Candidate for 16th Congressional District
Sam Liccardo is running for Congress to focus Washington on the big issues like homelessness, crime, and the punishing cost of living. As Mayor of San José, Liccardo’s innovative efforts to confront homelessness include pioneering the conversion of motels to housing. He piloted the development of quick-build prefabricated housing communities that were constructed at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional apartments. Liccardo also launched a successful program that employs unhoused residents cleaning the city in exchange for housing and pay.
When Liccardo came into office in 2015, San José’s police department had lost several hundred officers. Liccardo helped rebuild the department through the passage of two ballot measures that added more than 200 officers in four years, and by expanding a program for unarmed staff to respond to routine calls for service. By the year he left office, San José had the lowest homicide rate of any major U.S. city.
Liccardo led a regional effort to boost the minimum wage, making San José’s wage among the very highest in the nation. To protect consumers, he has taken on PG&E’s massive rate hikes and fought against wasteful spending at the local water utility district. He emphasized investments in preparing San José’s next generation for the jobs of the future helping more than 5,000 East San José teens obtain their first jobs, expanding after-school and summer learning for children living in San José’s least affluent neighborhoods, employing hundreds of low-income young adults to respond to impacts of the pandemic and climate change, and providing coding classes to thousands of youths through the libraries.
In his two terms, San José enjoyed the greatest expansion of tech growth in its history, with new or expanded campuses of leading employers such as Google, Adobe, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Zoom. He pushed for solutions to reduce barriers to job growth and transit-oriented housing development. Liccardo led the California Big City Mayors coalition for two years, spearheading efforts by cities to secure unprecedented statewide funding for more rapid homelessness and pandemic response.
Prior to his service in elected office, Liccardo prosecuted felony crimes of sexual assault and child exploitation in the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s Office, and served as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of California. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School, Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and Georgetown University. He and his wife, Jessica García-Kohl, live in San José.