During the historic midterm elections last week that featured several firsts in key political positions — from the first Black woman governor to the first Native American governor — a Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School (MVRHS) alumnus made his own splash on the other side of the country.
Hans Buder, a 2004 MVRHS graduate, was overwhelmingly elected mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, a coastal tourist destination in central California that fits more than 3,000 residents within just 1.06 square miles, on Nov. 3. Data from the Monterey County Elections Department shows the mayor-elect received more than 80 percent of the ballots cast and led his opponent David Boland, a banking executive who ran to face the previously unopposed Buder, by 914 votes.
“I never expected myself to be the mayor of a town in California, but life goes in strange ways,” Buder told The Times. He’ll be sworn in next month.
Buder is a born-and-raised Islander. He grew up in Vineyard Haven, where his parents ran the former Thornton Inn on Main Street, and led MVRHS to a football state championship as quarterback in his senior year. He was also his class’s valedictorian.
Buder said a desire to serve was instilled in him from a young age; his father was a deacon of Good Shepherd Parish. And in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, after he witnessed a lack in the federal government’s post-storm response, he and two other Duke University students drove down to New Orleans to help victims. The students entered the disaster area with fake press passes and delivered supplies as well as ferried seven people from the Morial Convention Center, which became a haphazard evacuee shelter after the hurricane.
He returned to New Orleans after graduating from Duke with his future wife Meghan, who was a California Polytechnic State University graduate, as Teach for America members in inner-city public schools.
“That was a pretty eye-opening experience,” Buder said, adding that some of his students’ families struggled with housing, and there were controversial public housing developments built after the hurricane.
The catastrophic aftermath of Katrina spurred Buder toward a career in real estate development, but Louisiana wasn’t the first time he saw housing issues in a community. He recalled how the high cost of living pushed Islanders, like his childhood barber who moved to Falmouth more than 15 years ago, to find homes elsewhere, and others to commute each day by ferry.
After his graduate studies at Harvard University and Stanford University, Buder joined real estate private equity firm Long Wharf Capital in Boston. He later moved to the California branch of a real estate development firm McCormack Baron Salazar, which specializes in revitalizing urban areas through mixed-income housing projects. Buder said the move to California was also done in part because his wife wanted to return to her home state.
Buder told The Times that, during his work, he grew “disillusioned” by affordable housing models built in primarily low-income neighborhoods. He argues that mixed-income developments in higher-income neighborhoods or reserving some units for lower-income residents would improve the socioeconomic mobility for children who could have access to better schools. It also led Buder to found an impact investing fund called MTO Fund as well as a connected nonprofit called Partners in Opportunity for families with Section 8 vouchers, a federal program to help low-income individuals find housing.
In Carmel-by-the-Sea, another area with housing affordability issues, Buder got “sucked in[to]” local politics after helping amend the city’s housing plan. He later got elected to the city council in 2024, and halfway through his councilship, he decided to run for mayor. Buder also has a record of public service in Carmel-by-the-Sea, including as former chair of the Monterey County Housing Authority’s board of commissioners.
Buder has lived in Carmel-by-the-Sea for the past ten years, making a home in a Californian city that shares many similarities to the Vineyard: no traffic lights, a lack of chain stores, and an effort by the community to preserve local character. In a similar vein, it also shares some of the struggles the Island does, such as questions of overtourism, rising sea levels, and a housing shortage contributed by a large second homeowner market. Buder said “the Vineyard is an incredibly unique place,” but communities that rely on tourism, whether that be the Island, Carmel-by-the-Sea, or mountain towns like Jackson Hole in Wyoming, “we’re all dealing with similar problems.”
As mayor, he hopes to figure out how to bring back more full-time residents to Carmel-by-the-Sea, which has experienced a population loss to nearby areas like the technology hub Silicon Valley.
Karl Buder, Hans’s father, who traveled to California last week for the Carmel election results, said the West Coast city’s similarities to the Island were “rather uncanny.”
“Anybody who is born and raised on the Vineyard, like he was, understands affordable housing,” Karl said, noting the “Island shuffle,” a phenomenon where locals are forced to move frequently to adjust to the Vineyard’s seasonal changes, some of Hans’s classmates experienced.
The senior Buder told The Times how proud he was of his son and said those who knew Hans wouldn’t be “terribly surprised” by the results.
“He’s the kind of guy that people would want to vote for,” the older Buder said, at times becoming emotional during the interview. “He’s truly a hero, in my view.”
