Adam Miller talks to LAist about why he should be LA's next mayor (Transcript)

Here's a transcript of the conversation that took place Monday, April 13, on the campus of Loyola Marymount University in front of a live audience of students and other guests.

Adam Miller is running as a Democrat.

Larry Mantle: Adam Miller is running for Los Angeles Mayor. He's a tech entrepreneur and a nonprofit leader. Adam Miller, welcome to AirTalk and LMU.

Adam Miller: Larry, thank you for having me.

How he'd approach his first government role

Larry Mantle: As the co-founder of the housing nonprofit Better Angels, you've described frustration at the city's barriers to reforming housing policies and improving oversight of spending, but you'd have a steep learning curve as mayor.

How would you implement dramatic changes while learning the institution?

Adam Miller: Well, the good news is I've been a leader for 35 years. I've been running corporations, startups, nonprofits, and that experience has taught me how to lead teams big and small. And the reality is that leadership can be applied across multiple types of organizations.

At the end of the day, an effective executive is good at setting a vision, aligning a team to that vision, operating with excellence, holding people accountable by measuring results and iterating when you need to make changes. That's what I've done across every organization I've had, and that's how I've been able to deliver results, and that's exactly what I would do as mayor.

Larry Mantle: As you know, government is a very different beast. You've got labor unions to negotiate and to deal with, you've got elected officials who may not say the same thing publicly as they'll tell you privately, you've got all kinds of differences between the private sector, the nonprofit world, which you're very familiar with, and the governmental world.

What have you done to try and familiarize yourself or prepare yourself for that very different beast of elective office?

Adam Miller: Yeah, so aside from studying when I was back at school, like the people in this room, I have spent a lot of time over the last few years with Better Angels working with the city, the county, and the agencies involved, as well as the nonprofits in the homelessness ecosystem.

So that's given me direct contact with many elected officials, many people that work in their offices, and many people that run the various agencies in order to get our work done. So Better Angels today is doing work around prevention, services, technology, shelter, and housing, all to end this epidemic of homelessness.

And that work involves multiple other groups which has put me right at the center of this ecosystem, working together with others.

How he'd approach homelessness

Larry Mantle: Let's talk about specific aspects of homelessness being one of the biggest issues, one that you've been attempting to address with Better Angels, our shelter system. One of the big problems is knowing where shelter beds are, what's available.

There's a high churn rate. What would you do if elected mayor to help improve the delivery of shelter services in the city?

Adam Miller: Well, thank you for starting with a softball question because Better Angels has been doing exactly this. Most people don't realize, but L.A. does not have a centralized database of all existing interim housing in the city.

I couldn't believe this after working with many different groups. And we decided to build it. So Better Angels has been building a comprehensive directory of shelter in the city, including other interim housing sites, in real time to enable people to have a comprehensive view of all the shelter properties that exist and ultimately all the beds that are available.

We built an app that works like Airbnb or hotels.com to make it easy based on where you're standing, to understand what kind of interim housing is around you.

Larry Mantle: What's the barrier to introducing that app?

Adam Miller: What's that?

Larry Mantle: What's the barrier to introducing that app? Or is that now available?

Adam Miller: So we are still building out the database, but it is largely complete and we are integrating it with our outreach app that is being used by outreach workers to help provide homeless services. So the goal of Better Angels is to provide a holistic response to homelessness, and that includes integrating these various aspects. You don't want to just deliver services, ultimately you want to deliver services that get people off the street. To do that, you have to know where to put them, which means understanding what interim housing exists and what beds are available, and having a pathway to take people from the street into shelter and ultimately into permanent housing.

How he'd handle the city budget and homelessness spending

Larry Mantle: The city of L.A. has paid hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements in alleged police misconduct cases. The council voted a couple of years ago to provide significant raises for city employees and benefits exceed what's generally available in the private sector, this as LA struggles each year to balance its budget and to provide basic services.

So in your view, what is the single most misplaced spending priority you see from the city's leadership?

Adam Miller: So we have issues around spending across the board. When you think about fiscal responsibility. It's about balancing a budget, and that means you only have two opportunities to balance a budget where you need to spend more.

