We spoke with San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan last April about his groundbreaking approach to municipal governance and the new directions he wants to take the Democratic Party. Now, he's running for governor of California, which makes this a good time to give this interview a second spin.

A Harvard grad who made his bones in the disruption-centered world of Silicon Valley tech startups, Mahan tells us he's put his focus on prioritizing results over ideology since becoming mayor of one of California’s biggest blue cites in 2023. 

Along the way, Mahan has been more than willing to touch progressive third rails. Take Prop 36, a 2024 CA ballot measure toughening sentences for drug and theft crimes. Openly bucking Gavin Newsom and the Democratic establishment, Mahan went all in advocating for Prop 36. Fed up Cali voters backed it too, passing it by more than two to one. 

He hasn’t stopped there. Mahan’s call for “a revolution of common sense” has led to breaks with public sector unions over pay raises and linking pay to performance, to prioritizing shelter over housing, and – most recently – to his controversial proposal to arrest homeless people who repeatedly refuse offers of shelter. So far, it’s working at the ballot box: Mahan was re-elected last year in a cakewalk, with 87 percent of the vote.

So we decided to go deep with one of the nation’s more unique blue city mayors. “Historically, cities have been engines of economic opportunity and upward mobility, and I think that's where we're struggling most,” Mahan told us in explaining his motives for broadly rethinking blue city governance. 

Is Mahan a role model or a pariah? Listen to what he has to say and decide for yourself.  

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

About Blue City Blues 

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.  

 America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.

But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. 

The Blue City Blues podcast aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? 

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

While David is away, we are reposting some early days Blue City Blues episodes that many of our more recent listeners may have missed. We thought this one, with author and cultural critic Freddie DeBoer, was a great conversation on a topic that remains timely. We'll be back with fresh episodes shortly:

Freddie DeBoer knows a thing or two about mental illness. He’s been admitted into psychiatric hospitals five times; he was involuntarily committed in 2002. He has, as they say, lived experience. 

Freddie is also one of our most original and independent commentators on American cultural trends. A self-described Marxist and a cogent critic of recent ideological turns within blue city progressive culture, he has written extensively, with clarity and passion and urgency, about why the idea of involuntary commitment of the severely mentally ill has long been a third rail in progressive blue city politics, and why that needs to change. 

We asked Freddie on to make his case for reforming our laws and procedures, and also our attitudes, about how to address the problem of the mentally ill suffering on blue city streets. And to discuss why the disability rights community has gotten this issue so wrong.  

"If the left does not have a vision for how to solve these problems, then the people will elect strong men who will come in and do it in a worse way," he told us.  

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Outside References: 

Freddie DeBoer, "Psychotic Disorders Do Not Respect Autonomy, Independence, Agency or Freedom," Substack (Freddie DeBoer), May 24, 2023

Freddie DeBoer, "The Case for Forcing the Mentally Ill into Treatment," New York, June 20, 2024

Freddie DeBoer, "'Well I Don't Know About This Involuntary treatment Business!' He Said, Stepping into the Safety of a Closed Tab," Substack (Freddie DeBoer), July 3, 2024

Freddie DeBoer, "You Call that Compassion?" Substack (Freddie DeBoer), Aug. 5, 2024

Freddie DeBoer, "What Is Freedom for the Mentally Ill?" City Journal, Dec. 2, 2024

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

In 1955, three men in the bohemian enclave of Greenwich Village got together to form what they thought would be a local community newspaper. But the Village Voice would soon morph into the voice of New York City’s political outsiders and cultural dissidents, as it became the progenitor of a new kind of journalistic outlet – the alternative newsweekly – and a new genre of engaged, inside out journalism that rejected the antiseptic detachment of traditional post-war newspapers. The model pioneered by the Voice spread rapidly across the country, and alt weeklies became a ubiquitous fixture in the media landscapes of large American cities in the second half of the 20th century. 

Tricia Romano, our guest on this BCB episode, spent eight years as a writer and columnist for the Village Voice in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s. She is the author of The Freaks Came Out to Write, a sweeping, magisterial oral history of the original, and most storied, of the alts. Over its 88 chapters and 572 pages, Romano’s definitive account weaves together more than 200 interviews to tell the inside story of the paper that radically remade a large corner of the American journalism world in its own image. 

With David away, Sandeep and Tricia discuss the epic factional ideological battles and the soap operatic personality clashes between legendary writers – Hentoff, Christgau, Gornick, Musto, Crouch, Brownmiller, Whitehead and so many others – that shaped the Voice’s quarrelsome and often overwrought internal office politics. But we also explore how the Voice became not just the chronicler, but the nurturer and the advocate, of a series of once fringe subcultures and artistic movements that fundamentally changed not just New York City but blue city cosmopolitanism more broadly. Experimental theater, radical feminism, hippie bohemianism, avant garde film, gay liberation, hip hop, all were catapulted from the social fringes to the city’s cultural mainstream by the early and loving attention of the Voice, Romano says. 

