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

0:0043rd Mayor of Miami served two terms since 2017 and his 10 years going to end in September because he's term limited. Although I hear these days that's flexible, please welcome Francis Warris. We were ranked half the City of America, the healthiest city of America. The formula for success is simple. Keep Tox's low. Keep people safe. Lean into innovation. How are things going in Miami? Obviously, we talked to you a couple years ago. We had our first all -in -submit 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.

0:45And giving a junkie a home doesn't exactly get them off the street. It just doesn't work. And we were one of the first people to say that plainly, how are you dealing with it? Is it gotten worse? Is it an intractable problem? Yeah, take us through it. So in Homo specifically, we are in an 11 -year low. We did our census. We did two census a year. We do one in January, one in the summer. And our January census had a sudden 11 -year low at 546 Homo, unsheltered Homo 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.

1:24I did my mayor's ball last year and this year I'll be doing it in 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. You do? And frankly, the strategy is not that complicated. Obviously, there's a macroeconomic strategy. We have a 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 % growth in nine years. So the economy is robust. We were ranked the happiest city in America, the healthiest city in America.

1:57Frankly, if you're happy, you're 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 have through that process. So it's 500 individuals who are categorized as homeless. How many of them are suffering from mental illness and or self -medicating slash addicted to drugs? A very high percentage.

2:29I would say 80 % plus. That's sort of anecdotal. But when I've been out through the streets, I'll be out there before my homeless ball now on May 31st. I'm actually going to spend a night on the street. And when you talk to them, when you engage in them, a vast majority of them are unfortunately. Okay, so let me double click on that. This problem wasn't as acute before the superdrugs, meth, like the serious ones. Well, the really serious ones they're making out of, 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.

3:13but this drug is pernicious, different, deadly, super -addicting. How much of the problem are those two drugs specifically if you double clicked on it? A big part of the problem, heroin or opioids. He's asking for a friend, by the way. Yeah, just not dead. I'm asking if you have a hook -up. It's just a rare, the clearly. No, but I'm being deadly serious because we had these homeless individuals in New York back in the day, in the sevens and eighties. They were kind of like hobos and vagavans, not seriously addicted, you know, suffering where they're folding over and curled up in a ball from Fentional.

3:47Well, 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 a Tonyo on here a minute ago, and he was talking about immigration and the border. And one of the big problems with the border is a 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, right, different drug, we had 220 homicides.

4:29So you had drugs, hurting people, but you had the business of drugs, very much hurting people, right? Yeah. 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. Wow. Okay, we had 220 and 1980. This year, we're trending below the 24. So we may, this may be the safest year in the history, recorded history of Miami. Can you connect those thoughts there? That's cool. Like, I think when people think about social policy, everybody confuses the correlation and causation. Yeah. But you've been in the seat now for a long time.

5:10Yeah. So you've seen what hasn't worked, what has worked, what maybe has been correlated. But if you had to sort of lay out the road map for other cities, but frankly for other states, the rest of the country, what's the road map? The Francis Farah's road map. The formula for success is simple. keep taxes low, keep people safe, lean into innovation. That's where the city, can we just double click into those? Of course. So, let's take the other side of these things just to help the conversation. Because I believe in them, but let's try to steal man the other side. Sure. Keep taxes low. What people say, if you look at California and if you look at New York, what they would say is, we have a duty to invest in the social services and the infrastructure to support everybody that isn't necessarily as well off.

5:54or didn't get the right side of luck, and we need to raise taxes in order to generate the revenues to fund that. My counterargument would be government is not a good purveyor of those services. It's not an efficient purveyor of those services. So just a double click. I lowered taxes to the lowest level in history, and I took the city in 2009 as a councilman in Bank of C. So I got in Bank of C, we decided, this is sort of the doge before doge, we decided not to raise taxes, we cut costs. We cut, you know, we didn't let anyone go, but we had tiered salary cuts, pension reform, and we balanced our budget.

6:29And we had 10 years of prosperity, and that prosperity led to a tripling of the size of our government. So we went from a 500 million dollar government to a billion and a half dollar government while lowering taxes. So we grew to 100 percent, right? So the resources that we had to dedicate to these actually went up, even though taxes went down. And then, you know, when you have a place where there's prosperity and where people are investing or where people are employed, there's obviously not as many social problems, so they're not out there killing people. They're not out there hurting people.