You can reallocate funds by reducing expenses in certain areas, or you can raise more revenue. The city has an opportunity to do both. We have lots of missed revenue in this city, both from businesses that are fleeing the city, and industries that have left. Film starts are down 40% since 2019. There is clear opportunity to build more housing in the city, which would bring more revenue, get more businesses in the city, drive more industry in the city.

Larry Mantle: So just to clarify, you're not looking at additional taxes to raise revenue?

Adam Miller: Not taxes.

Larry Mantle: You're looking at a growth model.

Adam Miller: Correct. On the flip side, there are opportunities to have less spending or more efficient spending, and we're seeing lack of efficiency all over the place. If you look at something like Inside Safe, we're spending $85,000 a motel room a year that equates to $7,000 a month to put somebody off the street into housing.

Of course, many of you would happily be spending 7,000 a month on rent, you'd be in a much nicer place than the dorm you're in today. There is a lot of opportunity to dramatically improve our spend and reallocate those funds to things that are desperately needed in the city.

Larry Mantle: So concretely, what would you do as opposed to putting people in what everybody agrees is very expensive transitional housing? Or short term in a hotel or motel room.

What would you do in lieu of that?

Adam Miller: So if you wanna talk about shelter specifically, number one, let's utilize the 25% of vacant shelter beds that aren't being used today. Number two, let's capitalize on other programs that exist in the city and the county that provides specific resources to people who are currently on the street, whether we're talking about share for addiction treatment or bed and cares around mental health treatment, we can utilize those beds.

In addition, there are opportunities to use more innovative solutions like shelter or pallet to build non congregant housing for temporary housing. That costs on average, under $10,000 a unit.

Larry Mantle: Are you not in support of using congregant housing models, which could lower the cost by, by having people living in group settings, dormitory style living?

Adam Miller: So congregant housing is not popular amongst the unhoused population. They would prefer not to be in congregate housing. There are a spectrum of types of congregate housing. In addition, we don't want to have homogeneous shelter across the city. What would be much more effective would be to have specialized shelters for different demographic groups.

For example, seniors probably shouldn't be living with young single men. It would be better to have dedicated facilities for seniors. Dedicated facilities for transition age youth dedicated facilities for single moms with their kids, which would enable us to be much more efficient in how we're allocating resources.

It would be easier to wrap around services at those locations, and it would be more attractive housing for people to be utilizing.

How he'd navigate building shelters

Larry Mantle: Adam, let's, let's talk about where those locations would be because one of the biggest challenges, as you know, is most communities do not welcome having significant numbers of people who've been living on the streets, coming in and living in their communities.

So how would you, if you were mayor of Los Angeles. Find places for this array of different housing situations to be developed.

Adam Miller: So one of the best interim housing sites today is a tiny home village with Hope the Mission in the valley. This is a tiny home village with a hundred units that is off from a park.

It is not near a residential area. It has its own security. It's very effective. The residents there love it. And it's been very effective. We can replicate that throughout the city. There are land sites available that are metro owned. There are sites that are owned by the city. There are sites that are owned by LAUSD where there's no school anymore.

So we have plenty of land that's outside of dense residential areas. Where we can put some of this interim housing and build great space for people that is not only putting a roof over their heads, but giving them dignity and a place to live.

How he'd spur construction of more housing

Larry Mantle: Mr. Miller, let's talk about housing itself, the larger issue.

What do you think the city of Los Angeles needs to do to spur construction, multi-unit, even single family, whether it's regulatory, whether it's incentives, what can the city do?

Adam Miller: So if you think about it, the biggest issue around affordability in this city, and many of you in this room probably feel like this is gonna be a hard place to live after you graduate because rent's so expensive. It's very expensive to live here. In many cases, Angelenos are spending 50 or 70% of their income on rent. This is what makes the city so unaffordable. The only solution to that, and you could ask this to almost any college student, is basic economics. It's supply and demand. So if you want pricing to come down, the only way to do that if you have fixed demand is to increase supply.

And that's exactly what we need to be doing. We need to increase supply.

Larry Mantle: How do we do it?

Adam Miller: How do we do that? First of all, you have to remember that it's not one type of housing. We're often talking about affordable housing, but when we talk about supply, it's affordable housing, workforce housing, and market rate housing.