We dive into the series of colorful owners -- including Rupert Murdoch, the founder of Fox News -- and editors who shaped the paper in its heyday  and discuss how the Voice lost its distinctiveness in the ‘90s as once stodgy mainstream papers like the New York Times aped its concerns and poached its writers, and once the rise of the internet stole away its classified ads cash cow. And finally we lament how it finally began to unravel into its current hollowed out husk when the owners of the New Times chain of weeklies bought the Voice in 2005 and rapidly stripped it of its countercultural cool. We close by talking about how the latter day fracturing and fragmentation of our online subcultures cries out for a cohering voice of the sort that alt newspapers like the Voice once provided.

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

Outside sources:

Tricia Romano, The Freaks Came Out to Write: The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper that Changed American Culture (2024). 

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

The pervasiveness of untreated mental illness on the streets of blue cities – about 20 percent of the homeless population in the United States is severely mentally ill – is a glaring feature of the urban landscape. So we invited sociologist Neil Gong, the author of an eye-opening book, Sons, Daughters and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles, to join us on this latest BCB episode to talk about his observations of how class dynamics drive radically different social expectations of how to address this problem.

Gong spent years observing public outreach and treatment efforts directed at the mentally ill in Los Angeles, first with the homeless on the gritty streets of Skid Row, and then in the city's tony private pay clinics where wealthy families sent their mentally ill relatives. His book insightfully unpacks the complicated – and often counterintuitive – ways that social inequality shapes not only how we address, but also how we think about, mental illness in urban America. 

We dig in with Gong on the “two different worlds” that exist in LA for handling mental illness. The public system for the homeless focuses on what Gong terms “tolerant containment.” This is the effort, born of civil libertarian ideas about the personal autonomy of the mentally ill combined with a woeful lack of public resources, to accept the problematic behaviors of the mentally ill so long as they remain out of public view in subsidized apartments or flophouses. But Neil contrasts that with the “concerted constraint” work of private clinics that, driven by the concerns of the patients’ families and loved ones, limit the freedoms of their clients as they intensively work to make them as high functioning as possible. 

In the latter part of the conversation we talk about what we should be doing to improve our response to mental illness in American cities. Gong argues we don't need new approaches, but rather greater investment in a more balanced system that combines a variety of approaches, from sober housing to intensive residential programs to in patient hospitalization capacity that compliments the existing, clearly inadequate, post-deinstitutionalization community care system.

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

Outside sources:

Neil Gong, Sons, Daughters, and Sidewalk Psychotics: Mental Illness and Homelessness in Los Angeles (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

About Blue City Blues: 

Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer. America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.
But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, as rising tribalism and growing polarization constrained discourse and reinforced cosmopolitan progressive groupthink among educated urban elites. Blue City Blues aims get beyond that conventional wisdom in offering a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them? Through conversations with a diverse array of smart thinkers and expert guests, we're committed to expanding the horizons of dialogue about the challenges blue cities face. 

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

We invited writer Sherman Alexie on to weigh in on recent cultural trends in blue cities. 

 Alexie has long been recognized as one of the country’s most talented, interesting – and funny – literary figures. The author of two dozen books, including The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), which won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, along with many short stories, essays and poems, Sherman has spent his life, and much of his writing, negotiating the boundaries between vastly different cultural communities: after growing up on the Spokane Indian Reservation, the child of alcoholic parents, he went on to become an “urban Indian” in cosmopolitan Seattle as his highly lauded body of work catapulted him into the rarefied ranks of the  literary elite. 

Much of Alexie’s recent writing has been on Substack, where he has a large and devoted following. That work touches, in layered and nuanced ways, on the beliefs and the failings of blue city urban cultural, intellectual and activist elites. Alexie, sometimes subtly and obliquely and sometimes more directly, questions the assumptions of the self-righteous, puncturing the sense of certitude and moral perfection that has gripped much of the educated left. 

In our conversation, Alexie tells us why, drawing on a terrifying youthful encounter with a budding murderer-in-training on the reservation, he felt compelled to question the abolitionist pieties of Ivy League academics, why he now has a complicated relationship with leftist politics, and why he describes himself as “artistically a libertarian” and has come to believe that “every writer is an individual who owes loyalty to nobody.”

