East Bay’s Assembly District 20 seat up for grabs

With District 20 Assemblymember Bill Quirk retiring at the end of this year, his seat representing about 500,000 people in the diverse East Bay is up for grabs.

Three Democrats and one Republican are hoping their plans for tackling housing affordability, homelessness, traffic and public safety will convince residents to vote for them in the June 7 primary.

The newly redrawn district is entirely within Alameda County, covering all of San Leandro, Hayward and Union City, parts of Dublin and Pleasanton, and all of the unincorporated areas of San Lorenzo, Ashland, Cherryland and Castro Valley.

The four candidates are registered nurse and former labor organizer Jennifer Esteen, 41, of Ashland; Dublin City Councilmember Shawn Kumagai, 45; labor union treasurer Liz Ortega, 44, of San Leandro; and retired energy scientist Joseph Grcar, 71, the lone Republican, of Castro Valley. The top two vote-getters in the primary will advance to the general election runoff in November.

Esteen, a nurse in the psychiatric ward of the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, is also an appointed board member of the Alameda Health System, which oversees the county’s hospitals and other health facilities.

Esteen, who is backed heavily by arms of the Service Employees International Union that she used to organize for, said if elected, she would push for major bond measures to raise “tens of billions of dollars” for supportive, affordable housing around the state.

“Supportive for people who like my clients who have mental health needs, supportive for people who are currently unhoused and need stability, so they can get back on their feet, and supportive because incomes have not been rising to keep to keep up with the cost of housing,” she said.

“People cannot afford rent, people cannot afford to just maintain where they’re at, because costs are rising,” she said.

Esteen said the state needs to create “holistic communities” with dense housing near transit, green spaces, services, markets and medical offices, all within walking distance.

If elected, Esteen said she would be the first Black person, and the first person who lives in the county’s unincorporated areas, to represent the district. She also said she would become the first Black, openly gay, Jewish legislator in the country.

She wants to redirect chunks of police budgets to a statewide mental health response and crisis prevention service, modeled similarly to the STARR program in Denver, which sends medical technicians and behavioral health clinicians to mental health crisis calls instead of cops.

“We already pay a lot of money in taxes to house a lot people in ways that don’t benefit our community,” such as in jails and psychiatric hospitals, she said.

Esteen helped draft the Mental Health San Francisco legislation aimed at reducing police responses to mental health calls, which a recent city report said is showing progress.

Grcar, the Republican, said the affordable housing crisis is a “red herring” because the Bay Area and much of California have long been expensive.

“I feel for the people in Tracy. And they drive to work through my community every day, and I’m happy to provide them with a freeway or with a through tunnel, but it’s not my job to pay for my own housing and to pay for housing for people who live 50 miles away just because they want to come here to work,” he said.

Grcar also said the COVID health orders that led to many local business closures were all an “overreaction.”

Grcar wants to convert part of the Hayward shoreline into a public beach. He also wants to hire Elon Musk’s Boring Company to dig traffic tunnels underground across the district, to cut congestion on highways and local roads.

Kumagai, the only elected official in the race, is a first-term Dublin council member, and the city’s first openly gay council member. He is also the district director for Assemblymember Rebecca Bauer-Kahan, and a Navy reservist.

He said his experience as a council member is what separates him from the others in the race.

“I do believe I am the one most ready on Day One to start getting results for the constituents of this district,” he said.

Kumagai said when he came to Dublin after being in the Navy, he was struck by how unaffordable the housing market had become, which inspired him to run for the council as a “pro-housing” candidate.

“As a veteran, as someone who has a master’s degree, and a career under my belt, I was struggling to find a place to live,” he said.

Dublin has seen nearly 5,000 market-rate homes go up since 2015, more than 4,000 more than the state regional housing goals asked the city to approve, but it has struggled, like many cities, to get affordable housing built.

“I have driven the conversation towards more affordable housing. We began a middle-income housing program and acquired 1,000 units using bond financing,” Kumagai said, many in apartment complexes, which will be converted to income-restricted housing over time.

He is backed by a bevy of housing interests, including building trade unions, developers, real estate agents and landlords.

Kumagai wants to reform the California Environmental Quality Act, because he said it is too often used as a cudgel by people opposed to new housing to kill projects.

He also wants to bring back some form of a redevelopment agency, like the one the state dissolved a decade ago, to help revitalize some regions around the state with “catalyst” development projects.

Ortega was the first Latina to serve as the executive secretary-treasurer for the Alameda Labor Council union, and said voters should choose her because of her track record of advocating for workers. She immigrated to the Bay Area with her parents at the age of 3.

“I learned to speak English by kindergarten by watching General Hospital and All My Children,” she said.

“I was translating for my family and my community for as long as I can remember,” she said, which pushed her into a “trajectory of service, and led me to working for different unions to be the voice of workers.”

She previously helped craft legislation with former state Sen. Ricardo Lara to boost wages for contract workers at the UC colleges, when she worked for the union that represents university service employees, AFCSME Local 3299.

Ortega said she supports Bay Area Assemblymember Buffy Wicks’ bill, known as the Housing Opportunities for Everyone Act, which would reserve 5% of the state’s general fund each year for building affordable housing and reducing homelessness. At current budget levels, it would set aside roughly $10 billion annually, she said.

“The state has to intervene here. We have to put money aside in order for us to really accomplish these goals that everyone has visions for,” Ortega said.

Ortega also wants to speed up progress on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s executive order that would allow surplus lands to be used for housing homeless people, which she said has stalled.