Oakland housing activist Carroll Fife appears to have unseated two-term incumbent Lynette McElhaney in the race for the Oakland City Council District 3 seat.
Fife, with a 2,766 vote lead, edged just over 50% in the third round of ranked-choice voting, enough to prevent further rounds. McElhaney is a distant second with 33% of the vote.
As a councilmember, McElhaney has focused on public safety and decreasing violence in the city. Her son, a student at the University of Southern California, was fatally shot in Los Angeles last year, the second time she had lost someone close to gun violence; a teenager whom she helped raise was shot and killed in Oakland in 2015.
Fife, director of the Oakland chapter of the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment, helped organize Moms4Housing, the occupation of a long-vacant West Oakland house by two mothers as a protest against housing speculation and the city’s homelessness crisis.
She has called for public funding of housing, tenant protections, reallocation of funds from the police to violence prevention programs, and initiatives around climate and environmental justice.
âJon Brooks (@jbrooksfoy)
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