The Formula for Building America's Happiest City: Miami Mayor Francis Suarez | All-In Live

The 43rd mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez has served 2 terms since 2017, and his tenure is going to end in September because he’s term-limited. Although I hear these days that’s flexible. Please welcome Francis Suarez.

We’re ranked the happiest city in America and the healthiest city in America. The formula for success is simple: keep taxes low, keep people safe, and lean into innovation. How are things going in Miami? Obviously, we talked to you a couple of years ago when we had our first All-In Summit here, and you had a nonsense approach that you thought was going to work with the homeless challenges we were seeing. I think, candidly, we discussed that a large portion of the homeless problem in these major cities is an addiction problem, and giving a junkie a home doesn’t exactly get them off the street. It just doesn’t work. You were one of the first people to say that plainly. How are you dealing with it? Has it gotten worse? Is it an intractable problem? Take us through it.

With homelessness specifically, we are at an 11-year low. We do 2 censuses a year: 1 in January and 1 in the summer. Our January census had us at an 11-year low. We had 546 unsheltered homeless people in the entire city of Miami.

We have a couple thousand sheltered. I actually raise money on an annual basis at a mayor’s ball. I did my mayor’s ball last year, and this year I’ll be doing it on May 31 to end homelessness. We want to be the first major American city to have zero homeless people, and we think we can get there.

We call it functional zero, and frankly, the strategy is not that complicated. Obviously, there’s a macroeconomic strategy. We have the lowest unemployment in America and the highest median wage growth in America. I lowered taxes to the lowest level in history, and we’ve seen 140% growth in 9 years.

The economy is robust. We were ranked the happiest city in America and the healthiest city in America. Frankly, if you’re happy, healthy, and working, you’re probably not homeless. Then, of course, we’ve done innovative things in the homeless space. We’ve worked with charitable organizations that help people reunify with their families if they live in other parts of the country.

We also rent homes so that we can get around the building process and provide all the same wraparound services, but we sort of hack through that process.

Those 500 individuals who are categorized as homeless—how many of them are suffering from mental illness and/or self-medicating or addicted to drugs?

A very high percentage. I would say 80% plus. That’s anecdotal, but I’ve been out on the streets. I’ll be out there before my mayor’s ball on May 31. I’m actually going to spend a night out on the street. When you talk to them and engage with them, a vast majority of them are, unfortunately—

Let me double-click on that. This problem wasn’t as acute before the super-drugs: meth, the serious meth they’re making now, and fentanyl, right? This combination seems to be different, deadly, and super-addictive. We had people addicted to heroin, like Miles Davis and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who produced incredible art and were addicts for 30 years. They went in and out of it, but this drug is pernicious, different, deadly, and super-addicting. How much of the problem are those 2 drugs specifically, if you double-click on it?

A big part of the problem is heroin or opioids.

He’s asking for a friend, by the way.

Just not. I’m asking if you have a hookup. Clearly. No, but I’m being deadly serious, because we had these homeless individuals in New York back in the day, in the ’70s and ’80s. They were kind of like hobos and vagabonds, not seriously addicted, suffering where they’re folding over and curled up in a ball from fentanyl.

Well, to your point, meth and opioids are incredibly addictive, and they’re very hard to beat. Even people who are wealthy and get addicted to these drugs have a very hard time. The recidivism rate is very high.

You just had Antonio Gracias on here a minute ago, and he was talking about immigration and the border. One of the big problems with the border is the tens of thousands of people who die annually because of fentanyl that gets imported through China and across our border. There’s a tie-in between federal policy and local policy.

In 1980, during the cocaine era—a different drug—we had 220 homicides. You had drugs hurting people, but you also had the business of drugs very much hurting people. We started recording homicides in 1946 in Miami. In 1946, we had 32 homicides. From 1946 to today, the lowest number we ever had was 24. Last year, we had 27.

This year, we’re trending below 24, so we may have the safest year in the recorded history of Miami. In the 1980s, we had 220 homicides, and we’re now one of the safest big cities in America.

