The Formula for Building America's Happiest City: Miami Mayor Francis Suarez | All-In Live

43rd mayor of Miami. 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. We're 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. How are things going in Miami? Obviously, you know, we talked to you a couple years ago when we had our first all-in summit here and uh you had a 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 you know giving a junkie a home doesn't exactly get them off the street. It just doesn't work. And you've 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. So, in homeless specifically, we are at an 11-year low. Uh we did our census, we do two census a year. We do one in uh January, one in in the summer. And our our January census had us at an 11-year low. We had 546 homeless, unsheltered homeless in the entire city of Miami. Um we have a couple thousand sheltered. And

uh I actually raised money on an annual basis uh as a mayor's ball. I I 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 and and and and frankly the 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. We I lower taxes to the lowest level in history. And we've seen 140% growth in 9 years. So, the economy is robust. We were ranked the happiest city in

America, the healthiest city in America. Frankly, 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 um charitable organizations that uh 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 we sort of hack through that process. Those 500 individuals um who are categorized as homeless. Yeah. How many of them are suffering from mental illness andor self-medicating slashaddicted to drugs?

A very high percentage. Um I would say 80% plus, right? And that's sort of anecdotal. Um but when I and I've been out to the streets, I'll I'll I'll be out there before my my homeless ball now on May 31st. I'm actually going to spend a night out on the street. Um 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 super drugs meth like the the serious meth um well the really serious ones they're making now and fentinyl right these 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 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. A big part of the problem heroin or opioids. He's asking for a friend by the way. Just not I'm asking if you have a hookup. Clearly. No, but I'm I'm being deadly serious because we we had these homeless individuals in New York, you know, back in the day in the 70s ' 80s. They were kind of like um hobos and vagabons, not seriously addicted, you know, suffering where they're folding over and curled up in a ball from

fentinel. Well, well, to your point, I mean, meth and and and uh the opioids are incredibly addictive and they're very hard to to to beat, right? I mean, even people who are are wealthy and get addicted to these drugs have a very hard time um the recidivism rate is very high and so uh you know, you just had Antonio on here a minute ago and he was talking about, you know, immigration and the border and one of the big problems with the border is the tens of thousands of people that die annually because of fentinel that gets imported through China and through our border. And so uh there's a tie-in, right, between federal

policy and and local policy. But for us, um again, uh in 1980 during the the cocaine era, right, different drug, uh we had 220 homicides. So you had drugs hurting people, but you had the business of drugs very much hurting people, right? Last 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 in 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 dots there? Like I think 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. Yeah. So you've seen what hasn't worked, what has worked, what maybe has been correlated, but if you had to sort of like 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 Suarez road map. The formula for success is simple. Keep taxes low, keep people safe, lean into innovation, right? Can we just double click into those? Of course. I can double click on each one of them. 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 or didn't get the right side of luck and we need to raise taxes in order to generate the revenues to fund that. My my counterargument would be government is not a good purveyor of those services. It's not an efficient purveyor of those services. So, so ju just to double click, right? I lowered taxes to the lowest level in history and I and I took the city in 2009 as a councilman in out of bankruptcy. So, I

got it in bankruptcy. We decided this is sort of the Doge before Doge. We decided not to raise taxes. We cut cost. We we cut, you know, we didn't we didn't let anyone go, but we had tiered salary cuts, pension reform, and we balanced our budget, and 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 government to a billion half dollar government while lowering taxes. So we we grew 200%. Right? So the the the resources that we had to dedicate to these actually went up even though taxes went down. And then uh you know uh when

you have a place where there's prosperity and where people are investing and where people are employed, they're obviously not there's not as many social problems. So they're not out there killing people. um they're not out out there hurting people. So the 1980s we had you know we were one of the mur murder capitals of America and we're now one of the safest big cities in America. And then I think you know the the how can I help moment that you guys are all familiar with was this juxtiposition with what American cities were doing right famously New York competes for and wins the Amazon HQ2 prize right and then rejects it. Rejects it. Yeah. And and and also famously in California, you had

a I guess it was a legislator that said, "F Elon Musk." Yeah. Elena Gonzalez. Exactly. And she and he replied, "Message received." And he left. And then she went to run a union, right? Is that where 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 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 the signal. The signal to me is much much greater, right? 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 um we announced, you know, 900 million dollars of loans in two projects in the last two days in two buildings, you know, our stadium, our Inter Miami stadium. We have the FIFA World Cup headquarters for 2026 in the in the world, right? So, I mean, this formula for success, it seems simple, other cities are getting it wrong completely backwards, right? their taxes are high, it's not safe, and they're not leaning into they're rejecting innovation. Are there are there 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 reform there or is that is that not where you wanted to be? So Ken Griffin recently was interviewed in a 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 hyperinflation, right? So housing costs have certainly gone up

