First-term Oakland City Councilmember Charlene Wang is facing a single challenger for her District 2 seat in the November election — political newcomer Nate Adams.
Wang is herself relatively new to the city’s political scene, having lost a 2024 election for the at-large council seat and prevailed in a special 2025 election to replace Nikki Fortunato Bas, who left to serve on the Alameda County Board of Supervisors.
Wang was elected to fill the remaining 19 months of Fortunato Bas’ term and now is facing Adams for the right to serve a full four-year term.
Adams’ priorities
While he hasn’t run for public office before, Adams has served in a leadership role for the East Bay Democratic Socialists of America and worked as an organizer for the Richmond Progressive Alliance, a political group focused on social justice, economic equality and environmental protections, among other things.
He says his top three priorities if elected are to “slash the rents, fix the streets and fill 1,000 city jobs.”
“Right now we have a city where even when we build market rate housing we see that rents are still skyrocketing and a lot of people, including myself, struggle to pay rent month to month and that represents to me a systemic failure,” Adams said.
He wants the city to use public land for affordable housing and community spaces, improve its building permit process, recognize tenants’ right to organize and beef up its rental property inspection system to better ensure landlords are held accountable for providing livable housing options.
He also wants to increase the city’s real estate transfer fees to fund “social housing and community land trusts” and to curtail the ability of corporate investors to snap up Oakland’s rental housing stock.
“One of my highest priorities is to ban the speculative investment of housing from corporations,” Adams said, although it’s unclear how such a ban would work.
He also wants to fill potholes and fix buckling sidewalks by, in part, fully staffing the city’s Public Works Department and expanding the Oakland Public Works Training Academy, a six-month paid training program for young people looking for new career opportunities.
“One of the things that we hear over and over and over is there’s just issues with sidewalks, issues with streets that are not getting addressed and so we need to really prioritize fixing our streets,” Adams said. “People deserve to live in a city where they’re able to walk to work or take their kids to school without worrying about tripping on a sidewalk, without worrying about their car hitting a pothole and getting a busted tire.”
He’s been endorsed by several Bay Area political leaders, including Richmond City Council members Claudia Jimenez and Sue Wilson, as well as Oakland Unified School Board President Jennifer Brouhard and the district’s teachers union, Oakland Education Association.
Adams said he won’t take campaign contributions from corporate sources or real estate interests. He has raised a little over $43,000 so far this year to support his candidacy, according to his latest campaign finance disclosure forms, which he filed Tuesday.
Wang’s record
Wang’s latest filing is from Thursday and, along with previous filings, shows she raised nearly $124,000 so far this year.
Her endorsements include Oakland Mayor Barbara Lee, six of the other seven members of the Oakland City Council and four of five Alameda County supervisors. Supervisor Fortunato Bas, who formerly held the District 2 seat, isn’t among the endorsements posted on Wang’s campaign website.
Wang also lists several accomplishments on her site and says she’s working to bring Grocery Outlet to the district, helped bring in 20 new businesses to the district to occupy formerly vacant storefronts, helped modernize and accelerate the city’s permitting process and supported funding for 180 new affordable housing units, among other things.
She said one of her key housing policy accomplishments was the elimination of developer impact fees for new homes built in the neighborhoods east of Lake Merritt, a change designed to encourage more construction in the city’s least expensive areas.
“You can be a household where you’ve got two teachers and a kid and they don’t qualify for the deed restricted affordable housing, so I just think that in many ways we’re pricing out, we’re hollowing out the middle class, the working class in Oakland and it’s that type of housing that we need to build more of,” Wang said.
She also said she pushed for the speedy implementation of new state regulations established by Senate Bill 79, which allows local governments to build higher-density affordable and market-rate housing near transit corridors.
Wang said one of her main public safety policy wins was the creation of California’s first city-level sex trafficking survivor support fund.
“It’s financed by penalties against exploiters, so the pimps, the Johns,” she said. “It’s a demand reduction approach where ultimately the revenue is going back to survivor services.”
She also said she’s been working to address the Oakland Police Department’s “understaffing crisis” by, in part, reaching out to community-based organizations and the University of Southern California’s Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work on new recruiting and support strategies for the department.
While she hasn’t been on the job for long, Wang says she was able to hit the ground running after her election and has racked up many legislative successes.
“I think having been now in the job for a year and a half, you know, you learn a lot,” she said. “You learn how to be effective, how to actually implement change and I’ve been able to deliver results.”
Wang and Adams will face off in a League of Women Voters-sponsored debate Saturday at 12:30 p.m. at Oakland City Hall.
Oakland’s District 2 is in the center of the city and includes several neighborhoods, including Chinatown, Little Saigon, Eastlake, San Antonio, Bella Vista, Trestle Glen, Crocker Highlands, Lakeshore and Jack London Square.