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

About Blue City Blues: 

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.  
 America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.
But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. 
Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

This week we take a close look at the damning decline in the quality of public education in progressive cities where, as Sandeep puts it, the "glaring contradiction" between a fixation on equity and shockingly inequitable results "drives me bat shit crazy." Our guest, Kelsey Piper, formerly at Vox and now a staff writer with The Argument, doesn't pull any punches either, arguing that "illiteracy is a policy choice.” 

In a series of cogently argued recent pieces (links below), Piper has provided yeoman service in jump starting a debate, largely dormant during the years of the Great Awokening, among left-of-center commentators about the declining quality of public education in blue jurisdictions. Her work details how Mississippi went from dead last to near the top of the nation in fourth-grade reading scores – demonstrating particular success with poor and minority children – via a combination of mandated phonics-based curriculum, teacher training, and accountability measures, including the controversial rule that holds back third-grade students who fail to demonstrate basic reading proficiency. 

Rather than joining her call to follow Mississippi’s lead, some prominent thought leaders on the left have instead worked overtime to try to discredit the success that Mississippi (and several other Southern states) has achieved. But Piper’s defense of the underlying data supporting “the Southern surge” in test scores is convincing. 

Beyond the Mississippi Miracle, we go deep with Piper on other misguided pedagogical trends that have emerged out of progressive education circles, like the move away from tracking and the push to eliminate gifted and talented programs, as well as rampant grade inflation and the lowering of standards in the name of equity. And we delve into the history of education reform in recent decades, and why the accountability ideas that were ascendant in the Clinton, Bush and Obama years have fallen into such disrepute on the left.

Drawing on a shocking recent UC San Diego report acknowledging a massive surge in admitted students requiring remedial math instruction despite boasting stellar high school transcripts with A’s in higher level math classes, Piper explains how a cynical focus on credentials over competence — giving kids a passing grade instead of making sure they reach basic competency — is a catastrophic mistake that only delays accountability, putting students at a profound disadvantage in the real world. 

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

Outside references:

Kelsey Piper, “Illiteracy Is a Policy Choice: Why Aren’t We Gathering Behind Mississippi's Banner?” The Argument, Sept. 25, 2025

Karen Vaites and Kelsey Piper, “Is Mississippi Cooking the Books? No, the Skeptics Are Wrong. The Southern Surge Is Real,” The Argument, Oct. 7, 2025

Kelsey Piper, “Education Isn’t a Zero-Sum Game: The Strange Equity Crusade Against Algebra,” The Argument, Nov. 3, 2025

Kelsey Piper, “When Grades Stop Meaning Anything: The UC San Diego Math Scandal Is a Warning,” The Argument, Nov. 18, 2025

And ICYMI, previously on BCB: "Whitney Tilson on Why Kids in Blue City School Districts Are Being Left Behind," Oct, 9, 2025

About Blue City Blues: 

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.  
 Ame

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

In November 2024, fed up San Francisco voters elected an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune the city's 46th mayor. Daniel Lurie, a moderate Democrat and a newcomer to City Hall politics who largely self-funded his own outsider campaign, ran on the promise of fundamental change, reversing course away from the permissive - and often performative - radical chic progressivism of the peak woke era. For a city reeling from spiking crime and street disorder, he won by offering a return to what he calls "common sense" policies that involve getting tougher on encampments, crime, and public drug use, while beefing up policing and speeding construction of new housing. 

Now Mayor Lurie is approaching the first anniversary of his tenure in office, and we want to know: how well is he delivering on his promises, and has life in San Francisco improved as a result? For answers we turn to San Francisco Chronicle editorial columnist Emily Hoeven, a relatively recent transplant to the city whose sharply drawn and impactful writing about San Francisco issues - and in particular about the failures and foibles of municipal governance - has quickly established her one as of the most prominent journalistic voices in the city. 

Hoeven tells us that there are good reasons for Lurie's broad popularity (recent polling has his approval rating north of 70 percent). The mayor's relentless cheerleading for a San Francisco comeback, particularly through his prolific and much viewed output of Instagram videos that lean in to his "earnest dad vibes," has changed how San Franciscans are feeling about their city, Hoeven tells us. And tangible signs of progress are readily visible: crime has significantly dropped, new businesses are opening and some big new housing developments are coming on line. "Overall, I do think the city is in a good place, and hopefully we'll continue heading in that direction," Hoeven says.

But she also emphasizes that significant challenges remain, and as the mayor's honeymoon with the public fades "it's probably only going to get harder" for Lurie to maintain the city's positive momentum. This is San Francisco, after all. Untreated addiction and serious mental illness remain a problem on the streets of the city, city government faces budget and labor challenges, and the city's notoriously fractious politics may be poised for a comeback. "The realities are going to become more real," as Hoeven puts it. 

