"On Monday morning, Santa Clara looked like a town waking up after a very expensive house party. The barricades were coming down around Levi's Stadium. The rental cars were streaming back toward the airport. Hotel staff flipped rooms at record speed. By lunchtime, the Super Bowl had already begun to recede into memory - another successful weekend, another headline about economic impact, another notch in the region's belt proving it can host the world. And then there was everything else."
"We just demonstrated - again - that when we decide something matters, we can mobilize staggering resources with ease. Hundreds of millions of dollars in spending. Tens of thousands of visitors. Seamless coordination between cities, law enforcement, businesses, transit agencies and private sponsors. All for a single weekend. All for a game. This isn't an argument against football. It's an argument against the myth we tell ourselves about homelessness."
Santa Clara marshaled massive resources for the Super Bowl: barricades, airport-bound rental cars, rapid hotel room turnovers, and seamless coordination across agencies and sponsors. Meanwhile, tents, encampments, and families sheltering in vehicles remained in place along Coyote Creek, highlighting persistent homelessness. The contrast reveals that large-scale coordination and funding are possible when prioritized. Preventing and ending homelessness requires consistent investment, coordination, and political will to treat housing stability as infrastructure rather than charity. Current spending focuses on reactive crisis management — emergency services and sanitation — which costs more over time than upstream prevention.
Read at San Jose Spotlight
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