We need to be doing all three. And to do that, we have to make the city more attractive for real estate developers. What do I mean? You have to make it easier to get permitted. Permitting takes too long. We need to be reducing the time from an average permit dramatically. I think we get an 80% reduction in permitting time on average in this city.

Larry Mantle: Is that because, uh, building and planning is understaffed or what, what are the reasons for this?

Adam Miller: It’s not typically staffing, it's process engineering. It's leveraging innovation. It's using AI to make sure permit applications are valid before being reviewed by the humans, it's making sure that we are enabling self-certification where it makes sense.

So literally lowering the load of permits that need to be reviewed.

Larry Mantle: And that's happened in some of the fire areas, self certification.

Adam Miller: There are things that we require permits for that probably don't make sense to require permits, minor modifications in your home that probably don't need permitting, and that would dramatically reduce the workload for organizations like building and safety.

Larry Mantle: You mentioned affordable housing and workforce housing, if I'm not mistaken, then market rate. What is workforce housing?

Adam Miller: So workforce housing are for people that are typically between 80% and 110% of area median income. So these are people who are teachers or first responders or nurses.

They are very integral parts of the community. But oftentimes they are needing to commute an hour or an hour and a half each way to get to work because they can't afford to live in the communities that they're working in. This is why we need more workforce housing.

Larry Mantle: Well, and many of those employees are people with families. So the model of the transit hub apartment building doesn't necessarily work. In all those cases. Then what is a way to, to develop more spacious accommodations for people who work in some of those professions when you know the cost of renting or buying a house is exorbitant here?

Adam Miller: Yeah, you need more supply.

You have to make it easier for people to build two bedroom, three bedroom, four bedroom units that make it available for the middle class. We do not have enough housing for the middle class in this city, and it makes it very hard for people to live here. So we talked about permitting. Entitlements and predictability.

I ran a public company for 10 years. One of the keys in running a public company is predictability. It is extremely important for large corporations to have predictability around their finances. And when you have a city that gives you no clarity around inspection timelines or permitting timelines, and delays are unexplained, you create a lack of predictability, which means those kinds of organizations don't want to build in L.A. anymore. So we have lost many of the national real estate developers, they have stopped developing in L.A.

Larry Mantle: Are there any California cities that you think have this right?

Adam Miller: Well, L.A. is down 30% since 2019 and new housing starts.

San Diego is up 10%. That's a 40% swing. That's a big difference.

Larry Mantle: And are they implementing some of what you're proposing? Or are there other approaches?

Adam Miller: They are implementing some of these things, but we don't have to look just in California. You can look all over the world. Many cities are doing this extremely well.

Larry Mantle: I was just thinking, 'cause the cost of living here, the high cost of labor here.

So it'd be an apple-to-apple comparison.

Adam Miller: Yeah. But even if you look at San Diego, you see big improvements. How people are building and the speed at which they're able to build. There's also things we could be doing around financing. So if you look at collaborating with the state and the county, there's opportunities for us to provide secondary guarantees on financing, which would enable emerging developers to more easily get financing to complete their projects.

All of these things would enable us to come a lot closer to our regional housing needs assessment. Today, we are 90% off from our target, we can do better.

Making government work

Larry Mantle: We're talking with Adam Miller, who's candidate for mayor of Los Angeles. L.A.'s neighboring cities arguably execute much better on services than Los Angeles, whether we're talking cleanliness, street conditions, lighting, removals of illegal dumping, police response time. It's a long list. Defenders of Los Angeles argue, well, such a big city, it's harder to serve residents than in smaller communities. But you could argue the opposite, that there's an economy of scale in Los Angeles.

Adam Miller: Absolutely.

Larry Mantle: It should actually be more flexible, more able to provide services than a little city where someone's out sick. So how would you make Los Angeles more responsive?

Adam Miller: You have to know how to operate at scale. This is the fundamental issue we've had in the city. We don't have the leadership that knows how to manage large scale operations, and we see this in all the things you just described, right? Whether we're talking about broken streetlights or sidewalks or city or the streets themselves, the trash everywhere, the encampments everywhere.

We see this in real life. It's very visual in this city, and we can do better. There are ways to optimize our operations. There's ways to leverage innovation. There's process re-engineering that would allow us to be more effective in how we're delivering all of these services. I'll give you a simple example from what we're doing at Better Angels.