7:02So the 19 A's we had, you know, we're one of the murder couples of America. And we're not one of the safest big cities in America. And then I think, you know, the how can I help moment that you guys are all familiar with was this juxtaposition with what American cities were doing, right? Famously, New York competes for and wins the Amazon HG2 prize. Right. And then rejects it. Rejects it, yeah. And also famously in California, you had a, I guess it was a legislator that said, F. Elon Musk. Yeah, Atlantic Consultants. Exactly, and he replied, message received, and he left. And then she went to run a union, right?

7:35That's what she ended up? Yeah, I think she went to work for a union. She's the CEO of one of the big unions now. But the issue is what I tell people is, look, it's bad enough to kick out a trillion dollar company from your city or the richest person arguably in the world from your city. But think about the signal. The signal to me is much, much greater. The signal is if you want to bring another headquarters or if you want to be another company, we just got FC Barcelona. Two days ago we announced that FC Barcelona moved their headquarters from New York to Miami. Right? Every single day we announced, you know, 900 million dollars of loans and two projects in the last two days and two buildings, you know, our stadium, our inter -miami stadium.

8:08We have the FIFA World Cup headquarters for 2026 in the world, right? So I mean this formula for success was seem simple. Other cities are getting it wrong completely backwards, right? Their taxes are high. It's not safe and they're not leaning into the rejecting innovation. Are there other downsides to growing this fast? Like are there things that have to keep up that are harder to change? Like building code, housing density, you know, those sort of cost of living things like have those? have you guys been able to drive or form there or is that is that not where you want it to be? So Ken Griffin recently was interviewed in the fireside chat like this and said I'd rather have the problems of success than the problems of failure and so there's no doubt that there are problems that stem from success right and housing prices you had a tremendous amount of inflation in the last administration and you you you sort of couple that with hyper demand here in Miami and you get hyper inflation right so housing cost have have certainly gone up significantly.

9:04And we do everything we can to leverage public dollars and public assets like land to try to build projects set up 15 to 1 or 20 to 1 leverage rate. So for $100 million invested, we'll get $2 billion worth of projects. There's a $5 million housing shortage across the country. And Miami has its fair share, just like any other major city. Traffic, I know none of you guys have experienced any bad traffic this last few days. I was in the car two hours and 40 minutes going over to that. I'm not going to take a far along where we're the boring company on trying to find underground boring systems or with some of the EV toll companies that we're working with.

9:38But I do think that transportation generally has to sort of turn the page from you know last generations our cake solutions to that train that what would you call the sunshine line or something? Bright line. Yeah, how did you get that done so quick and everybody says it's the greatest thing ever? That's a private sector project. I was done by a company. We had a piece of it which was we did a piece with Tri -Rail to bring it into the station. And when we did that piece, we made it free for inner -city residents to be able to use. So it was something that I was very proud of, it was part of my legacy.

10:09So a private company built it. Correct. You gave them the right of way. No, the admit it to my... It's bought the right of way. So it was totally private. So look, we have micromobility options that are private, like scooters... So all you did was just not getting away. Exactly. Shocking, by the way. Shocking. What a nightmare. Well, let me ask you... Let me ask you... How? How? How? It's like the hypocritical, do -no -harmed. Do -no -harmed. How can Mayors address, they come into office with a reform motivation and they're elected on, hey, we've got to fit. We don't have what Miami has. We got to fix this.

10:43We got to get the city working again. We got to attract business. We got to track road. And they inherit this regulatory morass, this massive infrastructure. Like San Francisco recently, I got all caught up in the fact that you can't put these phone booths in your office, you know, a lot of startups. I don't know if any of you guys have these, these phone booths, you got to have someone go and make a call, you put the phone booth in. And all my startups, all the companies, I've really logged in. Wait, you can't put one in San Francisco? So you put these phone booths in and then you can go and make calls.

11:12So when everyone's in an open desk configuration, but you got to do a private call, you hop in it, everyone loads up their offices with these phone booths. In San Francisco, they're illegal. Turns out that you need to run, and there's a piece of paper, which I was actually going to tweak, because it's insane. It's like three pages long. all the things you need to know about the phone booths that you want to put in your office. You got to get an architect review and engineering review. A design review. You got to get signed off from the engineer. You got to submit the permitting fees. It gets reviewed by the city inspector's office.

