The end comes swiftly, sometimes among the produce or at the spice rack. Our city’s 43rd mayor, Ed Lee, died last night after shopping at a Safeway — a shocking conclusion to a decades-long career in local government. London Breed, president of the Board of Supervisors, is now acting mayor.
How do we measure Lee’s accomplishments? The outlines of his life arc are well known: Lee grew up in public housing and worked as a dishwasher to help support his family. College at Bowdoin, then Berkeley law school, then a legal advocate for tenants in the Chinese community. Art Agnos brought him onto the city staff, and the rest is an upward-mobility story in municipal government.
By the time he was appointed mayor in 2011 (hand-picked by Gavin Newsom, who was elected lieutenant governor), Lee and every other civic leader in the country were staring into the depths of a Great Recession. Unemployment in San Francisco was almost 9 percent.
Flash-forward to today, unemployment in the city is below 3 percent, and San Francisco is belatedly taking steps to address long-standing issues holding it back: homelessness and housing. On the former, Lee vowed to end chronic homelessness for veterans and reduce chronic homelessness overall by 50 percent. To that end, he sought to place a navigation center in each of the city’s 11 districts. The response was, as they say when one tries and flops, mixed. What’s more, the sheer tenacity of the problem continues to grate on everyone, resident and visitor alike. Lots more work lies ahead here for the newly seated Breed.
On the latter, housing, Lee’s record looks a lot better. He had set a goal to add or rehabilitate 30,000 units of housing; the tally so far is past the halfway point at 17,000 units. More about this in a moment.
Even as gracious statements of condolence pour in (Sup. Aaron Peskin was in tears as he spoke to a reporter), some people aren’t ready to let go of what irked them most about Lee, and the last couple of mayors too: They were selling the city out. Lee in particular was accused of getting rolled by tech, making him a party to the displacement and evictions and bus-stop hijackings and SF’s devolvement into an unaffordable and sterile playground for the rich.
There’s a germ of truth to these claims, and The Frisc itself is dedicated to telling stories about a changing city. But let’s also be clear about the following: For all the criticisms from progressives, Ed Lee did not pivot toward them. Part of it was that he didn’t have to; Lee ran unopposed in his second try. (The distant second-place finisher? Francisco Herrera, a musician.) Cries of “sellout!” never got under his skin.
For his counterparts, the thick skin wasn’t exactly mutual. When the former city supervisor and always bombastic Chris Daly wakes up in the morning and sees that San Francisco’s mayor has died, he tweets this:
OK, so politics ain’t beanbag. San Francisco’s politics certainly aren’t, but in our game of beanbag the beans are organic and soaked in arsenic. Beyond Daly’s dead-man trolling, the thread is instructive on how things play out in San Francisco. Progressives like Daly keep airing the same grievance so often that it’s become a calling card for the city’s NIMBYs, cynical preservationists, and choleric power-grabbers. Even as SF suffers from housing scarcity, transit underinvestment, and much more, the last mayor, the new one, and also the next one will have to contend with this beef before getting on with the business of the office. Lee excelled at not taking the bait and not wasting his time.
I return now to housing, because here is where you’ll find Lee’s crowning achievement, more than plans for a sports stadium and being a calm leader and so on. The mellow mayor put his foot down earlier this year: He did not trumpet a pledge but directly asked city agencies to cut obstacles and delays to make sure we’re building 5,000 units every year to loosen the grip of the housing crisis.
Several preceding mayors should have had the vision or the backbone (probably a bit of both) to have done so before, but didn’t. It’s telling that the apparently unnatural politician, the seemingly meek man who once washed dishes and represented tenants and basically got put up to run the city had the goods to take on its toughest challenges. Not all heroes are firebrands who wear capes, and one may even have a funny mustache. We’ll miss you, Ed.
Follow Anthony Lazarus on Twitter: @Sr_Lazarus
