San José’s Batman, Fighting for the Unhoused, Is the Real Life Superhero ‘We Need’

Downtown San José residents aren’t startled by the daunting figure in a billowing black-and-purple cape beneath the streetlights. They know what comes next: the gravelly rattle of a rolling cart stocked with water bottles and food.

“Hey, Batman! Do what you do best,” one passerby shouted on a warm August night last year — an enthusiastic acknowledgement of Batman, and the superhero’s mission.

Some nights, Batman meets new people. On others, he reconnects with familiar faces — like Miguel, who walked over when he saw Batman wheeling his cart.

“This is a good man,” Miguel said, as Batman kneeled to pour water for Miguel’s dog Lorio.

We’re only using Miguel’s first name to protect his privacy as someone who is unhoused and part of a vulnerable population. Miguel speaks with certainty: “He’s my friend.”

Monica, whom we’re referring to by her first name for the same reason, spotted Batman across St. James Park and ran up to him.

“I’ve known him a long time,” she said excitedly, receiving the water Batman was handing out. “That’s my super[hero].”

This is the Batman of San José — a masked volunteer who has spent nearly eight years walking the city at night to help unhoused residents. He’s a far cry from the vigilantes of comic books. He isn’t swooping from rooftops, seeking revenge or delivering justice through fists. His superpower is noticing people who feel ignored and offering them food, first aid supplies, and sometimes, being someone they can confide in.

Disguise as a form of protest

In recent years, whimsical costumes — inflatable frogs, unicorns, oversized creatures — have become a national protest language, mitigating tension between demonstrators and law enforcement.

But the tradition goes deeper.

In 1974, California’s own Captain Sticky became the first widely documented “real-life superhero,” testifying before the Federal Trade Commission about health insurance fraud while dressed in a peanut-butter-and-jelly-themed cape. CBS San Diego’s cameras captured the contradiction at the heart of Captain Sticky: a quirky, outsized persona paired with a deadly serious mission — confronting “evil” by leading investigations into convalescent hospitals he said were defrauding consumers.

Others followed: Danger Man in Los Angeles, Shadarko in San Francisco — every day people donning costumes to protect their neighbors, deter violence, or simply show up when institutions didn’t. Batman of San José joined their ranks in 2018, when he was a high school junior.

An origin story that starts with one act of discrimination

Batman’s story began on an ordinary drive home from school. He was 17 when he spotted an unhoused single mother stranded on the side of the road with a broken-down car. A nearby mechanic refused to help her.

When Batman asked the mechanic for the same assistance on her behalf later, the mechanic agreed.

“She tried to do exactly what I did,” he remembered. “But for some reason, I was allowed to do that and not her. That very clear sense of discrimination stuck with me.”

He went home unsettled — and then decided not to let the moment pass. Within days, he began figuring out how to help people like the single mother he’d seen on the roadside.

At first, the effort was modest. His costume was bare-bones — just a sweatshirt with a Batman logo — and the supplies he handed out came from money saved from summer jobs. He stashed pieces of the outfit in his backpack or under his clothes, slipping into his Batman persona after class to check on people downtown.

His choice of Batman was deliberate.

“I appreciate that the character is human,” he said. “[He] wants to do the right thing despite having no superpowers [and] turns personal struggle into something that helps others.”

He said his own struggles with a learning disability propelled him to become Batman. Now, helping others is a way to heal some of the pain he felt as a kid.

Then he grinned: “And the character looks cool. I won’t deny it.”

He embodied the character, not sharing his identity with even his parents. For Batman, anonymity is part of the work.

“It means I can keep myself out of this,” he said. “And it helps people recognize me from a distance.” He added that it also makes him more approachable, using levity to connect with the unhoused.

When Batman of San José walked beneath the Highway 87 underpass in 2020, the familiarity of the costume drew immediate attention — especially from a 3-year-old child living there with his mother.

“The kid was absolutely fascinated,” Batman recalled. “He was grabbing at the ears of the mask and the cape.”

The tender moment caught him off guard, and he found he was grateful to be wearing a mask.

“I lost it almost immediately,” he said, recalling the sadness of seeing a child so young without shelter. “The mask helped hide that.”

The family was trying to get the child into school, he explained, but life on the street made regular attendance nearly impossible. Over the next several years, Batman worked alongside case managers, providing groceries, financial assistance and a steady presence as the family navigated housing instability.

After about two years, when the family received more permanent housing, the child finally started attending school. Batman was there for his kindergarten graduation.

“It wasn’t high school or college,” he said. “But to that family, it meant everything, [and] that mom is my personal hero.”

The mother told him her child now runs around clutching a piece of black fabric, pretending it’s Batman — something that keeps him safe.

“I never thought I’d have that kind of impact,” Batman said. “It taught me I don’t have to do everything — to that kid, that was everything.”

Since then, he has designed the costume with intention: gloves for scrambling up riverbanks, shin guards for kneeling beside tents, a belt filled with first-aid supplies, tools and tape. And the dramatic cape? It doubles as an emergency blanket.

“I can give it to someone if I run out of everything else,” he said.

The weight of friendship and loss

Batman has become a quiet keeper of stories and routes — able to trace who’s still around, who’s disappeared, and how lives on the margins shift over time. He has forged authentic relationships with the people he encounters, and each person leaves a mark.