11:38You got to design fire sprinklers that have to go into the phone booths. It's nuts. In case there's a fire in the phone booth, someone needs to put out the fire on the booths. That's hilarious. So I was talking to some folks about like, what are you going to do about this? But the mayor's kind of like, I don't know if there's enough action that I can take because it's in law that there's all this kind of regulatory stuff. How do you advise mayors that are stuck with this sort of an environment? And this is not just San Francisco. There's a lot of big cities in this country that have books and books of this stuff.

12:08And we can talk about philosophically why this has happened, sociologically why this has happened. Books and books of this stuff where the city can't get out of the way. What do the mayors do? And when you guys get together, is there any advice or are we stuck? Like, what's the solution? We're not stuck. I think it's cultural at some level. You have to, in calcate of culture, where you empower your employees to innovate and to, you know, de -conflict. I think when people come to me with a problem, I say, look, first issue is, if there's something that's blocking it, that doesn't make any sense.

12:43Why don't we just change it? We're legislators. That's what we do with legislates. We can fix it. Maybe it happened, maybe it made sense 20 years ago, maybe it made sense 50 years ago. It doesn't make sense today. Let's just change it. I think regulation is the other side of the coin from innovation. So regulation is telling you what you oftentimes what you can't do or how to do something. Innovation is to protect loss. It's sort of a first principle thinking, we want to do this, right? We want to make this work. And I think I always, not always, but I regularly fall on the side of innovation.

13:13And I think you as a public official, frankly, who's elected by the people, really are the one that has to push the bureaucrats, the bureaucrat class, right? at the beer class class, they get very accustomed to saying no, they're risk averse, they're not incentivized oftentimes, there's no incentive structure that says, hey, if you innovate, you're gonna get X or Y or Z. And then I think the third piece of it is artificial intelligence. I really feel that there's a breakthrough that's gonna come and it's not just in transportation, we're talking about EV tools and underground boring and all that.

13:41But I think in zoning codes and all that, it's gonna be computer to computer, right? So the codes are all straightforward, right? We have the same code for 15 years, right? Probably 97 or 8 % of all known decisions have already been made under this code. Right, so all you have to do is be replicated and going forward, right? And that's the code changes and then you just change the coding and you make the decisions all over again. So it's not that complicated. You should be able to submit something, the computer should be able to spit it out immediately. If it needs changes, it's to tell you what the changes are.

14:09A computer could look at that, make the changes and spit it back in. Right, and if you were to do that, you know, it takes to get a permit on a home in most places in America or on a building, in most places in America, you know, six months, nine months, a year, a year and a half. I mean, it's insane. It should be done instantly. And it could literally be done instantly with a technology that we already have available to the city. 100 billion dollar business, by the way, and just anybody wants to do it. Yeah, that's a great idea. It's a killer idea. I think some startups have worked on it too.

14:37I know by the multiple that are working on the other side of it. Building on Freeberg's point, the two best proposals I heard about regulations and I'm curious if you could steal me on them or just how practical they think they are, putting a time limit on regulations. So if you fought for some regulations around these phone boots, back when phone boots, Superman changes costume in them from the 60s and 70s, like back from that era, maybe it lasts for 20 years, and then it expires. Or you wanna add two regulations to office space regulations you gotta take one off the books. And those were the two proposals I've heard.

15:14some way of timing these out or if you want to add, you got to find something to take off. Either those practicals. I kind of like the first one better than the second one. Because the second one, I mean, this sort of one for one, I mean, there's got to be a reason to do one of the other. I like the first one better. Actually, what we normally do in government is the opposite. What we do is we do what we call pilots. So you'll do something that goes away very quickly. In other words, implement a piece of legislation and say, oh, we're going to do it for a year. Let's test it out. And it's a pilot.

15:42and then it goes away. I like what you're saying in terms of, you know, a big part of regulatory culture can probably be phased out over a 15, 20 year period as being an agronistic, right? It just doesn't work. Five percent a year get reviewed, and the government's responsible for reviewing five percent a year for 20 years, and they recertify it, let it go. Right, and then you have the ability to re -implement it if you think it makes sense, but I think what happens is you go back down to zero. You were asking in Tony and I was listening to the conversation because we did like I said we have to cut our budget by 20 % in one year And and part of the problem is budgeting is like layering right in all layers on top of each other same as regulation and layers on top of each other So if you were to be able to strip it down in a mechanical way right in an instantaneous way as opposed to having to Fight the the structures in our case We're very lucky there was a state statutory vehicle that allowed us to implement the cuts Otherwise, we'd have to bargain for them in a union process.