significantly. And we do everything we can to leverage public dollars and public assets like land to try to build projects at a 15 to1 or 20 to1 leverage rate. So for $100 million invested, we'll get $2 billion worth of projects. Um, there's a 5 million h, you know, 5 million housing shortage across the country and Miami has its fair share just like any any other major city. Traffic, I know none of you guys have experienced any bad traffic this last few days, right? I was in the car two two hours and 40 minutes going over to that. I'm not going to I'm not going to tell you how far along we are with the Boring Company on trying to find underground boring systems or with some

of the EV toe companies that we're working with. But I do think that transportation generally has to sort of turn the page from, you know, last generation's archaic um solutions to next. How did you get that train that what do you call it? The sunshine line or something. Bright line. Yeah. The 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 uh that was done by company. Um we had a piece of it which was we did a piece from 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 was part of my legacy. So a private company built it, correct? You gave them the right of way. They bought the right of way. So it was totally private. So look, we have microobility options that are private like scooters. So all you did was just not get in the way. Exactly. Shocking. By the way, what an idea. Let me Yeah. Let me let me ask you h how how can It's like the hypocratic oath. Do no harm. Do no harm. How can mayors address they they come into office with a reform motivation and they're elected on, hey, we've got to we don't have what what Miami has. We got to fix this. We got to get get the city working again. We got to attract

business. We got to track growth. And they inherit this regulatory morass, this massive infrastructure. Like San Francisco recently, I I 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 these phone booths, you got to have someone go in and make a call. You put the phone booth in. And all my startups, all the companies I've been involved in, you can't put one in San Francisco. So, you you put these phone booths in and then you can go in and make calls. So, when everyone's in an open desk

configuration, but you got to do a private call, you hop them in. Everyone loads up their offices with these phone booths. In San Francisco, they're illegal. Turns out that you need to run you and there's a piece of paper, which I was actually going to tweet 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, an engineering review, a design review. You got to get sign off from the engineer. You got to submit the permitting fees. It gets reviewed by the city inspector's office. You got to

design fire sprinklers that have to go into the phone booth. That's nuts. In case there's a fire in the phone booth, someone needs to put out the fire in the That's hilarious. So, I was talking 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 it's 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. And 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? when you guys get together like is there any advice or are we stuck like what's the what's the solution? We're not stuck. I I I think it it's cultural right at some level you have to inculcate a culture where you empower your employees to innovate and and to to uh you know deconlict. I think uh when people come to me with a problem I say look first first issue is if there's something that's blocking it that doesn't make any sense why don't we just change it? We're legislators. That's what we do. We legislate so we can fix it. uh maybe it happened maybe

it made sense 20 years ago maybe it made sense 50 years ago doesn't make sense today let's just change it I think regulation is the is the other side of the coin from innovation right so regulation is telling you what you often times what you can't do or or how to do something innovation is to protect loss it's sort of a first principles thinking we're going to we want to do this right we we want to make this work and I think uh I always not always but I regularly fall on the side of innovation and I think you you 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? The bureaucrat class, they get very accustomed to saying no. They're riskaverse. Um, you know, they're not incentivized often times, right? There's no incentive structure that says, "Hey, if you innovate, you're going to 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 going to come and it's not just in transportation. We're talking about EV tools and and underground boring and all that, but I think in in zoning codes and and all that, it's it's going to 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 they have to do is be replicated going forward, right? Unless 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 should tell you what the changes are. A 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 on a home in most places in America or on a building in most places in America, you know, 6

months, 9 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 us today. Hundred billion dollar business, by the way, in case anybody's a great idea. It's a killer idea. I think some startups have worked on it too. Um I know multiple that are working. Yeah, they work 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 you know just how practical you think they are. Putting um a time limit on regulations. So if you fought for

some regulations around these phone boots back when foam boots, you know, Superman changed his 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 want to add two regulations to office space regulations. You got to take one off the books, you know, and and those were the two proposals I've heard. Some way of timing these out or um if you want to add, you got to take you got to find something to take off. Are either of those practical? 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 or the other. Right.

