Meet Mayor
Matt Mahan
Mayor Matt Mahan was raised by working-class parents: a school teacher and a letter carrier. He was taught to value hard work, the importance of education, and the power of community. Growing up in Watsonville, Mayor Matt’s interest in local politics was sparked by his curiosity about the challenges of crime, unemployment, and poor education that his hometown faced. He avidly read the local newspaper, and when it came time for high school, he decided to make the long, often four hours a day commute to San José to attend Bellarmine College Prep, which offered him a full work-study scholarship as a low-income student.
There, he was active in community service and student government, joined the wrestling team, and worked on the grounds crew in the summers to pay for his education. Mayor Matt went on to Harvard, where he was an honors student and student body president. He also co-led the first successful campaign to end the university’s investment in companies supporting the genocide in Darfur.
This experience deepened his passion for civic engagement.
After graduating from Harvard, Mayor Matt spent a year in Bolivia building irrigation systems with family farmers to increase their economic opportunities. He then returned to San José to teach middle school English and History in Alum Rock through the Teach for America program for two years. There, he worked long days, coaching the girl’s soccer team and keeping his classroom open after school as a safe space for his students to learn. When Mayor Matt’s Teach for America program came to a close, he joined Causes, a startup and early Facebook app that enabled people to raise awareness and funds for their favorite nonprofits. Over the course of five years, Mayor Matt worked his way up from Director of Business Development to COO and eventually CEO. Causes ultimately grew to 190 million users in over 150 countries, and helped individuals fundraise over $50 million for nonprofits in the U.S. alone.
In 2014, he co-founded Brigade along with a few colleagues. Brigade built the world’s first voter network: a nonpartisan platform for voters to discuss issues, advocate to their elected officials, and vote for candidates who reflect their values. In the 2016 and 2018 elections, Brigade reached millions of voters and empowered them with better information and tools. Brigade’s team and intellectual property were acquired in 2019 by Pinterest and Countable, respectively.
Mayor Matt has long been deeply involved in the community. He has served on a number of neighborhood and civic boards, including the City of San José’s Clean Energy Advisory Commission, the Almaden Valley Community Association, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, the District 10 Leadership Coalition, Joint Venture Silicon Valley, and San José Rotary. He was also a founding member of the Friends of Guadalupe Oak Grove Park and co-led the effort to save the 63 and 13 bus routes in Almaden Valley.
Mayor Matt ran for city council in 2020 because he knew it was time to give local government a “wake-up call.” His focus was on improving the quality of life in our neighborhoods by making City Hall responsive and accountable, especially for public safety, infrastructure and cleaning up our streets. Despite having two opponents, Mayor Matt won outright in the March primary election with nearly 60% of the vote.
On homelessness, Mayor Matt put forth memos calling on the City and County to identify land for low-cost, safe, and secure shelter for those living on our streets. He outlined in detail how, with just 50 acres across the county and the amount of money we are already spending through Measure A, we could end street homelessness today. He has also advocated for requiring people to use shelter when provided. While fighting for sufficient shelter and common sense laws, Mayor Matt has proposed an interim solution to reduce the impact of encampments on the wider community: setbacks and services.
His plan asked the City to establish ‘setbacks,’ or areas where encampments would be prohibited, such as near schools, parks, creeks, and other sensitive public spaces. Alternatively, all encampments not in these areas would receive basic on-street ‘services’ including sanitation and trash pick-up. This approach should better manage the hundreds of encampments in our city as we work to build the shelter and services we need for a long-term solution. The Council chose Mayor Matt’s proposal as the number one new priority for the 2021-2022 fiscal year, but City Hall has been slow to implement it.
Mayor Matt ran for his current seat in part to see through his innovative and cost-effective strategies for ending street homelessness in San José.
Mayor Matt has also been a strong advocate for Laura’s Law, legislation establishing court-ordered mental health care for severely mentally ill people, many of whom are unhoused. He led the push in May 2021, asking the County Board of Supervisors to adopt the law, organizing hundreds of residents to sign a petition, speak at the meeting, and attend his press conference. His work was successful, as the County passed Laura’s Law with a 5-0 vote and established a citizen oversight committee thanks to Mayor Matt’s efforts. More broadly, Matt believes that our County government needs to do much more to provide in-patient mental health and addiction treatment for those who are unable to care for themselves.
He has continued to advocate for expanding care opportunities in his first several months as mayor, championing legislation like SB 43 and SB 363 that provide meaningful and measurable outcomes toward our shared goal of aiding some of our most vulnerable community members and reducing community impacts and crime.
During his time on the city council, Mayor Matt made good on his promises.
On fiscal issues, Mayor Matt has worked hard to overhaul City Hall’s budget and goal-setting process to align our government with achieving key results for San Joséans. In June 2021, he secured the City Council’s support in tying the funding of a department or project with the quality of service it provides to residents. While common in the business world, this performance-based budgeting approach has not been implemented at City Hall. Mayor Matt is now working with the city’s budget department to bring real transparency and accountability to how our tax dollars are spent.
On housing, Mayor Matt was the first Councilmember to host a press conference opposing the proposal to eliminate single-family residential zoning in San José, or ‘Opportunity Housing,’ or the four-plex plan, a policy proposal that would allow developers to build four-plexes in all single-family neighborhoods in the city. But Mayor Matt didn’t just reject the four-plex plan. He put forward his Smart Growth San José alternative, which builds the housing we need in places where it makes sense: near transit, infrastructure, jobs, and retail — not indiscriminately in the suburbs.
On government accountability, Mayor Matt has put a special emphasis on making government as accessible and open as possible.
In his council office, he pioneered a ticket system to track all incoming constituent questions and requests, tracking internal response times and holding himself accountable for delivering responsive, productive customer service. He also launched the district’s first-ever State of the District event and continues to hold town hall meetings so residents have direct access to their mayor to ask questions, share ideas and express their concerns.
Empowering the community to be active in their government through his council office, Mayor Matt initiated a set of resident working groups on key issues such as street racing, mental health services, residential zoning, and others. This innovative approach connects residents concerned about the same issues to come together and, with his office’s support, pursue legislative solutions. District 10’s working groups have achieved major victories such as securing numerous new speed radar signs and a roundabout experiment in our most dangerous intersection, expanding dumpster days in the district, funding murals to combat frequently graffitied sites, fighting San José Water Company’s rate increases, and getting a pilot project for cleaner and quieter leaf blowers into the parks budget.
Mayor Matt’s time on the council exposed him to the dysfunction at City Hall that prevents our biggest problems from being solved. He jumped into the Mayor's race to force the Council and the bureaucracy to focus on the key problems facing our community, such as homelessness, blight, crime and traffic, and to pursue common sense solutions that are both affordable and effective. You can read more about his back to basics approach right here.
Mayor Matt and his wife Silvia live in the Almaden neighborhood, where they are raising their two young children, Nina and Luke. They are members of Holy Spirit Church.
Subscribe to Mayor Matt’s bi-weekly newsletter.
