Better Politicians

Weeding is Fundamental

I’d like to write another book. That’s not going to happen for a while, for reasons I’ll explain later, but the book I would write next if I could would be called Better Politicians and How to Elect Them, or something like that. I want to find the politicians who are substantively reforming the machinery of government so that it actually works the way we need it to, and describe how they spend their time, how their staffers spend their time, and how they conceive of their jobs that’s different from others. I advise electeds, especially legislators, to spend more time elevating desired behavior from agency staff and less time punishing mistakes, so I should take my own advice and seek out and celebrate what I want to see more of.

If I were writing this book, I would write about how Matt Mahan, the mayor of San Jose, responded to a constituent’s tweet about a permit. Donovan Adesoro works for BuildCasa, a startup trying to build more housing. The San Jose permitting office rejected documents his team filed because the margins are supposed to be 1 inch, but on one of the pages, it appears to drift to 1⅛ inch. (At least that’s what the picture makes it look like, maybe they’re 1 1⁄8 inch everywhere.) He posted:

Adesoro didn’t tag Mahan on his post, but the mayor replied anyway.

Later the same day, Mahan follows up;

There is so much to say about both the absurdity of the county’s persnicketyness and the deftness of Mahan’s communication here. He doesn’t just acknowledge and explain. He enrolls Adesoro in a cause, and invites anyone listening to join as well. But the real triumph here is that he engaged in this issue in the first place. So many politicians would consider this kind of administrative detail unworthy of their attention. If they’re on Twitter, it’s to put out messages about their values, their policy priorities, their visions. They’ll talk about aspirational goals. Mahan is listening, and understanding what’s blocking us from achieving the goals we’ve already set. We need more of that.

More housing is a goal California has clearly set. According to the 21st Century Alliance, the California Legislature passed more than 100 bills to stimulate housing production between 2016 and 2022. Many elected officials deserve praise for these legislative accomplishments. But, as the Biden administration learned, legislative accomplishments do not necessarily ensure real-world change. Despite these 100 bills, housing permit numbers in the state have barely budged, and prices in the state remain sky-high due to low supply. Housing costs remain among Californians’ biggest concerns. Obviously, something else is needed. Perhaps there’s a learning cycle that informs and improves the effectiveness of the next 100 bills, but clearly, it’s not just that. No bill is going to change the overly rigid culture of the county and state permitting offices. For that, you need good old-fashioned leadership.

Mahan is a mayor, not a state legislator, and not the governor. (Though I do wish he would run for governor.) This kind of on-the-ground practicality is seen as somewhat characteristic of mayors, though his willingness to dive into the weeds is remarkable even for a mayor. But electeds of all stripes should take a page from Mahan’s book. And other legislators already have. I’ve praised Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s crusade against the regulations (or interpretation of regs) that kept daycare centers from serving fresh fruit, for example. That took a similar combination of administrative sleuthing (yes, likely conducted by staff in both cases), really strong communication, and the instinct to pull a thread most leaders wouldn’t even notice.

What Mahan and MGP are demonstrating is a conception of the job voters have hired them to do that’s different from their peers. If politics is at all like gardening, most politicians think of themselves as planting seeds. If a bill they author passes, that seed will grow, and the shade, or fruit, or flowers it provides the public is what gets them renown and reelection. What they fail to see is that those seeds aren’t growing. The fruits of their legislative labors are not materializing. As any gardener knows, planting is not the hard part. Gardening is about creating the right conditions: tending and fertilizing the soil, watering, weeding to give seedlings the space they need to grow. Gardening is cultivation.

Effective leadership in today’s sclerotic government also requires cultivation. The word stems from the Latin word "colere," which means "to cultivate, to till, to inhabit, to frequent, or to tend." This Latin root is also the origin of "culture." Mahan and MGP are willing to grapple with the culture of these agencies, and ways that culture is “eating” their well-intentioned policies. They recognize that the outcomes their electorate need and expect won’t come from just planting the seeds of policy ideas if the soil those policies planted in is dry, barren, and choked with the weeds of every other past priority, requirement, and mandate of their predecessors. Instead of continuing to plant seeds and blaming someone else when they don’t grow (or worse, not even noticing they haven’t grown), the leaders we need cultivate a purpose-fit culture.

The heart of that culture work needs to be taming risk aversion and fetishization of procedure. In that culture, it isn’t acceptable to reject an application for much-needed housing over ⅛ of an inch. But the culture isn’t going to change itself. Change requires leadership. Grandstanding about the big issues of the day may grab headlines, but debugging our government an ⅛ of an inch at a time is the kind of leadership we need.