16:42And obviously, no one would ever bargain to cut their salaries. It would never bargain to cut their... It would have happened. Nothing would have happened. We would have been bankrupt. And then a court would have taken us over. We would have looked like a joke. And instead, we cut costs and we survived and we thrived. Going forward. And by the way, my employees now love me. They were not happy the first couple of years when we did it. But now they... I don't even have to go to a union interview when everyone's for office. They just support me right away. Do you want to be governor? I don't think it's quite that simple.

17:10I want a dunk. I want a dunk. Yeah, I want to be able to dunk too. Look, I think that I'm a Republican for those of you who don't know. And the president is already waiting in the Republican primary. I respect the president's perspective. I have a good relationship with Congressman Donald's. So I think politics is very circumstantial. We've talked about that a lot in the past. So think sometimes conspiring your in your favor, things I'm saying Donald, sometimes he don't, right? And I do think it is circumstantial. So I think you have to weigh the circumstances. You know, I ran for president because I had a thesis.

17:44The thesis was urban voters, Hispanics and young voters, if they went Republican, would favor the Republican candidate, or Republican candidate would, and they did, it just wasn't me. Right, it was a different candidate. But, you know, the president did a great job on podcasts, right, going on all these podcasts that, you know, the vice president didn't do. And he got young voters and he got urban voters. Republicans never gonna win Philadelphia. Trump lost Philadelphia to Biden by 85%, but he lost Philadelphia to Kamala by 75%. And that Delta, the 75, 85, that 10 % Delta gave him Pennsylvania.

18:21Yeah, that's the election. Which was such a crucial state, right? Like arguably the winning state. So Republicans are never gonna necessarily win urban votes or the urban population centers throughout America. But you're also seeing, and I think it's important to note, you're seeing Democratic mayors lose across America. London, breed, lost in San Francisco. Tashara Jones, lost in St. Louis, the mayor of Chicago, Lori Life, lost. On that point, you were the, or still are the headmen. No, I was. I was a president of US Comfort, a president, yes. For a year and a half. If we had to ask you, you can't live in Miami.

18:55Yeah. You met all those mayors. Who, where are two places that you think are actually well run? that aspire, you know, to do something great and have their shit together. Cities? Take your time. I won't jump to an answer. I'll say this. I'll tell you a mayor that I like. How about that? OK. Justin Bibb. Justin Bibb is a mayor of Cleveland. We got a couple Cleveland people here. Apparently. There we go. Justin is a good friend. I have a lot of friends that are mayor. I'm a mayor, you know, I love all my mayor's because I was president of that institution. But I think Justin is a young, dynamic guy who's smart, not super partisan, cares tremendously about a city, and we talk a lot about it because obviously my am included are a little different, right?

19:39That's fair. And we joke about it. He says, I wish I had the kind of problems you have to go back to the Ken Griffin quote. You know, they don't struggle with affordable housing. They've got plenty of affordable housing because people don't necessarily want to live there. Sorry, Jerry. Jerry, I love you, bro. But it's true. It's kind of true. So he's dealing with economic development. He's dealing with, he wants to be the Miami of Ohio in terms of getting investment, getting the tech community there, getting people, special people to move into his community and believe in his vision. And I think the company building is hard, as you guys know, you guys have built some incredible companies.

20:20Ecosystem building is even harder. It's 1000X harder than building a big company. I mean, companies take years into decades and ecosystems take decades into centuries. It's two different. Is there something that inside of the next group, editorial campaign, let's say you don't run for governor? Yeah. That's a high impact job at the state level. Not really. I get to practice and I have a private sector life, I have a 11 year old and a 7 year old. So I mean, if the president called me and said, you know, I want you to be the US ambassador or two, a country that I have a passion to help, in terms of the United States, in terms of their relationship and world peace and things of that nature, which I think are high -rowized for the time investment and the financial sacrifice that you have to make, I would strongly consider it.

21:10But other than that, I mean, I live a very blessed life. I'm the mayor of the bus city on the planet. You know? Yeah. And I have incredible, incredible, incredible bosses. These are my bosses. I have the best bosses in the world. And they're constantly encouraging me. They're constantly cheering me on. And I live and breathe for them. I wake up early in the morning, I go to bed late, and I carry their problems, their hopes, and their dreams in my soul. All right, give it up for Francis Suarez. You're a mayor. Applause. Thank you to our friend, Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami for joining us on stage at our F1 event.

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23:01Thank you so much.

23:17I'm going on a beach