Mayor Francis Suarez of Miami argues the city avoids Detroit's pitfalls by prioritizing low taxes, robust police funding, and innovation, achieving historic homicide lows despite lower revenue. He details a "carrot" approach to affordable housing via public capital, a tourist-funded Homeless Trust targeting "Functional Zero," and massive upfront infrastructure spending for hurricane resilience. Suarez highlights Florida's rising independent voters and a voluntary gun buyback program, emphasizing that empowering residents economically is essential for surviving inflation and growth without relying on government assistance. [Automatically generated summary]
What's happening now in the United States is very similar to what happened in Detroit at the Industrial Revolution, which is that you're seeing this change from industrial to digital.
And Miami is the only city in America that got the memo and has basically built its entire economy to capitalize on what I call a tsunami of opportunity.
Cities like New York and San Francisco and Silicon Valley thought they were too big to fail.
And I'll tell you, Dave, they're not.
The world is more disrupted than ever.
Companies that are massive get disrupted out of existence like that.
and we are building for the future and it's exciting to see.
unidentified
All right, I'm Dave Rubin.
All right, I'm Dave Rubin, we'll see you next time.
Like, first of all, just coming here and seeing this incredible studio in the heart of Wynwood in Miami, which is one of the most dynamic, fun, exciting neighborhoods.
It's totally on brand for you, right?
And, you know, it's just exciting to see you here.
And we totally embrace what you're doing, you know, in terms of the content, the conversations that you're provoking.
And it's very much in line with who we are as a city.
And it's everywhere in Miami, not just right here, because although I don't want to say the specific part of town that I live in, you know, and in the area that I live in, there hasn't been a home break in 14 years.
I mean, the flourishing is every day I wake up and there's a new Los Angelino coming to my town.
And I've been in an elected office for 13 years, so maybe there's a correlation between the 14 and the 13.
But look, I think you're right.
Miami was the best-kept secret, number one.
Number two, Miami has always punched above its weight, right?
When you think about, what is Miami?
I mean, you could arguably have someone who lives in Palm Beach, who is in Paris, and they ask them, where are you from?
They say, Miami, right?
There's this big thing, right?
I always say Miami's an idea, it's more than a city.
And it's an idea born out of a trauma.
What's the trauma?
The trauma is many people in Miami were kicked out of their country of birth, were exiled, because a leader in their country said, give me all your businesses, give me all your property, don't worry, we'll make everything equal.
And you know what they did?
They made everything equal.
Equally miserable for everybody, right?
And so, we are traumatized by that.
And I think that's why Miamians are so fundamentally pro-America.
We're so fundamentally pro, you know, sort of fair market and free market.
And we believe in freedom and liberty, right?
Those are principles that for us, we fought for, right?
So on the tax side, you wrote a piece in Wall Street Journal about a month or month and a half ago talking about free markets and capitalism and why this place is thriving.
So how does it make any sense?
I thought the government just needs more of our money to make things work, but you're keeping taxes low and we don't have roads exploding and all sorts of stuff.
That means that for every dollar you earn, you take home $0.46.
In Miami, you get $0.63.
It is a huge delta.
And so that, at scale, obviously is incredibly motivating to people.
I've seen statistics that 70% of the taxes in New York are paid by 8,000 people.
And if that becomes $7,500 and $7,000 and $6,500, you get what's called a vicious cycle, right?
You get massive holes in your budget when those people leave, and there's only one way to get more revenue for them, which is to increase taxes, which creates more migration, more holes, and I call it the death spiral.
So, what's happening now in the United States is very similar to what happened in Detroit at the Industrial Revolution, right?
You're seeing this change from industrial to digital.
And Miami is the only city in America that got the memo and has basically built its entire economy to capitalize on what I call a tsunami of opportunity.
And cities like New York and San Francisco and Silicon Valley thought they were too big to fail.
And I'll tell you, Dave, they're not.
The world is more disruptive than ever.
Massive, get disrupted out of existence, like that.
And we are building for the future, and it's exciting to see.
