Lee fading just as S.F. needs potent leadership
Last month, one of the signature programs of Mayor Ed Lee’s administration was on the line at a stormy public meeting in the Mission District. Some 200 impassioned citizens showed up on a Monday evening at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts to hotly debate a temporary Navigation Center planned for the neighborhood, with at least as many people unable to enter the packed theater. The air was rife with angry tension — some residents fear the center will reinforce the Mission’s status as a “dumping ground” for the homeless, while others support it to alleviate the misery on the streets.
Supervisor Hillary Ronen was in the hot seat that night, as an outspoken advocate for the Navigation Center in her district. With catcalls and cheers ringing out, she stood her ground, calmly explaining her position. She
joined onstage by several city officials, including Police Chief Bill Scott, Public Works Director Mohammed Nuru, and homeless program chief Jeff Kositsky. But there was a glaring absence. As Ronen spoke, somebody in the rowdy audience yelled out, “Where’s the mayor?”
It’s a question that many San Franciscans are asking themselves these days, more than six years into Lee’s tenure as mayor. To many, the city seems rudderless as it undergoes convulsive changes. Lee lacks the dynamic and visionary leadership that it takes to manage the explosive growth that’s been rocking San Francisco in recent years. As a result, the city seems less affordable and more difficult to live in than ever, with housing prices and evictions soaring, street congestion doubling and even tripling crosstown travel times, and class and social tensions rising. Many longtime San Francisco residents complain that the city doesn’t feel like itself any longer — it’s become more callous and crass and less creative and diverse. And it no longer even looks like itself as generic, Lego-like office and apartment buildings spring up all over town.
Lee was missing in action again last week when city officials held a news conference to declare victory in their long battle to impose reasonable regulations on the out-of-control short-term rental market, with Airbnb and HomeAway finally agreeing to require their hosts to register with the city. The Airbnb settlement is a “game changer,” City Attorney Dennis Herrera told me, giving officials the tools they need to crack down on outlaw landlords who’ve taken thousands of long-term rental units off the local housing market.
Herrera, whose office outfought the massive legal power of Airbnb, was joined at the press event by Supervisor Aaron Peskin and former Supervisor David Campos, who took the lead in the political battle with the tech giant, as well as by Board of Supervisors President London Breed. But no Mayor Lee, even though he was notified about the event and had announced his support for the settlement.
“It’s no secret that Mayor Lee is very, very close to Airbnb investors like Ron Conway,” said Dale Carlson of the Share Better SF Coalition, an anti-Airbnb business-labor alliance. “He opposed all efforts to regulate the shortterm rental market.”
The mayor’s office explained his absence from the news conference at City Hall by saying he was attending the May Day immigration march: “Standing with our immigrants was a top priority for the mayor.”
Lee has come out strongly in defense of San Francisco as a sanctuary city, but on other burning issues, like the housing and homeless crisis and the exploding wealth gap, the mayor often is invisible.
Lee still has nearly three years left in office. But when Mark Leno announced his campaign for mayor last week at City Hall, surrounded by eager supporters and TV news cameras, it only seemed to reinforce Lee’s lamewas duck status. Leno told the press that he stood for a “new direction.” He pledged to fight the real estate speculators who are forcing people out of their homes and to take on the “deeppocketed special interests” that have made San Francisco unlivable for thousands of people. Though Leno dodged the question, it sounded like he was campaigning against Lee, who will be termed out of office in January 2020. Lee’s low poll numbers will undoubtedly make his legacy an easy target in the next mayoral race.
What Ed Lee’s legacy as mayor? Peskin, who has clashed often with Lee, told me it’s hard to define because he lacks a commanding presence at City Hall. “I was talking to somebody about a hot issue one day outside the Board of Supervisors room, and he asked me, ‘What’s the mayor think about this?’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you ask him — he’s standing over there.’ And I pointed to Steve Kawa.” The mayor’s chief of staff is the true power in Room 200, according to many City Hall observers, with Lee often disengaged from major decision-making.
“I get the mayor’s schedule of events mailed to me each day, and there’s often nothing on it,” said Peskin. “At least with mayors like Willie Brown and Gavin Newsom, with whom I often disagreed, you had colorful characters — they both fit the picture of what a bigcity mayor should be. But that’s just not Ed’s style. I don’t know what his vision is.”
Newsom, who helped install Lee as mayor in 2011 when he stepped down to become lieutenant governor, stands by him. “His leadership style is different than mine — but I thought it was a healthy change,” Newsom told me. “It was a welcome reset. Anybody can woulda, shoulda, coulda from the sidelines. But Ed had some major challenges. He had to drink out of the fire hose of rapid economic growth. And he’s advanced some extremely progressive policies, including a higher minimum wage, affordable housing and the Navigation Centers.”
As for the mayor himself, his office sent me this statement: “Mayor Lee, while not as flashy as some of our previous mayors, is a nose to the grindstone guy with a vision to match his tenacity.” His office pointed to the rehabilitation of the city’s long-neglected public housing stock as one of Lee’s signature accomplishments, “with nearly 3,500 public housing units and 29 buildings across the city” being renovated and placed under the management of nonprofit organizations that “specialize in this work.”
Supervisor Katy Tang, a supporter, gave credit to Lee for devoting more resources to the homeless crisis but said she’d like to see him play a more visible role in the life of the city. “I would like to see him go out to the neighborhoods more often, even if he gets heckled sometimes. Hey, I get heckled, too, especially on housing and development issues. But that’s the way it goes — you need to listen.”
If Lee did show up to more community events, he would indeed get an earful — and for good reason. His “hands-off, laissez-faire, let-themarket-decide approach to everything,” as community activist Calvin Welch puts it, is out of step with a growing multitude of San Franciscans who feel scorched by the overheated housing market.
“This mayor is pedal to the metal on marketrate housing, but he’s presided over a shrinking percentage of affordable housing,” Welch said. “Ed Lee is more concerned about the six-figure tech worker than he is with the cafeteria worker in the tech office building who makes $35,000 a year. But it’s the service workers who make up the largest percentage of the tech industry. His priorities are exactly backwards.”
Once upon a time, young Ed Lee stood for something else, fighting against the greedy landlords who were preying on the people of Chinatown. He was even called a “communist” troublemaker in those days.
“It’s sad Rose Pak is dead,” Peskin said of the power broker who drove the rise of San Francisco’s Chinese American community. “She’d be screaming at Ed, reminding him of where he came from.”