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

Outside references:

Emily Hoeven, "S.F.’s giant naked woman sculpture brought out the worst in our city," San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 2025

Emily Hoeven, "People are ‘obsessed’ with Daniel Lurie’s Instagram. But will it actually help S.F.?" San Francisco Chronicle, May 28, 2025

Correction: The first version of the audio for this episode misidentified the artist who created "Father and Son" for Seattle's Olympic Sculpture park. The artist is Louise Bourgeois. We have removed the reference in the audio to avoid misinforming listeners. 

About Blue City Blues: 

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.  
 America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.
But as blue cities went their own way, as th

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

Wards of the State: The Long Shadow of American Foster Care was a National Book Award finalist. Author Claudia Rowe exposes the chilling truth: the nation's foster care system is a "major gear" driving mass homelessness and the incarceration crisis in American cities.  She shares shocking statistics—including studies that found up to 59% of youth who grew up in foster care have been incarcerated by age 26—and outlines how the system's structural failures lead to such devastating outcomes. Rowe joins us to share the story of this broken system through the eyes of the former foster care kids who lived it, and she argues for a fundamental transformation grounded in modern brain science.

Our editor is Quinn Waller.

About Blue City Blues: 

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.  
 America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.
But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. 
Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

This Thanksgiving week, Blue City Blues sits down with former traffic engineer and urban planner Ray Delahanty, better known as “CityNerd” on YouTube. We get into the essential question: “what makes a great city?” Ray also shares his insights on the concept of "affordable urbanism" and gives us his honest assessment of one of modern transportation's most divisive projects, the "Vegas Loop."

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

About Blue City Blues: 

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.  
 America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.
But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversation about those problems stagnated, relegated to the narrowly provincial local section of regional newspapers or local NPR programming. 
Blue City Blues aims to pick up where Savage’s Urban Archipelago idea left off, with a national perspective on the present and the future of urban America. We will consider blue cities as a collective whole. What unites them? What troubles them? What defines them?

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]

One of Seattle's most insightful chroniclers, longtime Seattle Times metro columnist Danny Westneat, joins us in this episode to discuss the blues that have settled on one of the country's bluest (and most educated and affluent) cities. For more than a decade now, Westneat wrote in a recent post-election column, both Seattle city hall and the voting public have seemed torn between the agendas of the city's two competing political camps: on any objective scale Seattle's left and center left may not be that far apart ideologically, but subjectively in the city they feel -- and act -- as if they are diametric opposites. 

The result, Danny says, has been an extended period of discord and paralysis within Seattle's municipal governance, as voters yo-yo between the two poles, making it close to impossible for elected officials on either side of the divide to fully enact their agenda while briefly in the ascendency. In the elections two years ago, moderates swept out the left at City Hall, but this year the pedulum is swinging hard in the opposite direction. "This failure to choose has become a core part of Seattle’s identity," Westneat writes. "It’s why the city feels sort of 'stuck' much of the time. Directionless."

In out conversation, we discuss the city's struggles to come to grips with rampant street level fentanyl and meth addiction and the terrible toll it is taking on affected neighborhoods, and the equally deep divide over how to address the homeless encampments that have become a seemingly permanent feature of Seattle's streetscape. Danny relates the story of a homeless man in his neighborhood who ended up dying in a bus shelter as the local community could not come to agreement about how best to help him, suggesting that failure is emblematic of the Seattle public's conflicted psychology. 

We also delve into the city's sharply contested mayoral race -- the outcome of which, at the time of our taping, hung on a razor's edge -- and discuss our impressions of Katie Wilson, the progressive activist (and self-proclaimed socialist) challenger to incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell. And we assess whether we think (if she emerges victorious) she might be able to break the political logjam and address the city's seemingly intractable street-level problems, mostly born of what Westneat has termed the "prosperity bomb" that exploded over the city over the last decade.

Our editor is Quinn Waller. 

Outside references:

Danny Westneat, "Seattle shows it's a fickle city," Seattle Times, Nov. 8, 2025.

Danny Westneat, "After a homeless man;'s death, a Seattle neighborhood confronts the limits of helping," Seattle Times, Nov. 22, 2023.

About Blue City Blues: 

Twenty years ago, Dan Savage encouraged progressives to move to blue cities to escape the reactionary politics of red places. And he got his wish. Over the last two decades, rural places have gotten redder and urban areas much bluer.  
 America’s bluest cities developed their own distinctive culture, politics and governance. They became the leading edge of a cultural transformation that reshaped progressivism, redefined urbanism and remade the Democratic Party.
But as blue cities went their own way, as they thrived as economically and culturally vibrant trend-setters, these urban cosmopolitan islands also developed their own distinctive set of problems. Inequality soared, and affordability tanked. And the conversatio

Please send your feedback, guest and show ideas to [email protected]