Sam Liccardo

Liccardo grew up in San Jose, California. He earned a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University, a master's degree in public policy from Harvard University, and a law degree from Harvard Law School. Liccardo's professional experience included working as a prosecutor of sexual assault and child exploitation crimes in the Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office and as a federal prosecutor.[1] Before being elected mayor of San Jose, Liccardo served on the San Jose City Council.[2][3]

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I grew up in this district, and have served our community as a criminal prosecutor, college professor, councilmember, and San José mayor. In my first term in Congress, I have pushed to reduce your cost of living, while battling the Trump administration’s assault on the rule of law and our Constitutional rights. Despite a divided Congress, I worked across the aisle for solutions to our painful cost of living, including the passage of four bipartisan bills to help accelerate housing and remove barriers to affordability. I authored legislation supported by Democratic and Republican colleagues to reduce health insurance premiums, to reduce bank fees on financial payments, and to convert vacant buildings into housing. I secured millions in federal funding to build housing, reduce homelessness, bolster infrastructure and improve public safety in our community. I cosponsored measures to eliminate tariffs and restore funding for critical federal health and food assistance. I also led the fight against this administration’s chaos, cruelty and corruption. I authored legislation to prohibit President Trump’s crypto corruption, to protect cities from ICE and military enforcement, and to empower Americans against DOGE’s cuts to services. I consistently voted to end the war in Iran. I will continue fighting to defend your reproductive rights and voting rights, and to protect funding for Social Security, MediCal, and CalFresh. In 2027, I will get even more done for our community.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

Families are struggling with the high cost of housing, healthcare, groceries, utilities, and insurance. We need to build more housing and do it faster. I have authored bipartisan legislation to accelerate affordable housing development, including 4 bills included in a major housing package passed by both the House and the Senate. I also led efforts to counter proposed cuts to a program to protect thousands of low-income families from homelessness. I introduced the only bipartisan ACA tax credit extension that lowers health premiums while saving taxpayer dollars, and I supported efforts to eliminate price-inflating tariffs. I will continue advancing practical, bipartisan solutions that lower costs and provide relief for working families.I have fought against the historic assaults on our Constitution, our community, and our democratic institutions. I was the first legislator to introduce legislation to criminalize Trump’s grift through the issuance of meme coins, to halt the Administration’s efforts to ignore spending laws, and against unlawful military deployment and immigration enforcement in U.S. cities. I led the fight against attempts to silence CNN and other news media that hold Trump accountable, and I have worked with a litigation task force to secure court orders to halt unconstitutional conduct. With a Democratic majority in the House, I will push for accountability, to protect voting rights, to restore reproductive freedom, and the rule of law.I will fight for our future, and for our children. We’re spending our children’s money on wasteful wars, ballrooms, and tax subsidies, leaving them trillions in debt, and destroying their planet. I’m committed to pushing our Congress to invest, save, sacrifice for our future, and our children. I am leading legislation to incentivize renewables and batteries for data centers, and to incentivize companies to invest in programs at our community colleges and state universities that will provide young adults with employable skills. I have repeatedly voted to end our wasteful wars, have led efforts to protect our DACA young adults, and will push to reverse cuts to Pell grants and nutrition programs for our youth and families.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

During my first 20 months in office, I’ve worked tirelessly to lower the cost of living, defend our democracy, and build a stronger future for the next generation. My legislative work has focused on practical, bipartisan solutions that deliver tangible results, including legislation to expand housing supply, accelerate affordable housing construction, lower health insurance premiums, expand access to free education and job reskilling programs – all without increasing our deficit. I will continue to fight to protect our Constitution, hold Trump and his corrupt allies accountable, halt fiscal irresponsibility, protect our environment, and expand access to opportunity.

What organizations or individuals have endorsed your campaign?

California Democratic Party

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Campaign website

Liccardo’s campaign website stated the following:

Why I Wrote This

I wrote this for a simple reason: before you vote, you deserve to know how your candidates think about solving problems. Too many members of Congress seem convinced that the voters sent them to Washington merely to rail against the opposing party and to rant on TV.

As a former mayor, I was accountable to residents to solve problems. People rarely blame legislators for encampments, or a nearby burglary, or a pothole on their street. If they did, legislators would just point at the other party, and say, “it’s their fault.” However, they hold their mayors accountable. Mayors must respond. Imperfectly or well, mayors do respond. Meanwhile, Congress dismisses national crises like homelessness, crime, and the unaffordability of utilities, housing, or home insurance as mere “local concerns,” unworthy of their attention.

