Why a Harvard-educated SLC Council member and housing champion is heading for the exits of City Hall

Salt Lake City Council member Darin Mano is smart, engaged and influential — hardly anyone quibbles with that. So why is he stepping away from the halls of power in Utah’s capital?

The 41-year-old Utah native and Ivy League-trained architect from the city’s south-central District 5 is leaving office at the end of a watershed six-year stint on the City Council. He was first appointed in 2020 and elected in 2021.

He departs Monday with a lengthy record of zoning reform, likely to shape the city’s landscape and housing stock for years. On top of his belief in term limits, the job’s long hours, low pay and periods where he feared for his family’s safety have influenced his decision to walk away.

“I’m proud of the work we’ve done,” Mano said in an interview, reflecting on his years in office.

Through all the attention and vitriol that comes with the gig, he’s landed on this key takeaway as he heads for the exits of City Hall, at least as a council member:

“We’re still really just people trying to do our best, given a lot of responsibility and a lot of power in these elective offices,” he said. “It’s just human beings trying to do our best for the community and responding to whatever situations come across.”

In a series of recent public farewells, his fellow elected officials have poured forth with kudos and hearty thanks. And that hasn’t only been because of Mano’s deep knowledge and sway in overseeing a series of sweeping and complex zoning changes to entice more affordable homes in new places.

His time in office, remember, also included the raging COVID-19 pandemic. Social justice protests after George Floyd’s murder. A wicked affordable housing crisis. Huge in-migration and a doubling of downtown’s population. Major and controversial sports-related development deals with potential to transform the city.

Mayor Erin Mendenhall said Mano, who was appointed to fill her former council seat after she first won mayoral office, has exuded “a really genuine authenticity that shone through dark and difficult times in the world.”

“Your humanity,” Mendenhall told him at a final 2025 council meeting, “your dignity for everybody, and your authenticity helped make us a better city.”

As a gay man of Japanese descent, Mano has been a mainstay in the public eye for both the panel’s historic LGBTQ majority, as well as its minority-majority among its seven members. He was the city’s first Asian council member.

Mano — whose district spans Ballpark, Central Ninth, East Liberty Park and Liberty Wells — has chaired both the council and the governing board of its Community Reinvestment Agency.

As an unwavering advocate for affordable housing and for downtown’s re-emerging Japantown, he has lent a steady and principled presence to the council, colleagues say. That’s especially been true as the city handled high-profile and controversial issues, including the Salt Lake Bees’ departure from Smith’s Ballpark and raising sales taxes to renovate the Delta Center and keep the Utah Jazz downtown.

Now Mano is stepping away — by choice — and he’s looking for a new job. His elected successor, Erika Carlsen, a grassroots activist whom Mano endorsed in last November’s contest, will be sworn in Monday for her first term.

‘Intense for a million different reasons’

Mano announced in 2024 that he would not run again, citing a belief in term limits and avoiding long political careers.

Though he doesn’t point today to any single motive beyond that for his departure, he does mention some of what tipped the scales: the council job’s time demands; public pressures and conflicts over pivotal decisions; and safety fears in the face of someone he described as a hostile constituent.

He has coped with personal ups and downs as well. His mother, Cheryl, died of pancreatic cancer and his father, Ronald, from a heart attack, both in 2021. Mano married Kevin Randall the following year and folded a new family of four kids and a Shih Tzu named Bucky into a small Ballpark home.

“All those years — 2020, 2021 and 2022,” he said, “just felt really intense for a million different reasons.”

Concerns about safety

Personal safety for himself and his family, Mano said, has contributed to his decision to walk.

After winning his first election in 2021, Mano said he felt targeted by a resident who was initially unhappy with some of the council’s stances on the homeless — but whose ire seemed to turn personal, homophobic and racist. The conflict brought confrontations in public hearings and critical posts on social media.

“That anger got hyper-focused on me,” Mano said. The family’s anxiety ratcheted up when the same resident started posting about Mano’s husband, publicizing the couple’s address and sharing photos taken outside their house, including contents of their garbage cans.

“It was like, ‘This guy’s been to our house. This is not OK,’ ” Mano said. “We actually had a police camera out in front at one point, and we ended up moving out, to somewhere where it felt more safe.”

Mano and his husband rented a Liberty Wells property, partly so their address was less trackable.

It was a turning point on how he viewed continuing in public office, he said, especially as it spilled onto his family. “I would be lying if I said that that didn’t play a part,” he said of his departure, “though I wouldn’t say it was the majority of the reason.”

At their final council meeting together in December, colleague Victoria Petro referred to those personal attacks on Mano and apologized for “the ways you felt unsupported by a system that didn’t know how to stand in that gap for you.”