Can you connect those dots there? I think when people think about social policy, everybody confuses correlation and causation. You’ve been in the seat now for a long time, so you’ve seen what hasn’t worked, what has worked, and what maybe has been correlated. If you had to lay out the roadmap for other cities—and frankly, for other states and the rest of the country—what’s the roadmap? The Francis Suarez roadmap.

The formula for success is simple: keep taxes low, keep people safe, and lean into innovation.

Can we just double-click into those?

Of course. I can double-click on each one of them.

Let’s take the other side of these things, just to help the conversation. I believe in them, but let’s try to steelman the other side.

Keep taxes low. What people say, if you look at California and New York, is that we have a duty to invest in the social services and infrastructure to support everybody who isn’t necessarily as well-off or didn’t get the right side of luck, and we need to raise taxes in order to generate the revenues to fund that. My counterargument would be that government is not a good purveyor of those services. It’s not an efficient purveyor of those services.

I lowered taxes to the lowest level in history, and I took the city out of bankruptcy in 2009 as a councilman. I got it out of bankruptcy. We decided this was sort of the DOGE before DOGE. We decided not to raise taxes. We cut costs. We didn’t let anyone go, but we had tiered salary cuts, pension reform, and we balanced our budget. We had 10 years of prosperity.

That prosperity led to a tripling of the size of our government. We went from a $500 million government to a $1.5 billion government while lowering taxes, so we grew 200%. The resources that we had to dedicate to these things actually went up even though taxes went down.

When you have a place where there’s prosperity, where people are investing, and where people are employed, there obviously aren’t as many social problems. They’re not out there killing people or hurting people. In the 1980s, we were one of the murder capitals of America, and we’re now one of the safest big cities in America.

Then I think the “How can I help?” moment that you guys are all familiar with was this juxtaposition with what American cities were doing. Famously, New York competes for and wins the Amazon HQ2 prize, and then rejects it. In California, you had a legislator who said, “F— Elon Musk.”

Elena Gonzalez.

Exactly. He replied, “Message received,” and he left. Then she went to run a union, right? Is that where she ended up?

I think she went to work for a union. She’s the CEO of one of the big unions now.

The issue is what I tell people: it’s bad enough to kick out a trillion-dollar company from your city, or the richest person arguably in the world from your city, but think about the signal. The signal to me is much, much greater. The signal is, if you want to bring another headquarters or be another company.

We just got FC Barcelona 2 days ago. We announced that FC Barcelona moved its headquarters from New York to Miami. Every single day, we announce $900 million of loans in 2 projects—in 2 buildings—in the last 2 days. We have our stadium and our Inter Miami stadium. We have the FIFA World Cup headquarters for 2026 in the world.

This formula for success seems simple. Other cities are getting it completely backwards: their taxes are high, it’s not safe, and they’re not leaning into innovation. They’re rejecting innovation.

Are there downsides to growing this fast? Are there things that have to keep up that are harder to change, like building codes, housing density, and those sorts of cost-of-living things? Have you been able to drive reform there, or is that not where you wanted to be?

Ken Griffin was recently interviewed in a fireside chat like this and said, “I’d rather have the problems of success than the problems of failure.” There’s no doubt that there are problems that stem from success. Housing prices have gone up significantly. You had a tremendous amount of inflation in the last administration, and you couple that with hyper-demand here in Miami and get hyperinflation.

We do everything we can to leverage public dollars and public assets, like land, to try to build projects at a 15:1 or 20:1 leverage rate. For $100 million invested, we’ll get $2 billion worth of projects.

There’s a 5 million housing shortage across the country, and Miami has its fair share, just like any other major city. Traffic—I know none of you guys have experienced any bad traffic these last few days, right? I was in the car for 2 hours and 40 minutes going over to that. I’m not going to tell you how far along we are with the Boring Company in trying to find underground boring systems or with some of the eVTOL companies that we’re working with. But I do think that transportation generally has to turn the page from last generation’s archaic solutions to next-generation solutions.

How did you get that train? What do you call it, the Sunshine Line or something?

Brightline.

