On the surface, last week’s get-together was a perfunctory political scene: five California gubernatorial candidates meeting at the site of a pet project for a prominent big-city mayor, whose endorsement each of them would be happy to collect.
But that mayor, San Jose’s Matt Mahan, won’t back a candidate casually. He wants recently cut state funding restored for homeless services, including a “tiny homes” housing program that has helped get more than 1,500 people off the street and into safer spaces over the past five years in the state’s third largest city. Mahan has seen the positive results of that program play out in some of San Jose’s most desolate areas of homelessness even as new waves of people are priced out of their homes, often because of housing costs in and around Silicon Valley.
