On the day Gabby Chavez-Lopez came home from the hospital with her newborn son, one of the first questions that ran through her mind was where she wanted to raise him.
The 37-year-old was living in New Mexico at the time but wanted the best opportunity for her family — a similar feeling she experienced after spending most of her childhood and adolescence in Fresno.
Born to professors at Fresno State University, she gained a foundational understanding of how to build power through community, even walking with her father as a young child in the funeral procession for Cesar Chavez. But when her father took a new job in San Jose during the tech boom, it presented a new level of excitement — as if the sky was the limit. Chavez-Lopez later realized she wanted to replicate that for her son and now for the city’s residents as she seeks the District 3 City Council seat.
“San Jose represents a lot of things to a lot of people, but one consistent thing that I recognize as I’ve really been involved in this community for so long is that it’s really been a place of opportunity and possibility for so many people,” Chavez-Lopez said. “I want to make sure that it remains a place for folks and families like mine and others where they can come here and realize their dreams and their potential as I have.”
Chavez-Lopez, who currently works as the executive director of the Latina Coalition of Silicon Valley, is one of seven candidates vying to replace former Councilmember Omar Torres, whose child molestation scandal threw the city government into a state of chaos and prompted the city to seek a replacement through the special election that will take place on April 8.
Joining her in the race are:
Tyrone Wade, retired family counselor and former mayoral candidate
Philip Dolan, knife sharpener salesman
Retired law enforcement officer Adam Duran
Irene Smith, pro tem judge and the most recent political challenger to Torres
Matthew Quevedo, deputy chief of staff to San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan
Anthony Tordillos, an engineer at Google and chair of the city’s planning commission
Chavez-Lopez may not have been born in San Jose but the downtown area and its community leaders played a pivotal role in getting her to this point — from her family initially settling down at First and Julian streets to her first college job clerking at a law firm nearby and now running a business just blocks from City Hall.
While she may lack direct political experience, it’s the life skills she gained through working in philanthropy at the Koret Foundation, in destination marketing at the New Mexico Hospitality Association, as membership director for SV@Home and now leading the Latina Coalition that she believes can connect her to the most pressing issues residents face.
Chavez-Lopez said San Jose has too many “idea-people” and instead needs new leadership that could help push meaningful change forward. As a self-described community builder, she feels she can put the right people together to buy into a sustainable plan.
Her top priorities are improving safety and cleanliness, increasing housing density and streamlining development, ensuring small business success and creating a vibrant, inclusive downtown core.
“We need people who are going to implement and deliver results to our community and residents so that they feel and see that it’s focused on uplifting them, not hitting and not kicking people when they’re down,” Chavez-Lopez said.
With homelessness among residents’ top concern, she said a shared vision is needed around the issue because the current situation is more like a hodgepodge.
“The city solving homelessness on its own is absolutely ludicrous,” Chavez-Lopez said. “We don’t have the resources. We don’t have the expertise. We don’t have the know-how to do that on our own, so we need to engage the county in the state, and that’s why I think networking and partnership is going to be key to addressing this issue.”
She also said that the city’s plans place more impetus on intervention and should include prevention efforts, which have proven less costly and more effective in stemming the crisis.
Too many of the city’s problems, including homelessness, are also viewed in silos, she said, pointing to how the city’s failure to build new housing has contributed to high costs and contributed to more people on the street.
Along with opposing a permanent shift in Measure E dollars to interim housing solutions, Chavez-Lopez said the city needs to unlock new development, whether through converting commercial buildings to residential, streamlining infill developments, and ensuring that the city builds housing at all affordability levels.
With the office market still struggling, Chavez-Lopez said downtown has reached an inflection point and needs to play more to its strengths, like the arts and entertainment community, to help build a diverse, vibrant core with a more developed sense of place.
Arts and cultural events have generated hundreds of millions of dollars in economic activity, and one way that the city can do better is to remove the barriers that have made them more difficult to operate, she said.
“We’re not going to be able to attract investment and have people want to live downtown unless the quality of life is enticing enough for folks to make that choice,” Chavez-Lopez said.
Chavez-Lopez also said the city could focus better on partnering with other stakeholders like San Jose State, whose new housing options downtown have helped add more liveliness.
As she has knocked on doors and talked to businesses and residents over the past few months, Chavez-Lopez has been confronted with a litany of constituent complaints.
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But for all that is going in the wrong direction, they tell her that the staying force for them is the community — an answer that resonates and one she can relate to because it brought her back to San Jose and is what she wants to fight for.
“I believe in the power of opportunity and the strength of our community and, most importantly, just the importance of real result-driven leadership,” Chavez-Lopez said. “I am deeply committed to the future because I look into my son’s eyes every single day and I want to make sure that San Jose remains a place of opportunity and possibility, but most importantly, that it’s a city that he’s proud to grow up in and to be from.”