We need more leaders who act like mayors in Washington—and better ideas. I’m not going to magically transform all of these ideas into reality. We have a deeply-divided Congress, but they are unified around the time-honored tradition that first-term members are better seen and not heard. Nor do I pretend that this is a comprehensive set of solutions, by any stretch. But I hope this book provokes more substantive conversations about solutions, to provide a refreshing counterbalance to the superficiality and negativity of the election season.

An Important Note About Balancing Budgets and Bipartisanship

Every election season, politicians in both parties happily parade proposals for government programs that sound great but lack any clear means to pay for them. The result: our current $1.7 trillion deficit.1 In addition to burdening future generations with more than $34 trillion in debt,2 deficit spending crowds out private borrowing, resulting in higher interest costs for everyone.3

Mayors, in contrast, have to balance budgets. If we have a new, brilliant idea, we have to find a way to pay for it—including cutting somebody else’s good idea. In my final year in office, in 2022, I worked with our city team to leave my successor with a $30 million surplus,4 while San Jose reduced street homelessness by 11%5 and San Jose recorded the lowest homicide rate of any major US city.6 That’s what people expect from mayors. We should expect the same from Congress.

Admittedly, some of my proposed measures will require relatively modest federal budgetary offsets, such as expanding vouchers to address homelessness. For that reason, I’ve focused many other proposals on ideas that provide savings to the federal government, such as cutting agricultural subsidies and reducing Medicare costs for pharmaceuticals.

The common theme is that we need to find bold solutions that both Democrats and Republicans can agree upon and support, within our budget. We have a divided Congress, and that reality will likely persist. As the mayor of a city of one million residents, I routinely reached out to people who disagreed with me to find common ground. From my first day in the Mayor’s Office, I had to resolve pension reform and budgetary battles that had left San Jose City Hall—already the most thinly staffed city hall of any major city—with 1,000 fewer employees. We spent the next year negotiating with eleven city unions on a pension reform measure, and voters approved the settlement in 2016 with Measure F. As a result, we’re now saving taxpayers $3 billion over the next two decades—while restoring city staff and services.

As with pension reform negotiations, I usually found that there was at least one goal that every key stakeholder could agree upon: the need to solve a problem.

What problems? We face many, but I focus my writing here on three big ones: 1) homelessness, 2) crime, and 3) the high cost of living. Let’s discuss each in turn.

Homelessness

Why Homelessness Isn’t Merely a “Local Issue”

In my many hours walking the halls of Congress, whenever I advocated for greater attention to homelessness—such as for expanding rent limits on Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing (VASH) vouchers to help homeless veterans get off the street—I routinely was told, “that’s a local issue.”

The data tells us otherwise. Forty-four (44) of America’s largest 48 cities have at least 1,000 unhoused residents. Homelessness jumped 12% nationally in the last year alone, and on any given night, 653,000 Americans remain unhoused.

Homelessness is an important “local” issue in virtually every major metropolitan area in this country, from Miami to Anchorage. In other words, it’s a national issue. It’s just that in anyone’s memory we haven’t seen any significant policy action by Congress to address homelessness. Plenty of observers have reasonably asked, “If my city and county are spending all of these resources on homelessness, why isn’t the federal government doing more?”.7

Here are a few ways that I believe Congress can make a difference, both for housing and for the related issues of addiction and mental health:

Building Housing Faster and at a Lower Cost

Better Leveraging the Power of Housing Vouchers

Financing Affordable Construction More Nimbly

An Ounce of Prevention Can Save a Pound of Misery

Eliminate Barriers to Treatment of Addiction and Mental Illness

1. Nimbler Way to Build Housing

Two years ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Ludia. She and her grandsons had been living in and out of shelters for several months and could not find an available apartment where the landlord would accept her housing voucher. She was relieved to finally land at a recently-opened transitional housing community for families, on Evans Lane in West San Jose. She told me that her family enjoyed having a small apartment of their own, with the privacy of her own bathroom, a space in the community garden to grow vegetables, a large community kitchen, and a computer lab where her grandsons could do their homework.

Ludia kept looking for permanent housing, with the assistance of a case worker at Evans Lane. Although it took her more than a year to find a landlord in San Jose who would accept her voucher, she stuck through it and is now living on her own in west San Jose.

The traditional approach to building housing isn’t cheap—constructing an “affordable” apartment building in our area will cost about $938,700 per unit—and it takes five or six years of planning, city approvals, financing, construction, and inspections before anyone can occupy it. We can’t tackle a crisis that afflicts each one of our 12,000 unhoused residents in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties that way. If it takes nearly $1 million per unit and five years to complete an apartment building, we won’t eliminate homelessness before we’re broke and dead. We need to be much more nimble.

