Unaccountable Housing Dept drains city coffers while police dept starved
Concerned citizen Dean Hotop digs into a topic local media ignores—the wild misspending of funds by SJ Housing Dept—and links the dept’s fiscal mismanagement to increasing crime and lawlessness.
By choosing to live in the city of San Jose, we accept a grand bargain: We pay our taxes, and the city government provides us services. It’s a simple math equation; Taxes = Services. For years, this theorem proved true, and generally, citizens felt they got a good deal. In fact, San Jose was once known as the “Safest Big City in America.”
That’s important because the absolute core of those Services provided by city government is to cultivate a safe, clean, and healthy city in which to live. But times have, sadly, changed, and San Jose no longer delivers on the Grand Bargain as it once did. The fall from grace in San Jose is astonishing, saddening, frustrating, and quite frankly unacceptable.
The chart from San Jose PD below shows the dramatic increase in criminal activity since just one year ago. A 13.8% rise in property crime is of no surprise to anyone living in San Jose. The 35.6% increase in rapes shocks the conscience and should scare the living hell out of everyone.
If we want to live in the “Safest Big City in America” again, we have two choices: 1) move or 2) begin holding our elected officials and unelected bureaucrats accountable for results.
This Crisis in accountability is nowhere more visible than in our Housing Department. Three years ago, San José Spotlight graciously published my Op-Ed calling for results and accountability of San Jose’s Housing Department as it relates to the homeless/housing crisis.
Let’s take a close look at what has transpired there over these last three years since that Op-Ed.
Below is the total Housing Department spending by fiscal year, followed by the results. This information is available to anyone on the SJ City website, and source links are provided:
SJ Housing Dept’s budget has skyrocketed to over $1bn–where is it going?
FY 2019-2020
FY 2020-2021
FY 2021-2022
Total spending in the last three years: $1,026,553,187
Yes, over the last three years, San Jose’s Housing Department has spent over one billion dollars of San Jose taxpayers’ money. What have we gotten in return for our billion dollars? Let’s take a look at the results.
One billion dollars gone—and homelessness keeps going up
A best-case estimated reduction in the homeless population of somewhere between 0 and 200
Source: San Jose Housing Department
Huge spending–and all we get is twenty new subsidized affordable units built per month?
Source: San Jose Housing Department
Where has the billion dollars gone?
These results are not acceptable. The grand bargain from our Housing Department is not there. The results do not correlate with the spending. The San Jose Housing Department employees report directly to the City Manager, and if the City Manager does not hold its employees responsible for better results, it is time for the City Council to hire a City Manager who will. If the City Council will not do this, it is time for San Jose residents to elect new council members and a mayor who will.
The City of San Jose is now a failing city that is not providing services to the level of funding provided by taxpayers. We have a per capita Police Department that is less than half of the average for major cities (population over 500k) in the country. This has led to our fall from grace. San Jose is now a crime-ridden, unsafe city in which to live. While we underfund our Police Department, we are overfunding an ineffective, wasteful Housing Department.
Is it time to shift funding from HD to PD and return San Jose to its former glory? Let’s make San Jose PD the most well-funded, well-staffed Police Department in the country and start reducing the HD funding to correlate to the results produced.
Let’s have the most highly-trained, well-paid police officers in the country and turn SJPD into the pinnacle of law enforcement nationwide. Let’s attract, train, and retain the best, brightest and most successful law enforcement personnel from around the country. Perhaps then we will have the honor of once again living in the “Safest Big City in America,” and the criminals will be the ones forced to move.
For more from Hotop, check out the following articles:
Is SJ finally putting an end to punitive, heavy-handed regulations that have worsened the housing crisis?
Establishing a balanced housing policy that addresses the simultaneous benefits of re-development and preservation
How COPA will weaken the free market, drive up housing stock costs, and disempower local homebuyers
The unintended consequences of the Ellis Act, which tries to "preserve" affordable housing
How the SJ Housing Dept appears to be raiding Measure E funds for another expenditure—handouts to the local nonprofit housing cabal
What COPA really is, in its essence, along with some alternatives
Follow Opportunity Now on Twitter @svopportunity
Image by Nhat V Meyer