Miami Mayor Francis Suarez: The Recipe for Creating America's Happiest City | All-In Live from Miami

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:00)
Forty-third mayor of Miami has served two terms since 2017, and his tenure is going to end in September because he's term limited. Although I hear these days that's flexible, please welcome Francis Suarez.

**Francis Suarez** (0:13)
We were ranked the happiest city in America, the healthiest city in America. The formula for success is simple. Keep taxes low, keep people safe, lean into innovation.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (0:23)
How are things going in Miami? Obviously, we talked to you a couple of years ago when we had our first All-In Summit here, and you had a no-nonsense approach that you thought was going to work with the homeless challenges that we're seeing. I think, candidly, we discussed a large portion of the homeless problem in these major cities is an addiction problem, and giving a junkie a home doesn't exactly get them off the street. It just doesn't work, and you were one of the first people to say that plainly. How are you dealing with it? Has it gotten worse? Is it an intractable problem? Yeah, take us through it.

**Francis Suarez** (1:00)
So in homeless specifically, we are at an 11-year low. We did our census, we do two census a year. We do one in January, one in the summer. And our January census had us at an 11-year low at 546 homeless, unsheltered homeless in the entire city of Miami. We have a couple thousand sheltered. And I actually raised money on an annual basis as a mayor's ball. I did my mayor's ball last year, and this year I'll be doing it on May 31st to end homeless. We want to be the first major American city to have zero homeless, and we think we can get there. We call it Functional Zero.
And frankly, the strategy is not that complicated. You know, obviously, there's a macroeconomic strategy. We have the lowest unemployment in America. We have the highest median wage growth in America. I lower taxes to the lowest level in history, and we've seen 140 percent growth in nine years. So the economy is robust. We were ranked the happiest city in America, the healthiest city in America. Frankly, if you're happy or healthy and you're working, you're probably not homeless. And then, of course, we've done innovative things in the homeless space. We've worked with charitable organizations that help people reunify families if they live in other parts of the country. And also, we rent homes so that we can get around the building process and give all the same wraparound services. But we sort of hacked through that process.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:16)
Those 500 individuals who are categorized as homeless, how many of them are suffering from mental illness and or self-medicating slash addicted to drugs?

**Francis Suarez** (2:28)
A very high percentage. I would say 80% plus. That's sort of anecdotal. But when I've been out to the streets, I'll be out there before my homeless ball now on May 31st. I'm actually going to spend a night out in the street. And when you talk to them, when you engage in them, a vast majority of them are, unfortunately.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (2:47)
OK, so let me double click on that. This problem wasn't as acute before the super drugs, meth, like the serious meths. Well, the really serious ones they're making now.

**Francis Suarez** (2:59)
Fentanyl.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:00)
And Fentanyl, right? This combination seems to be, you know, we had people addicted to heroin like Miles Davis and like Philip Seymour Hoffman who produced incredible art and were addicts for 30 years and they went in and out of it. But this drug is pernicious, different, deadly, super addicting. How much of the problem are those two drugs specifically, if you double clicked on it?

**Francis Suarez** (3:23)
A big part of the problem, heroin or opioids.

**David Sacks** (3:26)
He's asking for a friend, by the way.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:27)
Yeah, I'm asking if you have a hook up.

**Francis Suarez** (3:29)
Clearly, clearly.

**Chamath Palihapitiya** (3:30)
No, but I'm being deadly serious because we had these homeless individuals in New York, you know, back in the day in the 70s, 80s. They were kind of like hobos and vagabonds, not seriously addicted, you know, suffering where they're folding over and curled up in a ball from fentanyl.

**Francis Suarez** (3:48)
Well, to your point, I mean, meth and the opioids are incredibly addictive and they're very hard to beat, right? I mean, even people who are wealthy and get addicted to these drugs have a very hard time. The recidivism rate is very high. And so, you know, you just had Antonio on here a minute ago and he was talking about immigration and the border. And one of the big problems with the border is that tens of thousands of people that die annually because of fentanyl that gets imported through China and through our border. And so there's a tie in right between federal policy and local policy. But for us, again, in 1980 during the cocaine era, a different drug, we had 220 homicides. So you had drugs hurting people, but you had the business of drugs very much hurting people. Right. Last year. So we started recording homicides in 1946 in Miami. 1946, we had 32 homicides from 1946 to today. The lowest number we ever had was 24 Last year, we had 27