Yeah, the Brightline. How did you get that done so quickly? Everybody says it’s the greatest thing ever.

That’s a private-sector project that was done by a company. We had a piece of it. We did a piece with Tri-Rail to bring it into the station. When we did that piece, we made it free for inner-city residents to be able to use. It was something I was very proud of; it was part of my legacy.

So a private company built it, correct? You gave them the right of way.

They bought the right of way, so it was totally private.

So, look, we have micromobility options that are private, like scooters. All you did was not get in the way.

Exactly.

Shocking, by the way. What an idea.

Let me ask you: It’s like the hypocratic oath. Do no harm. Do no harm. How can mayors address this? They come into office with a reform motivation, and they’re elected on, “Hey, we don’t have what Miami has. We’ve got to fix this. We’ve got to get the city working again. We’ve got to attract business. We’ve got to attract growth.” And they inherit this regulatory morass, this massive infrastructure.

Like San Francisco recently, I got all caught up in the fact that you can’t put these phone booths in your office. A lot of startups—I don’t know if any of you guys have these phone booths—you’ve got to have someone go in and make a call. You put the phone booth in. All my startups, all the companies I’ve been involved in, you can’t put one in San Francisco.

These phone booths let you go in and make calls when everyone’s in an open-desk configuration but you need to make a private call. You hop in them. Everyone loads up their offices with these phone booths. In San Francisco, they’re illegal.

It turns out that there’s a piece of paper, which I was actually going to tweet because it’s insane. It’s like 3 pages long: all the things you need to know about the phone booths that you want to put in your office. You’ve got to get an architect review, an engineering review, and a design review. You’ve got to get sign-off from the engineer. You’ve got to submit the permitting fees. It gets reviewed by the city inspector’s office. You’ve got to design fire sprinklers that have to go into the phone booth.

That’s nuts. In case there’s a fire in the phone booth, someone needs to put out the fire in the phone booth. That’s hilarious.

I was talking to some folks about what you’re going to do about this, but the mayor’s kind of like, “I don’t know if there’s enough action that I can take because it’s in law that there’s all this regulatory stuff.” How do you advise mayors that are stuck with this sort of an environment? This is not just San Francisco. There are a lot of big cities in this country that have books and books of this stuff. We can talk about philosophically why this has happened, sociologically why this has happened—books and books of this stuff where the city can’t get out of the way. What do the mayors do when you guys get together? Is there any advice, or are we stuck? What’s the solution?

We’re not stuck. I think it’s cultural. At some level, you have to inculcate a culture where you empower your employees to innovate and to deconflict. When people come to me with a problem, I say, “Look, the first issue is, if there’s something blocking it that doesn’t make any sense, why don’t we just change it? We’re legislators. That’s what we do. We legislate, so we can fix it.”

Maybe it made sense 20 years ago; maybe it made sense 50 years ago. It doesn’t make sense today. Let’s just change it. I think regulation is the other side of the coin from innovation, right? Regulation is telling you what you oftentimes can’t do, or how to do something. Innovation is sort of first-principles thinking. We want to do this right. We want to make this work.

I think I always—not always, but regularly—fall on the side of innovation. And I think you, as a public official, frankly, who’s elected by the people, really are the one who has to push the bureaucrats, the bureaucratic class, right? The bureaucratic class gets very accustomed to saying no. They’re risk-averse. They’re not incentivized, oftentimes, right? There’s no incentive structure that says, “Hey, if you innovate, you’re going to get X or Y or Z.”

Then I think the third piece of it is artificial intelligence. I really feel that there’s a breakthrough that’s going to come, and it’s not just in transportation. We’re talking about eVTOLs and underground boring and all that, but I think in zoning codes and all that, it’s going to be computer to computer, right?

The codes are all straightforward, right? We have the same code for 15 years, right? Probably 97% or 98% of all known decisions have already been made under this code, right? So all they have to do is be replicated going forward, right? Unless the code changes, and then you just change the coding and make the decisions all over again.

