On the Record: San Jose District 3 Special Election candidate Irene Smith

If elected, what actions and policies will you prioritize in your first 100 days in office?

First order of business is to galvanize support for immediate, large-scale community-congregate shelters across the city to provide housing for 100% of our unsheltered neighbors by end of 2025. This means building on support for Councilmember Bien Doan’s SJ LUV program as described in the mayor’s budget.

Second: Present a memo creating an Office of Public Listening, to get our city’s input process out of the dark ages and into the modern era of high-tech based on focus groups, polling, and public dashboards. First areas of analysis for public opinion:

• Backesto Park mural
•  Electronic billboards
• Watson Park sanctioned encampment
• New taxes, fees, bonds
• Elimination of public hearings & zoom comments
• PSH neighborhood impacts
• Unresponsive/inaccurate 311 app
• Elimination of parking for new construction
• Lack of code enforcement on properties causing blight and fire hazards

And finally review the e-billboard contract, based on thorough analysis of public input.

How should San Jose close its budget shortfall and generate new revenue for city services?

We should be focused on realizing efficiencies and cuts in current government, not seek more taxpayer largess. We need to: prioritize core services, deprioritize secondary services, and eliminate failed programs, hold ourselves to a much greater level of accountability over outsourced vendors, and create a task force to eliminate city/county redundancies.

San Jose has 98 core services and 264 supporting programs.  By limiting core services, we make better decisions based on priorities, we have better accounting and monitoring of performance and there is a unifying clarity of purpose. Our core services should be limited to: police/fire, waste removal, streets/traffic, emergency planning and urban planning.

Also:

• Introduce a zero-based budgeting pilot: one department per year.
• Expand Mahan’s Pay for Performance model to nonprofits with which the city does business.
• Reject all new taxes and bonds at city, county, or state level — causing higher costs of living.

Name three specific things you’ll do to address the lack of affordable housing in San Jose.

Our failure to create an ecosystem that allows affordable housing to be built quickly and driven by market forces is the #1 failure of almost every city in California, including San Jose.

While subsidized housing has a place — as Mayor Mahan correctly states — “we will never subsidize our way out of this problem.”

Solution requires:

• Zoning for more density in areas where high density makes sense–transit lines, existing dense neighborhoods.
• More vouchers for rental assistance–given before tenants reach a crisis point.
• Regulatory reform to increase density of existing buildings–micro units, bigger ADUs, etc.
• Assist new housing techniques that are much faster and cheaper: modular, prefab, etc.
• Pioneer regulatory reform that allows for high density congregate living–dorms, bunk beds, etc.

And it needs happen all across the city: D3 should not aim to become the Manila of California, with 119,600 person per square mile.

What is your plan to make downtown San Jose more economically vibrant?

Privilege small, local businesses, take a machete to the jungle of city bureaucracy that stifles new family and immigrant businesses, and experiment with jumpstart programs: accelerate those that work, dump those that don’t.

Key principles:

1. Downtown needs to be clean and safe at all times; we need more foot patrols and community police.
2. Make downtown more attractive for families, not just large, corporate, or one-time events.
3. Japantown: Create a special Use District to preserve history and heritage.
4. Guadalupe Washington: Create an enterprise zone to lift up neighborhood economy.
5. Small Black businesses: Support, retain, and ensure culture continuation.
6. Partner with SJSU for job training.
7. Privilege local business for city contracts.

How would you tackle the homelessness and mental health crises the city faces?

The reason we’re not making a dent in homelessness is because we’re not thinking big enough.

We are playing whack-a-mole with misery and homelessness, and not doing the big things that will really make a difference. We need to think bigger and quit fiddling around the edges of the problem with half-baked ideas like small shelters and misguided incarceration plans.

Answer: bigger, faster shelter solutions.

Shelter first instead of housing first.

• Large-scale sprung structures that can house up to 600 is the way to go.
• At those sites we can focus on services, safety, mental health, rehab, job training, PO boxes.
• Graduate people in stages — what I call the ILHS to the next level of housing.

District 3 needs a councilmember who will join with Doan to put unsheltered people first, neighborhoods first — and shelter first — immediately.

What steps would you take to improve public safety in San Jose?