need every single city and county to do its part — and that starts by mandating it at the state-level. Please join me every chance you get in telling our state leaders that Sacramento should hold every city and every county accountable for building their fair share of interim housing units and in-patient treatment beds. What San José can do is inspire others by bringing back the hope that ending unsheltered homelessness is possible here in California. I believe it is — and I hope with time, we can prove it to you, too.