It’s not that complicated. You should be able to submit something. The computer should be able to spit it out immediately. If it needs changes, it should tell you what the changes are. A computer could look at that, make the changes, and spit it back in, right?

And if you were to do that—you know, it takes 6 months, 9 months, a year, a year and a half to get a permit for a home in most places in America, or for a building in most places in America. It’s insane. It should be done instantly, and it could literally be done instantly with a technology that we already have available to us today.

A $100 billion business, by the way, in case anybody’s looking for a great idea. It’s a killer idea. I think some startups have worked on it, too.

I know multiple that are working.

Yeah, they work on the other side of it. Building on Friedberg’s point, the 2 best proposals I heard about regulations—and I’m curious if you could sell me on them, or just how practical you think they are—are putting a time limit on regulations.

So if you fought for some regulations around these phone booths back when phone booths—you know, Superman changed his costume in them in the 1960s and ’70s, like back from that era—maybe it lasts for 20 years and then it expires. Or, if you want to add 2 regulations to office-space regulations, you’ve got to take 1 off the books. Those were the 2 proposals I’ve heard: some way of timing these out, or if you want to add, you’ve got to find something to take off. Are either of those practical?

I like the first one better than the second one, because with the second one, this sort of one-for-one, there’s got to be a reason to do one or the other.

Right. Okay.

I like the first one better. Actually, what we normally do in government is the opposite. We do what we call pilots, right? You’ll do something that goes away very quickly. In other words, you implement a piece of legislation and say, “Oh, we’re going to do it for a year. Let’s test it out,” right? It’s a pilot, and then it goes away.

I like what you’re saying in terms of a big part of regulatory culture can probably be phased out over a 15- or 20-year period as being anachronistic, right? It just doesn’t make sense to have it reviewed in 1 year. The government’s responsible for reviewing 5% a year for 20 years, and they recertify it, right? Then you have the ability to reimplement it if you think it makes sense. But I think what happens is you go back down to zero.

You were asking Antonio, and I was listening to the conversation, because we did it. Like I said, we had to cut our budget by 20% in 1 year. Part of the problem is budgeting is like layering, right? It all layers on top of each other, same as regulation.

So if you were to be able to strip it down in a mechanical way, in an instantaneous way, as opposed to having to fight the structures—in our case, we were very lucky there was a state statutory vehicle that allowed us to implement the cuts. Otherwise, we’d have to bargain for them in a union process, and obviously no one would ever bargain to cut their salaries. They would never bargain to cut them. Nothing would have happened.

We would have been bankrupt, and then a court would have taken us over. We would have looked like a joke. Instead, we cut costs and survived and thrived going forward.

And by the way, my employees now love me. They weren’t happy the first couple of years when we did it. But now they—I mean, I don’t even have to go to a union interview when I run for office. They just support me right away.

Do you want to be governor?

I don’t think it’s quite that simple. I want to dunk.

Yeah, I want to be able to dunk, too.

Look, I think that I’m a Republican, for those of you who don’t know, and the president’s already weighed in on the Republican primary. I respect the president’s perspective. I have a good relationship with Congressman Donalds.

So, I think politics is very circumstantial. We've talked about that a lot in the past. Things sometimes conspire in your favor. Sometimes things don't, right? And I do think it is circumstantial, so I think you have to weigh the circumstances.

You know, I ran for president because I had a thesis. The thesis was that urban voters, Hispanics, and young voters, if they went Republican, would favor the Republican candidate and help the Republican candidate win. And they did. It just wasn't me, right? It was a different candidate.

The president did a great job on podcasts, right? Going on all these podcasts that the vice president didn't do. And he got young voters and he got urban voters. Look, a Republican's never going to win Philadelphia, right? Trump lost Philadelphia to Biden by 85%. But he lost Philadelphia to Kamala by 75%.

And that delta—the 75%, 85%, that 10% delta—gave him Pennsylvania.

Yeah, that's the election, which was such a crucial state, right? Arguably the winning state.

So, Republicans are never necessarily going to win urban votes or the urban population centers throughout America. But you're also seeing—and I think it's important to note—you're seeing Democratic mayors lose across America. London Breed lost in San Francisco. Tishaura Jones lost in St. Louis. The mayor of Chicago, Lori Lightfoot, lost.