During my mayoral tenure, we worked to find innovative approaches that could help us expand housing supply faster and less expensively. We began converting two motels to housing in 2016, about four years before Governor Gavin Newsom implemented this approach statewide.

We partnered with Habitat for Humanity to build “tiny home” communities on two sites in 2017, at first with only modest success. With every iteration, we learned, reassessed, and pivoted.

Within the first days of the pandemic in March of 2020, under state orders to vacate our shelters to protect unhoused residents from COVID, I put the challenge to our public works team at the city: how quickly can we could build small communities of prefabricated, modular dorms—with private bedrooms and bathrooms—on public land? We had about $17 million in funds to work with, and I committed to raising money philanthropically. Our team responded—as did Susanna and Peter Pau and Sue and John Sobrato, two generous couples who donated several millions of dollars. We built three “quick-build” communities housing 300 residents in a matter of months, not years. The cost? Less than $110,000 per unit, rather than the conventional $938,700 per unit.

Unlike the “tiny homes” and “tuff sheds,” these attached dorms provide residents with private bedrooms and bathrooms, utilities, hot water, a safe lock on their door, as well as a place for their pets and storage for their belongings. These features are not mere conveniences; they’re essential to persuade many unhoused people unwilling to leave the streets. Unhoused residents often fear that traditional shelters fail to offer safety, privacy, or dignity, particularly when they need to bring pets and belongings. Also, unlike tiny homes, the dormitories’ sturdier construction lasts for decades. City-funded nonprofits provided mental health counseling and programs to residents grappling with the trauma they experienced on the streets, as well as helping them to find jobs.

To bring people off the streets, we need to create places people will actually choose to go. Regardless of how anyone feels about controversial encampment sweeps, federal courts will make it very difficult on cities who merely want to push people off the streets involuntarily. Consent always yields better outcomes. That’s how Ludia became one of our many success stories.

Soon other cities, such as Mountain View and Redwood City, launched prefabricated communities of their own with their own variations on the model. We benefited from learning from each other, and the idea began to scale. Cities typically used these models for low-barrier-to-entry transitional housing: places to stay for several months until permanent housing could be identified. Later iterations of San Jose’s prefabricated communities, however, were built to federal standards for use flexibly as permanent housing as well, with small kitchens.

By the time I left office at the end of 2022, San Jose had constructed five quick-build (or “interim”) housing communities. It would take time for us to see the outcomes from our work, but I was proud that my successor, Mayor Matt Mahan, could announce the results: unsheltered homelessness dropped nearly 11% in 2022. In the rest of Santa Clara County, homelessness increased.

Critically, the outcomes for the residents also appear promising. In congregate shelters and navigation centers, most of the people return to the street and typically fewer than 20% of residents land in permanent housing. In our interim quick-build communities, more than 72% remained housed more than two years later, most of whom found permanent housing.

Our solution used what’s called “factory-built housing,” which has taken off, and so has demand. Several years ago, the Northern California Carpenters union perceptively saw the future and began partnering with start-ups like FactoryOS to see how we could accelerate construction at a lower cost, while still maintaining fair union wages.

With the growing demand has come associated challenges. Costs of prefabricated units have increased dramatically since we started in 2020. Supply chain challenges stalled projects throughout the pandemic. In some cases, poor construction quality has undermined success. Enabling better, more cost-effective prefabricated “quick-build” construction is a critical path to getting the 653,000 unhoused Americans off the streets and into dignified housing more quickly.

Congress must step up, particularly in helping this nascent industry to scale effectively to better meet the need. Financing new factories has been a challenge for some small companies, particularly given the uncertain demand. Congress can use the government’s purchasing power, within the existing authorized budget for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), to create a steady demand that many factories need to get financing to expand. It can establish federal minimum standards for construction for eligibility for federal funding, and certify suppliers that meet quality criteria to make it easier for cities and counties that want to find quality builders. It can support efforts, like those of the Carpenters union, to expand workforce training for well-paying jobs in factory-built housing in areas suffering from high unemployment. It can help modular builders satisfy bonding requirements and other requirements associated with conventional construction.8

Importantly, Congress can also eliminate the statutory restrictions on the use of federal housing choice vouchers for transitional housing units, like the ones San Jose has built. Federal law allows vouchers to be deployed in units that cost $1 million to build, but not in units that cost $150,000. If cities like San Jose, Mountain View, and Redwood City could accept payment by federal vouchers for their transitional communities, it would help those cities pay for the operations of these communities and clear a path to build more of them. Residents could stay in a transitional community for several months, and when an apartment elsewhere opens, they could take their voucher with them to pay that landlord. To get there, we need changes in the law governing vouchers, which is a topic to which we’ll turn next.