Do you get any pushback from other mayors who are going, hey, Francis, you know, if you keep taxes low, it's gonna make us look like a bunch of idiots, because we got the grift going here, and it's kind of working, until it doesn't work out.
And what I get more of, and I gotta be careful how I say this, is I get more of the, camera's not on, listen, we really think It's great, but we don't have the ability to do it.
What kind of pushback do you get from the Democrats here when you're doing some of these things?
So you're lowering taxes, you're putting police on the street.
I mean, one thing for sure that I notice here is that when I go to New York and I see cops all over the place, to me it's a sign that something is not right.
When I go here and I see cops, whether it's in South Beach or down where I am, it's like, oh, they're patrolling and just making sure everything's okay.
And I think the other difference in mentality is we support them.
I think in other cities, they don't feel supported.
What you've got to understand is right now in America, being a police officer is the hardest job in America.
It's harder than being a roofer.
There isn't a job in America where you get paid less money, with more scrutiny, and more risk, and more at stake, and being asked to do more things, because now they're being asked to be social workers.
I mean, it's really, really hard to be a police officer in America, and I think fundamentally, number one, they need to be Protected, they need to be sort of supported, right?
Number two, they need to be well paid, right?
Like anybody in life, right?
You've got to support them financially because they've got to take care of their kids.
They want their kids to go to school just like you do.
And so we've been blessed.
And then you have to have a lot of police officers because it creates a deterrent effect.
We've given them a ton of technology to help them leverage their sort of force multiplier.
And all of that has been incredibly successful in maintaining our homicide rate.
What are some of the stresses of having all these people move here?
I mean, house prices for sure.
You mentioned they're lower than New York, but it's tough to get a place here.
And one of the things I'm always worried about, and I see emails from this, is that people that are the OG Floridians, who have done it right and lived here for a long time, they're suddenly feeling, oh, we could get priced out because all of these rich people from LA and New York.
What happens is, first of all, you have historic inflation.
So, here's a problem with government saying, we're going to solve the inflation crisis by giving everybody money, right?
So, you're in a level where we're at historic inflation.
If you look at urban America right now, not just Miami, urban America, rents are up 25% or more in every urban city, big city in America.
Miami's more like 35-45%.
Why?
Because you layer on top of that a hyper demand.
People are just fleeing, getting the heck out of places where they think they're not wanted, or where they think they're getting taxed to death, or where they think the economy's moving away from.
They can do market, or if they want to do something different, they can do affordable housing.
And we have built, and we will build, probably between $4.5 and $6 billion of affordable housing over the next 5 to 10 years here in Miami, in addition to the supply.
We have systematically invested and we did it in a way that was really smart, right?
So we have something called the Homeless Trust and it is a tax, right?
We don't like to pay taxes, but this is a tourist tax.
So this is for people who are coming to Miami, staying in hotels, they pay 1% on their bill, right?
And it funds a homeless trust.
So basically our visitors, not our residents, are paying this tax.
Our visitors are basically paying a tax.
That goes to help what I call the least, the last, and the lost, the most marginalized in our community.
And so, you know, what have we done?
We built a decentralized set of centers that give them alcohol treatment, drug treatment, mental health treatment, and vocational training.
Right?
In addition to that, we're spending over the next two years about $7 million in a plan that I call Functional Zero.
So we have 640 homeless right now.
6-4-0, according to our last census.
That's it.
That's it?
That's it.
But I want to be at zero.
Because I don't think any city in America, big city, has really challenged themselves to get to zero.
And I think that if we create a model, then it can be certainly exported, right, to the rest of the country that are dealing with tens of thousands of homeless in their cities.
Look, I think I had a mayor, and I won't say who it was, from a big city, one of the top 20 cities in America, tell me recently, we just waited too long.
You know, we didn't do what you guys did.
We used to have 9,000 homeless.
We brought it from 9,000 to 1,000, right?
And 1,000 is in the county, which is 2.8 million people.
Only about 600 of that 1,000 is in the actual city proper, which is my jurisdiction.
So we did it through this decentralized network.