We have in this city and specifically in the county, spent $10 billion over the last decade on homelessness, and yet the problem has gotten much worse. It's not a money problem. Because we've had the money, it's an execution problem, and there are many, many, many different service providers in this city working on services for unhoused individuals.

The problem is those services are not efficiently getting to the people that need the service. So we were aware of this at Better Angels and we started a program we call resource days, where instead of in expecting an unhoused individual to get to the various service providers that they need access to, we bring the service providers to them.

How do we do it? We partner up with a community group, or often a church that does something like a community meal one day a month, think the third Thursday of the month, and we turn that meal into a street fair and we provide 10 to 20 different service providers providing everything from medical services, mental health services, career development, housing, navigation, showers.

Larry Mantle: You think government could do something similar? You think it could organize that?

Adam Miller: 100%. We shouldn't have to do it. We're just showing the way.

Larry Mantle: Let's bring up another LMU student. This is Michael Stewart who has a question for Adam Miller, candidate for Mayor of Los Angeles. Michael,

Michael Stuart: Thank you for being here Mr. Miller, my question is, uh, given that you've never had any government experience, uh, could you tell us how you would deal with government bureaucracies, unions, and other inclusive institutions and ensure that many voices are heard in our city's policy making?

Adam Miller: Thank you, Michael, for the question.

Sometimes people ask as you did, is being an outsider, a liability or an asset? And in this case, I think it's clearly an asset. We have a city government that is rife with issues around transparency, fraud, and accountability.

And that means making sure students are getting what they need, making sure adults are getting what they need. Seniors are getting what they need. Working across all neighborhoods, all racial diversity, all community groups to make sure that we're doing what's best for the people of L.A.

Larry Mantle: And part of Michael's question, I think, which is so good, is sort of how do you hear all those voices? This is an incredibly diverse city with people that are, you know, diametrically opposed in needs and wants. How do you synthesize that?

Adam Miller: So I had a company with 3000 employees in 25 countries. We were able to forge alliances with other corporations that were supposed to be our biggest competitors, became our best partners in the work I did on the internship program I created, which has brought over 2000 internships in technology to 18 to 24 year olds from South and East LA over the last few years.

That program was met with a lot of resistance. People said on the corporate side, “oh, it's gonna be impossible to deliver that on the community college side.” People said, “it's too hard to scale that up. There's a lot of challenges you have to meet.” People said “you won't be able to get people who come out of the justice system or who have graduated from the foster care system.”

That's exactly what we've done and we've been able to deliver, we'll do over 500 more internships this year, and it's from understanding how to collaborate, how to partner, and how to build consensus.

What makes him uniquely suited for the job

Larry Mantle: We just have a minute left and I know this is difficult to answer this question in such a short time, but Adam Miller, selecting a police chief and exerting leverage over the department is arguably the mayor's greatest power.

What is the most important attribute you would seek, whenever the police chief job opens up, What is the most important attribute in that person?

Adam Miller: Accountability. I think the city needs more accountability across the board, and it's somebody who is a leader that understands the importance of driving accountability across the board. We should have double the patrols in this city and we can do that with bringing our staffing level back to what it was.

Larry Mantle: What, what staffing level would you wanna see?

Adam Miller: At least 10,000 officers. And I think we need double the patrols. We have less than half the patrols of any other major city per capita in this country. And we can do better.

Larry Mantle: Even though crime is down, you think there's more that should be done.

Adam Miller: Crime is down from a violent crime perspective, but I can tell you across this city, from north to south, east to west, people do not feel safe in their homes.

They feel like response times are too slow. People also do not feel prepared for the next disaster, which will inevitably come and we can have a safer city for everybody. Again, leveraging innovation. Accountability and a focus on results.

Larry Mantle: Real quickly, final question, like 30 seconds. Setting aside what you've done, what you've learned, you as a person, how you're wired, how do you see that aligning with the job of mayor?

Adam Miller: I'm a player coach. I know how to lead from the front. I think one of the challenges we've had in the city is that leadership has been too far behind the scenes and not front and center. I know how to lead from the front. Be on the front lines and get people what they need, make the partnerships, get consensus, and get results.

Larry Mantle: Adam Miller, thank you for joining us and talking about your candidacy for Mayor of Los Angeles.

Adam Miller: Thank you.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and grammar.