Randall, Mano’s husband, said the situation spiraled into “levels of harassment” neither of them fully anticipated when Mano first joined the council.

“It required a lot of soul-searching and difficult conversations,” Randall said of that period. “He had to develop a thick skin, you know, which he did over time.”

Caustic public critiques

While adamant about the public’s right to speak out, Mano recalls feeling “dehumanized” by repeated bouts of criticism and attacks on controversial issues before the council. That included, in particular, some of the hearings on police accountability after George Floyd’s murder and public input from pro-Palestine protesters as Israel invaded Gaza.

For a time, the council’s weekly meetings were filled with hours of online and in-person castigation from residents and others who testified, pressuring the council to formally support a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas conflict. That ultimately led the council to limit its public hearing period during formal meetings to an hour and put in place strict rules for decorum and respect.

Mano remembers one member of the public yelling out his name and demanding from the podium that he look them in the eye.

“I refused,” Mano said. “It was just a really powerful moment where I, on one hand, am agreeing with the things they’re saying, but I don’t have the power to fix those things — and I’m feeling personally attacked.”

The experience, he said, brought home that the power of political office isn’t always worth the toll.

“What does it mean to be an elected official?” Mano asked, “And what are the personal costs of that?”

Council members and higher pay

Following a substantial pay increase for Mendenhall in 2024, council members were deeply divided on whether their pay should jump at a similar rate — to ensure, some argued, that average residents could take on the job without losing their livelihoods.

Mano said he’s been “very public” in urging the council to raise its pay significantly. To do otherwise, he said, is, in effect, to wall the job off from many working residents.

“There’s no way I felt like I could do this with a full-time job that wasn’t at least government-adjacent,” Mano said. “It shouldn’t ever be a job where someone gets rich, but it should be a job where you don’t have to worry about how to put food on the table.”

Salt Lake City, he said, shouldn’t have elected officials “in a state of financial duress, making decisions that affect the whole community.”

Rethinking SLC’s community councils

Around the time Mano announced he would not seek another term, he wrote an email to several leaders of the community councils in his district, saying he would no longer attend their meetings and would instead focus on engaging with residents through his own town halls.

Although the city’s recognized community organizations “certainly bring value,” he told the councils, “I have concerns about whether they are fully representative of all voices” — particularly, he added, residents of color and those in marginalized communities.

In hindsight, Mano said, “that was a poorly written email.” But he stands by his contention the city’s current system of recognizing community groups at City Hall is flawed.

“We’re giving preferential treatment to individuals who already have more resources and more connection to city government,” Mano said, “and we are leaving out the people that don’t have the time to show up every month to a community council meeting or don’t feel safe.”

Housing at a crossroads

Up through his last hours in public office, Mano has sweated the details on a series of mayor-initiated reforms to crucial aspects of city zoning and development to boost housing.

In fact, Mano, a University of Utah- and Harvard University-trained architect and zoning wonk, has had a key role in helping refine, guide and explain to his colleagues a host of granular, yet significant, land use changes.

Mano said that in terms of addressing housing, the city now only has a few more zoning hurdles to clear. Compared to 2020, he said, pages and pages of city code now look substantially different.

But as Utah’s capital takes those steps, Mano questions whether other cities will follow, at least enough to make a dent in a statewide housing deficit amounting to tens of thousands of homes. Now, he is an advocate for what he calls “a nuclear option” in Utah — state lawmakers stepping in to preempt local zoning rules to encourage more housing still.

“The opportunity to actually create housing in places where there’s already water, sewer, trash services and streets is not in Salt Lake City,” Mano said. “It’s in the rest of the developed cities in the county.”

It’s controversial, he concedes, “but unless other cities get in line, the state needs to step in.”

What’s next for him?

Mano is focused intently these days on his professional future, and after several months of reflection, he said, “the sky’s the limit.”

He’s been appointed to the board of the Housing Authority of Salt Lake City, so he’ll keep a post in government. He’s also applying for jobs in architecture, hoping to branch out from his past experience in designing offices and commercial spaces to building affordable apartments.

At the same time, Mano continues to try to develop housing on a couple of small pieces of property he owns in the city. For all the new incentives in city zoning, he said, prospects still don’t quite pencil on his own lots, partly because he’s not excited about building luxury homes.

“We’ve made some progress, but not as much as I’d like,” Mano said of developing his properties. “I keep telling people I’m turning into a developer, though I feel imposter syndrome saying that.”

While he’s eager to find new work, Mano said his possibilities have never been more fluid.

Ideally, he said, he’d combine architecture, a passion for affordable housing “and all the work and experience I’ve gained on the City Council.”

Whatever is next, he’s moving on.