Okay. I I like the first one better. Um actually what we normally do in government is the opposite. What we do is we do what we call pilots, right? So you'll do something that goes away very quickly, right? In other words, you imple implement a piece of legislation say, "Oh, we're going to do it for a year. Let's test it out." Right? And it's a pilot and then it goes away. Um, I 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 anacronistic, right? It just doesn't a year get reviewed and you you're the government's responsible for reviewing

5% a year for 20 years and they reertify it or right and and then you have the ability to reimplement it if you think it makes sense. But I think what happens is you go back down to zero. you were asking Antonio and I was I was listening to the conversation because we did we did it like I said we had to cut our budget by 20% in one year and uh and part of the problem is budgeting is like layering right it all layers on top of each other same as regulation it 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 the structures in our case we were 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 in a union process and obviously no one would ever bargain to cut their salaries. There would no never bargain to cut. It would nothing would have happened. We would have come we would have been bankrupt and then a court would have taken us over. We would have looked like a joke and instead we we cut costs and we and we survived and we thrived right going forward. And by the way, my employees now love me. They were not happy the first couple years when we did it. But now they they they um I mean I don't even have to go to a union interview when I when I run for

office. They just support me right away. Do you want to be governor? I don't think it's quite that simple. I want to dunk. I want to dunk. Yeah, I want to be able to dunk, too. Uh, look, I think that I'm a Republican for those of you who don't know, and uh, you know, the president's already weighed in the Republican primary. I respect the president's uh, perspective. I have a good relationship with Congressman Donald's. So, I I think politics is very circumstantial. Um, we've talked about that a lot in the past. So, you know, things sometimes conspire in your in your favor. Sometimes sometimes things 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 had a thesis. The thesis was urban voters, Hispanics, and young voters, if they went Republican, would favor the Republican candidate or Republican candidate win. And it 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. Um, and he got young voters and he got urban voters. Uh, look, a Republican's never going to win Philadelphia, right? Trump lost Philadelphia to Biden by 85%. But he lost Philadelphia to Kamla by 75%. And and that delta, the 75, 85, that 10%

delta gave him Pennsylvania. Yeah, that's the election, which was such a crucial state, right? Like arguably the the winning state. So you you know, Republicans are never going to necessarily win urban votes or the urban population centers throughout America. But you're also seeing and and I think it's important to note you're seeing Democratic mayors lose across America. London Breed lost in San Francisco. Yeah. Tashara Jones lost in St. Louis. The mayor of of Chicago, Lori Lightoot lost. On that point, you were the or still are the head of No, I was I was a president US Conference of Yeah. for a year and a half. Okay. If if if we had to ask you, you can't live in Miami.

Yeah. 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 [ __ ] together? Cities. Take your time. I don't jump to an answer. I I'll say this. I I'll tell you a mayor that I like. How about that? Okay. Justin Bib. Justin Bib is a mayor of Cleveland. We got a couple Cleveland people here apparently. There we go. Justin is a good friend. Uh I have a lot of friends that are mayors. I'm a mayor. You know, I love all my mayors because I was a president of that institution. But

I think Justin is a young, dynamic guy who's smart, not super partisan, cares tremendously about his city, and and we talk a lot about it because obviously Miami and Cleveland are a little different, right? On the margins, that's fair. Uh and and we joke about it. He says, you know, I wish I had the kind of problems you have. To go back to sort of the Ken Griffin quote, you know, they they don't struggle with affordable housing. They got plenty of affordable housing cuz people don't necessarily want to live there. Um uh sorry Jay sorry Jay I love you bro. Uh but but it's true right? It's kind of true. So so he's dealing with economic uh development. He's dealing with he

wants to 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 uh I think look company building is hard as you guys know you guys have built some incredible companies. Ecosystem building is even harder, right? It's it's it's a thousandx harder than building a big company. I mean, companies take years into decades and ecosystems take decades into centuries. Yeah. It's too different. Yeah. Is there something that inside of the next gubernatorial campaign, let's say you don't run for

governor, that's a high impact job at the state level? Not really. I get to practice and I have a private sector life. Uh I have a 11-year-old and a seven-year-old. So, I mean, if the president called me and said, you know, I want you to be the US ambassador to, you know, a country that I have a passion to help, you know, in terms of the United States, in terms of their relationship and world peace and things of that nature. Um, which I think are high ROIs for for the time investment and the financial sacrifice that you have to make. I would strongly consider it. But other than that, I mean, I'm I live a very blessed life, you know. I I I'm the mayor of the best

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. Yeah. And they're constantly encouraging me. They're constantly cheering me on. And and 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, your mayor. Thank you to our friend Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, for joining us on stage at our F1 event. And thanks to you, the audience for tuning in. Give us a like, a thumbs up, a subscribe, write

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