“I consider a lot of the people I meet out here to be my friends,” he said.

He shared the story of Susie, an unhoused woman he checked on often, until police cleared the area where she was living.

“She passed away recently,” he said. “She was swept [by police] and then got hit by a car [in the street] — that should have never happened to her.”

His grievance is with a system that he feels repeatedly casts unhoused people aside — clearing encampments without permanent housing solutions.

City officials have said that the cost and pace of building permanent housing have led the city to prioritize temporary shelter. In an emailed statement, Mayor Matt Mahan’s office told KQED: “We’ve expanded temporary housing so that we can get people off the streets faster while continuing to invest in permanent supportive housing.”

The office pointed to city data showing that more than 800 affordable housing units were permitted last year and that funding fromMeasure E — a San José tax on property sales of $2 million or more passed by voters in 2020 — helped prevent more than 1,200 families from falling into homelessness.

But for Batman, those metrics don’t capture what he has watched unfold on the street.

“People should be alive that aren’t anymore, “ he said, holding back tears. “My friends are dying, and I’m losing people I care about.”

So, he keeps walking — beneath freeway ramps, through parks and along light rail stations — checking on people he hasn’t seen in days. Sometimes, he runs into someone he feared he’d lost.

On this night, he spotted KC approaching.

“It’s been a minute,” Batman said. “I’ve been worried about you.”

“I’ve been locked up for like 13 months,” KC replied. Their longstanding friendship bridges any discomfort over asking for resources — what Batman can bring next time: underwear, flashlights and a sleeping bag.

When asked how it feels to see Batman, “I feel happy,” KC said, smiling.

Beyond the cape: advocacy, policy and mutual aid

Batman’s work does not end on the sidewalk. He has spoken at City Hall, intervened during police sweeps and shown up at demonstrations. At a San José protest last summer over human rights violations under the Trump administration, he addressed the crowd with his own understanding of resistance.

“When I look at people across the country standing up to authoritarianism, I see heroes,” he said. “And that’s the scariest thing — to be a hero.”

For him, that fear translated into urgency. He wanted the people he knew on the streets to live longer lives — not just endure them. He pushed back against the assumption that unhoused people were not trying hard enough.

“People think, ‘Why don’t they have to work for it?’” he said. “Quite a few [unhoused] people work — it’s that it can be impossible to fit everything into one day.”

For many, he explained, survival became a full-time job: finding food and water, staying clean, protecting belongings, getting to work — while also trying to secure housing. From what he has seen, the most common paths into being unhoused are job loss and medical debt.

“That’s why ‘Housing First’ is always the best way to go,” he said. “Research shows it’s the quickest way to stabilize someone.”

An evaluation by UCLA’s Center for Health Policy Research echoes that view. Researchers found that California’s Housing for a Healthy California program — which follows a housing-first model that places people into stable housing before requiring medical treatment, employment or other conditions — improved long-term stability and health outcomes when paired with intensive case management and support services.

Batman advocates for housing, medical support and is vocal about how San José has carried out encampment abatements like the one in Columbus Park in August of last year.

“Why are we not waiting for 1,000 beds to be open before sweeping people?” he asked.

Mayor Matt Mahan’s office said that temporary shelter was being rolled out in phases and maintained that there were sufficient beds for people displaced from Columbus Park, one of San José’s largest encampments.

“There were 370 people living there, and over a 70-day period of outreach before the abatement began, every single person was offered housing,” said Tasha Dean, a spokesperson for the mayor, in an email. “ About two-thirds of encampment residents accepted the city’s offer of housing, and no one who accepted housing was abated until their bed was ready for them to move in.”

KQED’s reporting back in August found there were people who were moved without consent — and some advocates felt the outreach period fell short in informing residents of the park about their possible outcomes.

Batman adds that clearing encampments before offering housing erodes trust, making people less likely to seek help: “The people who are trying to help them are also the people in their minds who are hurting them — they’re both wearing the city of San José logo.”

Officials frame the problem differently. They point to the cost of permanent housing — at about $1 million per unit — and the scale of unsheltered homelessness — around 5000 people — in San José, which they say makes a build-first approach untenable.

“We can’t build a permanent unit for the lucky few, while leaving the vast majority of people to suffer and far too often, die, on our streets,” Dean said. “We’ve chosen to get people indoors faster with a solution that is cheaper and faster to build, so they don’t have to wait on the streets indefinitely.”

As that debate continues, Batman’s work has grown beyond a one-person effort. What began as solo nighttime rounds has become a small mutual-aid collective called Bay Area Superheroes. He has joined forces with the Crimson Fist, Black Phoenix and KaiKai Bee, expanding their reach to San Francisco and Oakland. But, for Batman, San José has remained his anchor.

“The fabric of San José is people who are from all different walks of life and they still come together and form a community, and I think the unhoused community is just that.”

He pointed to moments that rarely made headlines: people sharing clothes and stepping in to protect neighbors during raids.

“If ICE shows up, they hide people,” he said. “They stand up for each other.”

Batman is woven into that fabric. In full costume, he cannot walk more than a few feet without running into someone he knows.

“It’s Batman!” one man called out. “Not the hero we deserve, but the hero we need.”

Batman smiled, waved, and disappeared into the dark with his cart of snacks and supplies, the shimmer of purple and black satin trailing behind him.