Samuel Theodore Liccardo (born April 16, 1970) is an American attorney and politician currently serving as the U.S. representative from California's 16th congressional district. Previously, he served as the 65th mayor of San Jose from 2015 to 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, Liccardo was elected mayor in November 2014. He was reelected in 2018 with 75.8% of the vote. As the leader of the California Big City Mayors Coalition, Liccardo advocated on statewide issues including homelessness and COVID-19 response.
Early life and education Sam Liccardo was one of five children of Salvador and Laura (née Aceves) Liccardo. He was named for his paternal grandfather, who owned and operated a neighborhood grocery store in downtown San Jose, the Notre Dame Market. Liccardo is of Sicilian and Irish descent, and also of Mexican Californio ancestry, tracing his ancestors to the early Californio inhabitants of the Bay Area and to more recent Mexican immigrants who worked in the Almaden mines.
Liccardo grew up in Saratoga, California, and graduated from Bellarmine College Preparatory in 1987. Liccardo received a bachelor's degree in government from Georgetown University, where he graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. He later earned his Juris Doctor and Master of Public Policy at Harvard Law School and Harvard Kennedy School. Prior to his election to public office in 2006 he served as a criminal prosecutor in the Santa Clara County District Attorney's office.
San Jose City Councilman In 2006, Liccardo ran for San Jose's District 3 Council seat. After placing first in an eight-candidate June primary with 43% percent of the vote, Liccardo went on to place first in the November runoff election, this time with 61.3%. In June 2010, he won his reelection to the City Council with 80.16% of the primary vote.
As councilman, Liccardo pushed for more affordable housing, championing an inclusionary zoning ordinance in 2008 that required developers to either build 15% of their units in any project to be affordable and rent-restricted, or to pay fees to finance affordable housing construction elsewhere. The statewide homebuilding industry vocally opposed the measure, and sued after its passage; subsequent litigation prevented its implementation until the California Supreme Court eventually sided with the City of San Jose in 2015. Liccardo also advocated for more high-rise housing in San José's downtown, including the construction of the $135 million, 23-story high rise at One South Market.
Mayor of San Jose 2014 election In 2014, Liccardo ran for Mayor of San Jose to succeed termed-out Mayor Chuck Reed. He placed second to County Supervisor Dave Cortese in a five-candidate June primary with 25.7% of the vote, but placed first in the November runoff with 50.8% of the vote. The contentious run-off election focused on the city's chronic budgetary challenges, as well as Liccardo's support for pension reforms led by Mayor Reed that had City employee unions and their allies heavily supporting Cortese. Liccardo's financial support emanated primarily from the tech business community, but he also had support of several environmental organizations.
Pension reform
In the decade prior to his election as mayor, San Jose saw retiree pension and health care contributions nearly quadruple as a result of retroactive benefit increases, poor market returns, and rapidly rising unfunded liabilities. In order to offset rising retirement contributions, the city council enacted steep budget cuts, cutting the payroll by more than one thousand employees. As a consequence, San Jose became the major U.S. city with the most thinly-staffed city hall and ranked 49th out of the largest 50 U.S. cities in police staffing as of 2020.
In his first year in office, he helped guide negotiations on an agreement with all 11 of city's employee unions that closed the retiree healthcare plan to new employees, predicted to save the city $3 billion in employee retirement costs over the course of three decades. In the 2016 elections, voters approved the agreement by passing Measure F with more than 61% of the vote. This measure supplanted a more contentious pension reform plan, which has faced a series of legal challenges since its 2012 passage. By 2022, San Jose's budget director reported that pension and retiree healthcare obligations had begun declining, enabling projections for balanced budgets for the following five years.
Transportation
As Mayor, Liccardo has pushed for transit, cycling, and other alternatives to the automobile in San Jose, a city that grew rapidly in an auto-dominated, suburban model in the 1950s and 60s. Both during his time as City Councilmember and mayor, Liccardo served as a board member of the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA) (which he chaired twice) and Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), advocating for the creation of a bikeshare program, expansion of Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) to San Jose, and for the launch of the region's first bus-rapid-transit line, all of which began operations during his mayoral tenure. Liccardo was a leading advocate and fundraiser for several ballot measures to fund transit improvements that most notably included funding for the extension of BART to Downtown San Jose, most recently for the $6.3 billion VTA Measure B in 2016, and Regional Measure 3 in 2018. Measure B's passage by more than 70% of the voters did not settle the matter, as lawsuits and controversy ensued from some who opposed the tax as well as specific projects in the measure, but the lawsuit has since been resolved.
