“Let’s go for a walk,” Jordan Thomas says, gesturing toward Hermann Park. Dressed in a campaign T-shirt, white sneakers, and shorts, the city council hopeful looks more like a volunteer than an actual politician—no suit, no tie, no seemingly rehearsed spiel about constituents; just a guy who wanted to stroll through his favorite park. 

As we amble around, he snags a forgotten ball from the nearby golf course, bouncing it against the pavement. Chuckling at himself, Thomas talks about his newfound love of golf. “I’m a golfer now, it’s probably one of the most embarrassing things about me,” he says with a laugh. Fatherhood has made him a caricature of the typical suburban father, he jokes, and despite his whirlwind city council campaign for At-Large Position 4, Thomas doesn’t feel much like a politician.

Thomas launched his campaign earlier this year, daringly branding himself as an “urbanist.” His platform spans multiple Houston issues, including affordable housing plans and improved bus and METRO routes across the city that have earned him an endorsement from the Houston Chronicle. Still, Thomas has no idea how to fall completely into the “politician” role. At his first political forum, he froze on stage, convinced he wasn’t cut out for politics. “I have no business doing this. I am a fraud!” he recalls thinking. And yet, supporters have loved his fumbles and foils because they feel more authentic than the polished “30-second sound bites” of other candidates. “I can’t remember the speeches they write for me and stuff, so I just kind of have to speak from what I know and believe,” he confesses. He insists his strength lies in being an average Houstonian whose policies stem from lived experience. 

Born and raised in Houston, Thomas saw the city from the eyes of the working class, splitting his childhood between Sunnyside, Southwest Houston, and Katy, living with his mother, father, and grandmother. In Sunnyside, his mother worked retail jobs to make ends meet. “We bounced all around the city, mostly in apartments, trying to find a place where we could lay our heads,” he explains. Living with church members and couch-surfing was, at times, part of his family’s day-to-day life. 

Everything changed when his mother landed a banking job. She saved up enough money to buy her childhood home, a fixer-upper in Sunnyside, but poor housing and quality-of-life issues took their toll. Thomas developed asthma at a young age, and he remembers commuting hours by bus across Houston with his grandmother (or, “Really, waiting for the bus with my grandmother,” he clarifies). These formative memories have fueled his housing policies today. “Quality of life as it relates to housing has been a huge thing for me, just because it’s something I really lived,” he says.

Eventually, Thomas moved out to Katy with his father, a lineman for the now-defunct phone company Southwestern Bell, and enrolled in River Oaks Baptist School with the help of a relative. Each morning, Thomas woke up before dawn to commute to the private middle school, and each afternoon, when after-school programs ended, his father would pick him up mid-shift, shuttle him back to work with him, and then take Thomas to union meetings, where he remembers listening to “class-conscious speeches” from blue-collar workers. Transitioning later to the prestigious St. John’s School, where he attended high school with the “most privileged people in society,” was a “culture shock,” says Thomas, recalling his humble Sunnyside roots.

At University of Miami, he dabbled in journalism, film, political science, and philosophy before discovering activism. He ran into a group of student organizers supporting campus janitorial staff who were in the middle of negotiating a union contract. As Thomas plugged into the community, he learned that the university planned to build a biotech center in Overtown, a historically disadvantaged Black neighborhood in Miami. (“Stop me if that sounds familiar!” he says.) Thomas quickly joined the student organization, where he negotiated a community benefits agreement requiring that locals from Overtown be hired during the construction process. The slow progress was disheartening. “I felt defeated,” he says. “…To feel like you’re pouring your heart and soul into something and those efforts aren’t translating into wins for people is discouraging.” 

But during a community meeting, an Overtown resident stood up and explained that, after being on the brink of eviction and unable to afford baby formula, he had secured a construction job thanks to the contract. “That day [changed] everything for me,” Thomas says. “We’re just a couple of college kids that came together and started making some noise, and now this guy’s able to pay his bills.”

Following his graduation, Thomas took a job as a union organizer, traveling across the country to work on electoral and union campaigns for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU). One fateful day, on a visit to Houston for his brother’s graduation, Thomas met Letitia Plummer, who was campaigning for a congressional seat in District 22, an area stretching from Fort Bend County to Pearland. His father believed Thomas would be the perfect candidate for Plummer’s chief of staff position, but Thomas refused. The district was, at the time, largely conservative—a “fool’s errand” for a Democrat, Thomas says. But his father schemed away, covertly booking a coffee interview with Plummer hours before Thomas was scheduled to fly home to Los Angeles. 

During that coffee conversation, Thomas and Plummer “clicked”—so much so that Thomas flew back to LA, quit his job, returned to Houston, and ran Plummer’s campaign. The campaign was somewhat successful: Though she failed to secure a victory, Plummer advanced into the runoff election, and Thomas continued to network. An introduction to Amanda Edwards, then serving as Houston’s City Council At-Large Position 4, led to him later serving as her chief of staff for four years.

Then, during 2020, while serving as chief of staff for Plummer after her At-Large win, “the world [fell] apart twice,” Thomas says. Houston saw the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and memorial protests for George Floyd, a Houstonian whose murder in police custody sent shockwaves throughout the nation. From his City Hall office, Thomas learned more about infrastructure and social policies, while also witnessing a different Houston—one with bluer skies, fewer cars on the roadways, and forward-thinking policies like rental assistance and police reform. So, for weeks, as Houstonians flooded Downtown streets in Floyd’s memory, Thomas drafted amendments on police reform while listening to a playlist peppered with J. Cole and Kendrick Lamar anthems. Houston slowly began to make significant progress.

But, as the pandemic came to an end, so did many of the city’s reforms. Thomas watched as policies expired. Handing out food became criminalized, and in today’s Houston, the very presence of people experiencing homelessness is criminalized, Thomas notes. “It feels like rental assistance became more money for landlords, sometimes slumlords. Policing reform became police overtime budgets unchecked and out of control,” he says. 

“It broke my heart,” he adds. “I was filled with hope that we could actually take this mobilization of people on the streets and translate it into real change in policy.” 

In 2021, burned out on politics, Thomas took a job with Grid United, a company that seeks to unite the nation’s electrical grids. But in July 2025, Thomas decided to make his return. Plummer announced her candidacy for Harris County Judge, leaving her council seat vacant, and with years of experience working behind the scenes, Thomas launched his campaign. He’s since centered his policies on addressing inequalities in Houston’s infrastructure, while pointing to major issues like protections for undocumented immigrants and improved street infrastructure. He’s used his platform online to post videos explaining civic meetings and even took on the daring task of racing Downtown’s Red Line light rail on foot, which recently lost its signal priority.

In its endorsement, the Chronicle’s editorial staff called Thomas a “policy wonk,” a title he questions. Though Thomas may have technical knowledge of policies, his motivation isn’t to be a politician or expert. 

All of his campaign is “driven by what I’ve really lived,” he says.