A lot of these cities just didn't do it.
And then, of course, we're seeing a lot of mismanagement, a lot of... I mean, I've heard some crazy statistics in California where people are paying like $400,000 or $500,000 a homeless or something like that.
Let's talk a little bit about the hurricane situation because obviously it ended up, Hurricane Ian ended up hitting Southwest Florida.
We're obviously in Southeast Florida, but at first it was going to hit here.
Obviously hurricanes do hit Miami.
Yeah.
You've been tweeting about it and doing all sorts of stuff.
What do we need to know for the Miami and the future Miami and who's going to come down here or to Florida in general when it comes to these storms and all this stuff?
So to be honest, and I'm, you know, again, as President of the U.S.
Conference of Mayors, I led a delegation To the Gulf Coast, to see all the cities that were impacted in the Gulf Coast.
And it was devastating.
And there's two things that I think everybody needs to know.
Thing number one is, for every dollar that we as a community, as a country, spend on the front end in resiliency investment, we save seven to eight dollars on the back end.
So I was just at a podcast today, at an interview, where they were saying that Senator Rubio's Advocating for 33 billion dollars of spending for hurricane relief So my point is if we would have spent 5 billion on the front end We could have potentially saved 25 to 30 billion on the back.
You're talking about building new structures I'm talking about things like buildings that I'm talking about things like like like like urban reservoirs pumps pumps increased seawalls You know backflow preventers.
These are all the things that we're doing in Miami right now Yeah.
Okay.
In Miami, we, post Hurricane Andrew, which was in 1992, which was a 200 mile an hour wind event, we basically made Miami the most wind resilient city on the planet.
Like, we're a bunker, right?
The problem now is water, and water volume.
What we've seen in the last two years are two events that, frankly, are super frightening.
Ian and Dorian, I don't know if you remember Dorian from a couple years ago.
Dorian was a Category 5 that sat on top of the Bahamas.
Never touched continental U.S.
that I'm aware of.
Maybe up north.
But certainly didn't touch Florida.
And it produced 25 foot of storm surge.
So Ian has produced 10 plus foot of storm surge.
You're talking about 25.
So Mother Nature has just shown us two massively destructive events that no city in the world is prepared for.
Period, full stop.
We've got to start being creative.
One of the great things about this country is its innovative spirit.
Its ability to solve problems, complex problems.
We get thrown challenges, we solve them.
We're the first country to invent We have always been a country that finds a way to solve big problems.
Obviously, as heinous as it was, we used it and it ended the war.
It could have saved—who knows what would have happened if we didn't have that technology.
We have always been a country that finds a way to solve big problems.
And this is a big problem.
And I think, you know, we're going to have to really dedicate a ton of resources to try
to solve it, because the scale of these problems are much bigger than what we've seen before.
How does that work related to the city level versus the state level?
I mean, you know how proud I am to be a Floridian, but watching Governor DeSantis just go from every community every freaking day and you could see the media, the media was doing what they do with you.
Like when we had, when we had one day of water and brickle, there was one picture of some Kids getting out of a club because they want to use it against you guys.
But can you talk a little bit about how the cities have to operate with this stuff versus the state?
Oh yeah, we've called a bunch of people, like, hey, when is this thing gonna flow, right?
So I think, but I think, look, infrastructure is a legitimate expense for the federal government if it's spent properly and if it doesn't, you know, produce massive deficits, which unfortunately it has, right?
But I think at the end of the day, you know, we need a piece of that money so that we can spend money on the front end to, again, avoid having to spend more money on the back end.
I think a lot of those people, even in a county like Dade County, which is a predominantly Democrat county, right?
I'll give you an example, something that the former president did, right?
He lost Dade County in 16 by 30 votes, 30 percent, I'm sorry, right?
And he only lost it in 20 by 8 percent.
So, when you talk about that increase from 100,000 to 400,000, it almost comes exactly back to Dade County, because it's a 22% delta on 1,200,000 voters, right?
So, what did he do?
He was strong in Venezuela, right?
