Gubernatorial candidate Matt Mahan believes that California’s affordability crisis is a governance failure, one he has begun reversing as mayor of one of the state’s largest and most diverse cities.
Mahan, 43 — the only millennial in the Democratic primary field — told reporters during a May 7 American Community Media briefing that he wants a pathway to legal status for undocumented immigrants, an overhaul of housing regulations and a state prosperity fund drawn from tech company tax revenues.
With a population near one million, San Jose is the largest city in Northern California including the Bay Area, and the 12th-largest city in the nation. It’s also among the most diverse cities in the nation, with roughly 42% of residents foreign-born — nearly triple the national average.
California’s housing crisis
On the state level, it’s a different story. California has lost a congressional seat for the first time, and the culprit for this population decline is clear to Mahan: “we’re not building enough housing,” he said. “My sisters both moved out of state, so many of my friends have left.”
He attributed the shortage largely to decades of regulatory accumulation and, specifically, to the threat of construction liability lawsuits that have effectively killed the condo market.
California’s construction defect standards make it easier to sue a developer a decade after the fact, more than in any other state, he explained, making new condo projects nearly impossible to finance.
“It’s one of the main reasons California has one of the country’s lowest rates of home ownership, 10% less than the national average,” he said. “These are solvable problems because they’re policy breakdowns.”
Under his leadership, Mahan said San Jose has reduced homelessness by a third, streamlined permitting and design approval, broken ground on over 2,000 housing units in 2025 alone and cut building development fees — including affordable housing, traffic impact and park fees that he argued were suppressing supply.
He called his housing plan the most comprehensive put forward in the governor’s race and said he intends to bring the same focus to Sacramento.
“If it costs a million dollars to build a home, it’s by definition not very affordable,” he said. “We’re going to have to acknowledge that decades of layering more rules, more process, more requirements, more reporting requirements, more legal risk, have led us to have less of the things we need — housing, energy, health care.”
Immigration reform
On immigration, Mahan stopped short of endorsing the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — a position at least two California gubernatorial candidates have staked out — but said the agency requires deep reform.
“I think what people really mean by that is somewhat of a symbolic statement,” he said, “because we will obviously have some level of enforcement of basic immigration rules. But where I share the sentiment — and it needs deep reform, if not a complete restart, which is what people are asking for — is starting with an acknowledgement of the humanity of all of the people within our country.”
Mahan called for a pathway to “permanent legal status, ideally citizenship,” for everyone already in the country, paired with a strengthened legal immigration system and a secured border.
The more fundamental issue, he argued, is a bipartisan failure spanning decades: “Both parties were complicit and wanted low cost labor, and we had a very porous border, and people came back and forth regularly. That was certainly true in my hometown … and now it’s become this political target, and we see people politicizing status and … country of origin as a way of scoring points.”
Mahan described growing up in Watsonville, a small farming town on the Central Coast “where about a third of my neighbors were undocumented” — “the hardest-working people I’ve ever known,” he said — and drew on that experience to explain the urgency he feels about the current federal posture: “It’s put vulnerable people in an impossible position.”
Under his leadership, San Jose has sued the Trump administration 12 times, multiplied by 20 the city’s legal defense fund for immigrant residents and banned ICE agents from using city property to operate or wearing masks while operating within city limits.
Asked whether he would prosecute ICE agents who violate California law, he was explicit: “No one’s above the law. If you break the law, including as an ICE agent, you should be prosecuted.”
Filling healthcare gaps
On healthcare, Mahan acknowledged that federal cuts under the budget reconciliation package known as the “Big Beautiful Bill” will outpace what California can backfill on its own.
He said San Jose has partnered with Santa Clara County on a five-year sales tax measure to shore up some of those losses locally, but called that “a bridge”: “Where possible, we have to use our state and local budgets to fill the gap. The magnitude of the gap, the magnitude of the Trump cuts are so great that we won’t be able to fully do that, so that’s where we’re going to have to evolve and get more creative.”
He pointed to administrative overhead — which accounts for up to 30% of healthcare costs in California — as the most immediate target for reform, and called for allowing out-of-state telehealth providers to practice in California, allowing nurses to work at the full scope of their licenses, expanding rural clinics staffed by nurse practitioners and using loan forgiveness to draw medical workers into underserved communities.
Silicon Valley, AI and the workforce
On artificial intelligence and the threat of workforce displacement, Mahan said he supports taxing tech companies but wants to avoid regulations so costly that they drive the industry and its tax base to other states.
He drew a historical parallel: “When the tractor came along, 90% of the jobs in farming disappeared”; when factory automation came, the same happened in manufacturing. “The service economy, particularly health care and education, is going to continue to grow. The building trades will continue to grow, but we have to prepare people,” Mahan explained.
He proposed a statewide “shared prosperity fund” in which all or “a portion of” the tax revenue generated by data centers and other tech infrastructure would be directed toward “workforce development, apprenticeships and reskilling.”
“If we end up with 10% or 20% unemployment, we’re going to need to experiment with new tools like a universal basic income,” he said, “because we have to protect people through these transitions.”
In San Jose, the city has built a government AI coalition now used by over 900 cities and counties nationally and internationally.
“It’s our policy and regulatory framework around the ethical and responsible use of AI. We’re using AI on the one hand to speed up city buses and improve language translation, identify potholes faster,” he explained. “On the other hand, we’ve created upskilling curricula so that our workforce doesn’t get left behind.”
He said he supports banning cell phones in schools, requiring parental consent for minors on social media and mandating human oversight in AI-assisted decisions touching healthcare, criminal justice and employment.
Mahan pushed back on his opponents’ attacks that he is beholden to Silicon Valley money.
“I have one of the most aggressive AI regulation platforms of any candidate in the race,” he said, noting that “San Jose is not Palo Alto or Menlo Park. We’re not where the tech billionaires are. We’re a working-class, very diverse city.”
While San Jose’s median household income is $148,226 as of 2024, roughly one-and-a-half times the state median, it is nearly 10% lower than the Santa Clara County median household income of $164,281.
Some tech leaders have backed his campaign, he said “because they’ve seen the incredible results we’ve delivered … on building housing, reducing crime, reducing homelessness.”
“That doesn’t mean that I am interested in giving them any special privileges,” he added. “I am not an ideologically rigid person. I’m worried about rising populism on the right and the left. I want government to work. I believe the best resistance to authoritarianism is results, is making government work for people.”
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