2. The Power of Vouchers

Since the demise of federally-funded public housing in the 1970s, the majority of federally-funded rental support comes through housing vouchers, for people to use in the private market. About 2.35 million extremely low-income families now use housing choice vouchers to stay housed. Often referred to by such programmatic names as Section 8 or VASH, vouchers constitute the most effective federal housing program along several key metrics—for reducing homelessness, housing instability, and overcrowding.9

How do vouchers work? Each household must contribute 30 percent of its income, and the voucher covers the rest of the costs of rent and utilities, up to a limit based on HUD’s fair market rent estimates. Families with vouchers have the ability to choose where they live, with private landlords receiving most of the voucher revenue.

Vouchers had traditionally been seen as a less bureaucratic approach than the troubled legacy of public housing. Voucher holders had choices about where they would live, rather than facing confinement to deteriorating, government-owned housing projects. Great Society Democrats increasingly embraced the program, and it became a bipartisan program.10 Despite the many flaws of the program—and there are flaws—it has generally survived because of something resembling a political consensus.

The biggest challenge is that voucher demand vastly outstrips supply. Only one out of every four families that qualify for vouchers actually get them. In October, the San Francisco Housing Authority opened the waitlist for the first time in nearly a decade, and about 60,000 families signed up—for only 6,500 spots on the waitlist. To be clear, every family had a one-in-ten chance of even making it onto the waitlist, and even then, the “winning” family or individual waits for years before actually receiving a voucher.

And what do these lucky sweepstakes winners get? Not enough of them get housed, unfortunately. Too many vouchers are held by people who can’t use them. In high-cost areas like ours, voucher holders can’t afford security deposits, application fees, or broker fees to get into apartments. Some landlords, frustrated by the bureaucracy of the system, refuse to accept vouchers, particularly where they have had the experience of leaving apartments vacant for two or three months while they await an inspection or approval from a federal official from HUD. Many housing authorities require reassigning vouchers if a client doesn’t use theirs within a specified duration.

So, how can we better use vouchers to get more homeless Americans housed?

More Flexibility

Congress needs to make vouchers more flexible. Under the existing statute, public agencies can’t use a voucher for transitional housing. Making that simple change would enable more voucher holders to get off the street until permanent housing becomes available. So long as the transitional facility meets basic standards—providing all of the basic utilities, private bathrooms, lockable bedrooms, etc.—it should be incorporated as part of a federal strategy to move more voucher-holders off the streets. It would also help cash-strapped cities sustain and create more of this low-barrier housing.

For example, after the construction of San Jose’s quick-build transitional communities (described in the preceding section), we had to use city funding to provide supportive services like substance use counseling because the County of Santa Clara would not do so. (Counties receive all of the state and federal money to administer health programs in California; if counties refuse to provide mental health or addiction treatment, then cities need to dig into their own pockets.) Those services and operations can cost a typical city in the Bay Area roughly $35,000 per person. If residents had the ability to use federal vouchers at the transitional housing sites, the city could rely on a stream of federal money to support some of the operations of the communities and those services. Yet, according to our local Housing Authority, which administers federal vouchers, federal law prohibited their use for transitional housing.

A spirit of flexibility could also enable Congress to better incentivize landlords to accept vouchers—for example, by mandating provisional approval of a unit with an “inspection pending” where delays exceed a couple of weeks. Streamlining can help as well, as the current “balkanized and inefficient voucher delivery system” consists of thousands of public housing authorities, often with multiple agencies serving the same regional market, creating conflicting mandates and confusion for landlords and tenants.11

More flexible rules would make it easier on tenants as well: loosening the “use-it-or-lose-it” mandates by providing them more time to find apartments in tight housing markets and to enable vouchers to cover the cost of security deposits.12 Providing greater flexibility on rent caps13will also enable tenants to have greater opportunity to move to safer neighborhoods with better schools and resources—an important but often unrealized objective of the program.14

More Vouchers

“Better vouchers” is good. “More vouchers” is better. We simply need more vouchers. That’s not rocket science; four times as many families need them as have them.

Obviously, it will cost more money. With nearly every one of my proposed solutions, I’ve pulled back from ideas that simply spend more federal money. Our nation’s deficit is bloated enough, and our children don’t deserve more of the $34 trillion in debt that we’re already giving them.