He was bold, and he recognized Guaido and got a coalition of countries to recognize Juan Guaido to try to disrupt the Maduro regime.
What did he do on Cuba?
He rolled back all the Obama giveaways, right, during Obama's presidency.
He wanted a legacy victory, kind of like Nixon's China opening, right, with Cuba and putting an embassy there.
And we got nothing in return, right?
Trump undid that.
So 75% of new arrival Cubans voted for Donald Trump.
So we're going to, in a little bit, we're going to bring in Asaf, who's the CEO of Locals, but I just want to talk to you broadly on the tech side before we talk about what we're doing.
Sure.
So you brought in all these tech, well, you brought them in.
I mean, basically, you sent out a tweet.
You said, how can I help?
Next thing you know, all these tech people show up.
We've talked about this a little bit once or twice before.
But, you know, there's always the fear from the original Floridians.
And people don't realize it's not just that you're pushing out 50,000 high paying jobs, right?
It's the signaling effect.
What are you telling your own residents that you're taxing to death?
Things aren't going to get better.
We don't want you here.
Get out of here because we don't value people who achieve the American dream.
California, F Elon Musk.
Elon says, message received.
I'm out of here.
Same thing.
You're not only losing the world's richest person, frankly, you're losing something much worse than that.
You're losing the jobs from those companies.
Again, signaling effect.
We don't want to hear if you're successful, which to me is an anti-American sentiment.
When somebody says, hey, what if we move Silicon Valley to Miami?
And I respond, how can I help?
What am I saying?
I love this country.
I'm saying, I want you to be successful.
I'm saying, I want my residents to be successful.
And I think what happens is the media feeds our residents one thing and one thing only.
Government is here to help you on the expense side.
We're here to give you housing, we're here to give you transportation.
And I unlocked something that I thought was counterintuitive and by the way, the press sometimes
give me a hard time about it, which is I wanna help you fish, not just give you a fish.
I want to teach you how to fish.
I want you to be empowered.
I want all my residents to get the best paying jobs, to be able to provide for their families so that they don't need an affordable house, affordable housing, apartment, that they can buy whatever apartment they want, that their kids can go to good schools.
I want my people to be successful.
And I think, I don't know why that's controversial at times.
You know, I get criticized because it's like, oh, but you don't care about it.
No, I do.
I've spent 12 years of my life building affordable housing and mass transit.
Free, you know, trolley systems in our city.
Now, I want people to be successful.
And I spend a lot of my time and energy on that.
You know, in terms of some people who find it harder for them.
You know, my heart goes out to them because obviously you want everybody to be successful and you want people to embrace the competitive scenario that we're in.
But it reminds me a little bit of… I don't know if you ever saw the movie Primary Colors?
Anyways… I know it's the Hillary… Yeah, there's a scene where the Clinton character, John Travolta, actually says, you know, I'm going to do something very outrageous.
But anyways, and what he says is he's telling a union organization that the jobs that left that factory are never coming back, but that what he said was that he's going to teach them to exercise a different set of muscles, the one between their ears, right?
And I think as our economy becomes more digital, unfortunately the economy that we're going to be living in is going to be more experiential, content-based.
So you've got more inflation, so you've got dysfunctional foreign policy, disastrous retreat in Afghanistan, conventional war in Ukraine, which obviously this administration wasn't able to avoid.
This oil situation in the entire world, right, where you have oil prices that are dependent on foreign producers, the dependency of Europe on Russia.
You've got South America going socialist more and more, and the U.S.
having no coherent policy on that.
You know, we have systematically ignored Cuba's role as the head of the snake in exporting its only commodity, which is communism, and doing it very effectively because they were trained by the Russians in the 1970s.
And, you know, there's supply chain issues.
I mean, they have really not confronted successfully, in my opinion, any of the macro issues that are generational in nature that are going to set up this country for success.
Yeah, look, I mean, we're a city of immigrants, right?
Mostly legal immigrants, frankly, because, you know, Cubans had a favorable immigration policy called, you know, wet foot, dry foot and what preceded it.
So you were able to get asylum, essentially, automatically.
