Erik Soliván, San Jose’s new housing director, has a big job ahead of him.
In addition to overseeing the city’s efforts to alleviate its chronic housing shortage, Soliván has been tasked with shepherding ambitious plans to add new tiny home shelters, sanctioned campsites and overnight parking lots to accommodate more than a thousand local homeless people while helping them find permanent housing.
Soliván, who took over the city housing department in May, has held high-ranking positions at housing agencies in Tulsa, Denver and Philadelphia. But his new role with San Jose might well be his most challenging yet.
Silicon Valley’s largest city has some of the nation’s highest housing costs and one of the largest populations of homeless people living without shelter at an estimated 4,400. And frustrated residents, along with a mayor and City Council who’ve made tackling homelessness their top priority, are demanding results.
Soliván spoke with the Bay Area News Group last month about his aims for one of San Jose’s most critical agencies. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity, and to summarize some discussion points.
Q: In many parts of California, including Silicon Valley, it now costs around $1 million to develop a single unit of affordable housing. What can San Jose and other cities do to bring down the cost of development?
A: Let’s take a look at what goes into the development of housing. You have your three components: land, labor, materials, and then another catalyzing agent on top of that, which is a financing mechanism. Financing tools, driven by larger capital markets, put a structure around land, labor, materials, and how those costs are integrated.
A development generally gets bifurcated in the following: Labor is roughly 45% to 50% of that cost. Land, particularly here in San Jose, is significantly higher than in other areas where I’ve worked. And then your material costs saw a COVID spike, and post-COVID, an even higher spike.
How do we underwrite to all those factors? My area of focus, having come from the housing finance side, is to see whether the financing cost projections from developers of city-subsidized projects are reasonable. And then, on the land side, where does the city help in providing subsidies and various services to reduce the cost of the land, or control it and lease it out.
Q: With public funding for affordable housing oversubscribed statewide, how are you looking to the Bay Area’s tech sector to help solve the housing crisis?
A: Since coming here in the last few months, I’ve had a very open dialog with organizations that have come to the city before to make investments. Apple and Google and Nvidia and the Sobrato Foundation. Those conversations are continuing, and where do we expand and find opportunities for public-private partnerships?
With the loss of a proposed $20 billion Bay Area housing bond measure, we now have to look for ways to maximize the leveraging of our public funds. And that means going to the tech industry here more broadly and saying, here is our plan to resolve unsheltered homelessness. Help us get there so we can have both the capital needs and the operating funds needed to maintain a system to ensure that unsheltered homelessness is brief and quickly resolved.
Q: A recent state audit found that San Jose, as well as San Diego and California more broadly, have failed to adequately track the billions of public dollars spent on various homelessness programs in recent years. What are you doing to ensure taxpayer money to solve homelessness isn’t going to waste?
A: The recommendations in the audit, both the state audit and the city audit, provided, for me, coming into this new, a good guide path for how best to make changes within the department to address those concerns. How are we investing those dollars with our supportive service providers? And ensuring, from the city as well as our provider partners, that we’re accounting for those dollars and doing so in compliance with all regulations?
Over the last couple of months, we have begun reaching out and coordinating, auditing, reviewing, and building out an internal compliance team in order to ensure that we can improve our management and administration of contracts, as well as communications with our partners that are clear and consistent regarding their expectations for the delivery of these programs and utilization of funds.
What the audit found and what I have learned in connecting with our supportive service providers, is this city has not been the best partner. It has not been a clear communicator, it has not been a consistent administrator of contracts, and that’s our end of the bargain that we have to hold up as a housing department.
Q: The city has estimated the cost of operating its shelter sites could in the next few years exceed $70 million annually. How can the city keep those costs in check?
A: There are probably about 5,700 unsheltered homeless people in the city, assuming the official estimate is likely an undercount. That number fluctuates daily. If we can target what that particular number is on the demand side and say, here’s the supply number we need to get to, we can make better decisions about the build-out of that portfolio. We can make better decisions about how to connect that to the county’s work in this area. And we can go to our communities, as well as the philanthropic community, to say we have a target of how we’re going to solve this. We have a clear strategy for management and execution.
Erik Soliván
Organization: San Jose Housing Department
Position: Director
Age: 45
Birthplace: Philadelphia
Residence: San Jose
Education: Bachelor of Arts in Political Science, Haverford College. Juris Doctorate, Rutgers University
Five Things to Know about Erik Soliván:
1. He has a 13-year-old dog named Chewy.
2. His wife Amanda is a high school teacher at Presentation High in San Jose.
3. He is an avid chess player.
4. He is a former senior vice president at the Philadelphia Housing Authority.
5. He is a former chief development officer and chief of staff at Tulsa Housing Authority.