On that point, you were—or still are—the head of the U.S. Conference of Mayors?

No, I was president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors for a year and a half.

Okay. If we had to ask you—you can't pick Miami—you met all those mayors. Where are two places that you think are actually well-run, that aspire to do something great and have their shit together? Cities. Take your time. I don't jump to an answer.

I'll say this. I'll tell you a mayor that I like. How about that?

Okay.

Justin Bibb. Justin Bibb is the mayor of Cleveland. We got a couple of Cleveland people here, apparently. There we go. Justin is a good friend.

I have a lot of friends who are mayors. I'm a mayor. I love all my mayors because I was president of that institution. But I think Justin is a young, dynamic guy who's smart, not super partisan, cares tremendously about his city, and we talk a lot about it because obviously Miami and Cleveland are a little different, right?

On the margins, that's fair.

And we joke about it. He says, "You know, I wish I had the kind of problems you have." To go back to the Ken Griffin quote, they don't struggle with affordable housing. They got plenty of affordable housing because people don't necessarily want to live there. Sorry, Jay, I love you, bro, but it's true, right? It's kind of true.

So he's dealing with economic development. He wants to be the Miami of Ohio in terms of getting investment, getting the tech community there, getting special people to move into his community and believe in his vision. And, look, company building is hard, as you guys know. You guys have built some incredible companies. Ecosystem building is even harder, right? It's 1,000x harder than building a big company. I mean, companies take years to decades, and ecosystems take decades to centuries.

Yeah, it's totally different. Is there something inside of the next gubernatorial campaign—let's say you don't run for governor—that's a high-impact job at the state level?

Not really. I get to practice, and I have a private-sector life. I have an 11-year-old and a 7-year-old. If the president called me and said, "I want you to be the U.S. ambassador to a country that I have a passion to help, in terms of the United States, their relationship, world peace, and things of that nature," which I think have high ROIs for the time investment and the financial sacrifice that you have to make, I would strongly consider it.

Other than that, I live a very blessed life. I'm the mayor of the best city on the planet.

Yeah.

And I have incredible, incredible, incredible bosses. These are my bosses. I have the best bosses in the world. They're constantly encouraging me. They're constantly cheering me on.

I live and breathe for them. I wake up early in the morning, I go to bed late, and I carry their problems, their hopes, and their dreams in my soul.

All right. Give it up for Francis Suarez, your mayor. Thank you to our friend Francis Suarez, the mayor of Miami, for joining us on stage at our F1 event. And thanks to you, the audience for tuning in. Give us a like, a thumbs up, a subscribe, write a review, whatever you're into. Maybe send it to a friend if you want to come to our next event. It's the All-In Summit in Los Angeles. Fourth year for All-In Summit. Go to allin.com/events to apply. A very special thanks to our new partner, OKX, the new money app. OKX was the sponsor of the McLaren F1 team which won the race in Miami. Thanks to Haidider and his team, an amazing partner and an amazing team. We really enjoyed spending time with you. And OKX launched their new crypto exchange here in the US. If you love All-In, go check them out. And a special thanks to our friends at Circle. They're the team behind USDC. Yes, your favorite stable coin in the world. USDC is a fully backed digital dollar redeemable one for one for USD. It's built for speed, safety, and scale. They just announced the Circle Payments Network. This is enterprisegrade infrastructure that bridges the gap between the digital economy and outdated financial reality. Go check out USDC for all your stable coin needs. And special thanks to my friends, including Shane over at Poly Market, Google Cloud, Salana, and BVNK. We couldn't have done it without y'all. Thank you so much. Let your winners ride. [Music] We open sourced it to the fans and they've just gone crazy with it. Queen [Music] of besties are gone. That is my dog taking it on a share driveway. Oh man, my habitasher will meet up at We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy cuz they're all just It's like this like sexual tension that we just need to release somehow. [Music] We need to get mercy. [Music] I'm going all in.