I just don't think we're having a very coherent conversation about it, you know, on both sides, right?
I think when you look at a city like Miami, we have 1.4% unemployment.
That's awesome until you want to start a small business and then you can't find employees.
Right?
So the beauty of us, of America versus China, for example, is we both have declining birth
rates and the difference is nobody wants to go to China.
Everybody wants to come here.
So I think that's an opportunity if we have a conversation that benefits the US, right,
as opposed to just a border conversation, right?
And I think that's where I hope the future of this conversation goes, because this is an unresolved issue that is not—it reminds me of World War I trench warfare.
Everybody's sort of in their side, just gonna poke up, they get back in,
and then in a year they maybe move four inches, right?
It's a Federal Government Immigration Customs Enforcement issue as to whether or not, how they detain people and what they do with them once they're detained.
So we don't have a role in that.
We don't get in their way either.
We sort of let them do their job.
And support them if and when necessary.
But, you know, again, part of what makes us special is our diversity, right?
And our inclusion in terms of a variety of different people that come from a variety of different backgrounds.
And it makes us who we are.
So, I also think for the Republican Party, I think this is important, Hispanics are trending Republican, right?
And I think, why is that happening in part?
Because Democrats don't know how to speak to them.
They either call them Latinx, which does not resonate when you go macro.
And then when you go nuanced, you call them a San Antonio taco.
So they don't get the macro branding.
They don't get the nuanced branding.
And I think this is an awesome opportunity for Republicans to say, hey, we respect you.
We know you want to be Americans.
We know you're law abiding.
We know that you believe in family and you want to, you know, you believe in the family unit as a means of trying to get people to be successful and education.
These are all of the things that Republicans always talk about, right?
So, you know, there's a great opportunity there to lean into that and not be worried that if, you know, something happens on the immigration front, it's going to be damaging to Republicans.
Let me ask you one that I saw... Oh wait, look what's happening on the southern Texas border in congressional races.
No, it's incredible what's going on.
It's incredible Republican women that are going to hopefully sweep three congressional races, including one that I think they hadn't held for 150 years or something.
Well, first of all, I think... People that like you generally, that live in this I'll tell you this, let's see how I put this sort of a little bit delicately, right?
There's a lot of jockeying going on right now and there's a lot of surrogates that are doing a lot of things to try to build people up and tear people down, kill them in the crib type of thing.
There's a lot of that happening with me as my profile gets bigger, as I get talked about in more prominent circles.
It's more like, hey, let's try to brand him as a certain thing, right?
And there's a lot of that happening with me.
You know, gun buyback is something that the city's been doing forever, right?
And it's not about, you know, being pro-gun or anti-gun.
I'm fervently pro-Second Amendment, I'm a gun owner, and incredibly pro-police.
I think really more, it's more for, you know, what happens oftentimes is like a widow.
Right?
Whose husband passes, and the husband was an avid gun collector, and they have 20, 30 guns at home, and they're afraid that if somebody breaks in, they're going to steal the guns and kill them or hurt somebody else, so they just don't feel safe with the guns at home, and they prefer to sell it.
You know, oftentimes our elderly people who are living on fixed income, right, and they get, you know, we have like, what do you call it, coupons that we give them or, you know, I forget what they're called.
sort of a gift cards that we give them, right?
And so we'll give them gift cards to Publix or gift cards to Target or whatever.
And they'd rather have $1,500 in gift cards to Target than 20 guns that they don't know what they're doing with,
right, in their own home.
So that's the prototypical scenario.
So it's not like we want to take guns off the street in that sense, or we want people not to,
it's completely voluntary, right?
So people want to do it, they do it.
If they don't want to do it, they don't have to do it.
So, that's the other thing, is that, you know, in this conversation about gun violence, you know, people, it's such a myopic conversation, right?
We don't talk about the fact that in Miami, for example, we were ranked the happiest city in America, the healthiest city in America, with 1.4% unemployment and increasing funding for police departments.
So it turns out, if you have more police officers, happy people, healthy people, and people that are working, guess what?