Liccardo was also instrumental in forging a consensus among Bay Area regional leaders to support putting Measure RR on the ballot, the passage of which in November 2020 will help preserve and expand Caltrain transit service, connecting San Jose and Santa Clara County with San Francisco. Liccardo has been a strong advocate of bringing High Speed Rail to Silicon Valley and the Bay Area, and has worked to secure regional dollars to pay for a share of that construction of that line, which has already commenced in the segment running through California's Central Valley. Liccardo has also urged more innovative approaches to supplant the region's plodding, poorly performing light rail, such as autonomous, electric bus rapid-transit.
As a cyclist, Liccardo long advocated for physically separated bike lanes, and under his tenure, a "Better Bikeways" network of bike lanes separated from vehicular traffic by buffers and low-cost bollards has emerged throughout the Downtown, and increasingly in surrounding neighborhoods.
"Smart City Vision"
In March 2016, Liccardo unveiled a "Smart City Vision", with the expressed goal to make San José the "most innovative city in America by 2020." Liccardo hired Shireen Santosham to be his Chief Innovation Officer and lead the newly created Mayor's Office of Technology and Innovation (MOTI). The Smart City Vision received unanimous approval from the City Council in March, and in June 2016 the city created an Office of Civic Innovation to meet its goals. Since then, Liccardo formed a partnership with Facebook to deploy the company's wireless, high-speed internet technology called "Terragraph" in downtown San José, and the City of San José launched a project to bring free wireless internet to two schools in San José's East Side Union High School District.
In 2019, Liccardo launched the San José Digital Inclusion Fund, a $24 million initiative to bridge the digital divide in San Jose by extending broadband, distributing devices, and improving digital skills among tens of thousands of low-income families. The pandemic accelerated the city's efforts, resulting in distribution of free hotspots to 15,800 children by October 2020, with another 50,000 residents receiving broadband service through the city's Wi-Fi partnership with the East Side Union High School District. After Council approved funding in late 2020, Liccardo announced the city's progress of reaching 100,000 residents, along with plan to connect 300,000 East San Jose residents—the population of a city the size of Pittsburgh or St. Louis—by full build-out in 2022.
Other partnerships emerged through the city's innovation work under Liccardo's lead. For example, San José became the first city to launch a "Cash for Trash" program, in partnership with Mastercard, to enable homeless residents to earn and safely keep money in exchange for cleaning the city's streets, neighborhoods, and creeks. Mastercard's CityKey technology enabled unhoused to safely keep cash, while preventing purchases in such businesses as liquor stores, and could be used to facilitate the provision of health and other services.
Airbnb and San Jose partnered on several housing-related initiatives that leveraged innovative uses of the AirBnB platform in San José as a pilot city. The "Open Homes" program help victims of natural disaster find emergency housing with an AirBnB host without cost, and since its launch in San José, now serves cities globally. Another San Jose and AirBnB partnership with the nonprofit Bill Wilson Center and San José State University provides AirBnB sponsor homes for unhoused college students for extended durations.
Recognizing San Jose's success in its digital inclusion efforts, as well as their use of data, analytics, and technology in such initiatives as improving emergency medical response, identifying high-risk traffic crash corridors, and responding to vulnerable residents during the pandemic, Government Technology ranked San José No. 1 among large U.S. cities in its Digital Cities Survey in 2020.
In 2022, Liccardo appointed Clay Garner to lead the Mayor's Office of Technology and Innovation.
Housing crisis
Throughout Liccardo's tenure, many San Jose residents suffered under very high rent burdens attributable in part to California's housing shortage. To boost housing supply, Liccardo led efforts to reduce fees on construction of granny units and Downtown high-rises, increase housing densities—including such innovative approaches such as "coliving—near transit, and streamline approvals of "backyard homes," also known as alternate dwelling units.
Liccardo has also pushed for more public resources for affordable housing, building on his work on inclusionary housing as a councilmember. In 2018, he led a coalition of affordable housing advocates to propose Measure V, a $450 million housing bond measure which secured 64% of the vote, but still narrowly failed due to California's 2/3 threshold for passage of bond measures. Liccardo vowed to push to find a successful alternative, and in 2019, he partnered with SiliconValley@Home and other affordable housing organizations to put Measure E—a supplemental transfer tax on properties sold for $2 million or more—on the March 2020 ballot. The measure passed with 53% support, and will generate up to an estimated $70 million annually for affordable housing and homeless response.
San Jose's efforts to house its 6,000 homeless residents have been hindered by the extremely high costs of housing construction in the region. In response, Liccardo pushed to find more innovative, cost-effective ways to house the homeless, including the use of prefabricated and modular construction, construction of "tiny homes," and the rehabilitation of deteriorating motels. With the non-profit Destination:Home, he also pushed to find collaborative approaches with landlords to take more homeless veterans as tenants; on Veteran's Day in 2015, he and Santa Clara County Supervisor Dave Cortese launched the "All the Way Home" campaign with Destination:Home. One year after launching the program, the group announced it had found homes for more than 500 homeless veterans, and had housed 1,940 by 2020.