This issue is one in which I make an exception. Bluntly, we need more vouchers. A lot more of them. I cannot imagine a federal expenditure that could do more to reduce human misery. Many experts believe that the most direct, effective way to reduce homelessness lies in expanding the number of vouchers available to extremely low-income families—and they’re right.

How much will it cost? Last year, the federal government spent $30.2 billion for vouchers that house 2.2 million households comprising more than five million Americans. Those 2.2 million households comprise only 25% of the total number of families who qualify for that assistance. Some context: the federal government allots more than $95 billion annually in tax expenditures to homeowners, through such deductions as mortgage interest, state and local taxes, and capital gains on sale.15

While I’m a grateful homeowner, it’s hard not to see the inequity in that. If we spent even half as much on rental support as we spend on homeowners, we could serve more than another one million families in need, lifting them from abject poverty.

We’ve seen what dedicated federal funding can do. In November of 2015, I stood with Jennifer Loving, the CEO of Destination: Home, and County Supervisor Dave Cortese to announce “All the Way Home,” a partnership to end homelessness among veterans. We had many housing choice vouchers, called “VASH,” specifically issued for veterans, but the rent caps appeared too low for the high rents of Silicon Valley. So, I traveled to Washington, DC in 2016 to join Housing Authority officials to lobby the Obama Administration to lift the caps, and we prevailed. Armed with effective VASH vouchers, the partnership moved 1,940 veterans off the street within five years. By 2021, Loving announced that we had reached “functional zero,” meaning we could house veterans at a faster rate than they were becoming homeless.

That’s what vouchers can do, if we’re deploying them well. More than anything else we spend federal money on, they’re worth the investment.

3. Financing Affordable Housing Better—and More Cost-Effectively

In addition to more vouchers, we need more housing supply.16Throughout our Valley and Peninsula, rental vacancy has remained beneath 4% for most of the last decade and a half due to a vastly inadequate supply. Most of that housing supply must be created by the private sector, without government subsidy.

However, market-rate housing will never be affordable to extremely low-income families, no matter how much of it gets built. The rate at which new housing will “filter down” to become affordable to low-income families requires decades (if it ever happens).17 To address the current crisis, we need to build more housing that is immediately affordable—that is, rent-restricted18

In 1986, in the wake of the demise of public housing programs, Congress created the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program to support construction of rent-restricted affordable housing by for-profit and non-profit builders. Developers use LIHTC and their syndicators to attract equity investors in their housing projects, reducing the funding that the builder needs to borrow to finance the project. While an imperfect tool that has proven complex and costly to implement, LIHTC is the nation’s largest and most enduring federal tool for constructing affordable housing. Tax credits have provided a stable source of funding for 110,000 new units annually.

The problem is that LIHTCs aren’t terribly “affordable” themselves, because LIHTCs only provide part of the subsidy required to make the construction of any apartment building financially viable. Particularly in the high-cost Bay Area, builders need to find many other subsidies to fill the gap. As a result, we see projects that may have five, seven, or even nine other sources of funding—from state, local, private, or philanthropic sources—in the project’s “capital stack.” The mere arrangement of these highly complex equity and debt deals creates enormous delay and complexity, with conflicting requirements and approval timelines for each local, state, or federal funding source. Above all, these complexities add tremendous cost: about $6,500 per funding source in every apartment unit built, according to one study.19 Other studies estimate that developing “affordable” housing—with all of the attendant financing and government requirements—costs an additional 19% to 44% more per unit to build than privately-constructed apartments.20

Developers and economists alike gripe about the cost, delays, and complexity of the LIHTC program. Regardless, it endures because it’s often the only available federal source of financing for an affordable housing project. In the words of Stephen Stills, “If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.”

When construction costs rise rapidly—as they did during the pandemic—developers have to hit the pause button and find more funding to fill the gap, exacerbating another round of delay, thereby increasing costs even more.

Even with successful completion of construction, non-profit housing providers still need to find another source of subsidy—typically a Housing Choice Voucher—to help pay for the management, maintenance, and operations of the facility. If they seek to serve extremely low-income residents, seniors, or formerly homeless people, then those services can be very expensive. Currently, LIHTC doesn’t pay for any of that. So taxpayers subsidize the construction of the project, yet the rents are still too high for any extremely low-income or homeless individual, so taxpayers pay again for a rental voucher for the same tenant.

A streamlined approach would rely on a single funding source for the entire project, and it would save time and enormous public cost. The head of the Santa Clara County Housing