Mayor led city in time of change
Big challenges: Humble politician juggled soaring economy, fallout
Edwin Mah Lee, a onetime housing activist who as San Francisco’s first Asian American mayor led the city through a period of prosperous yet turbulent tech-fueled growth, died early Tuesday after suffering a heart attack. He was 65.
He collapsed while shopping at the Safeway on Monterey Boulevard near his Glen Park home about 10 p.m. Monday. He was taken to San Francisco General Hospital, where he died at 1:11 a.m. Tuesday surrounded by family and friends.
Lee’s nearly seven years at the helm of a city known for its colorful leaders and vibrant politics marked a stark change at the mayor’s office. The reserved government manager and humble civil rights at-
torney once teased for his collection of outdated ties reluctantly accepted his interim appointment by the Board of Supervisors to San Francisco’s top job in January 2011. His predecessor, the more effervescent Gavin Newsom, had been elected lieutenant governor the previous November.
Lee insisted he would not run for a four-year term, even asking the supervisors to amend the law that would ban him from returning to his position as city administrator. He changed his mind after a public campaign started by civic leaders in Chinatown, proud of his ties to the Far East, persuaded him to run. He won the mayoral election that November and was re-elected in 2015 with only token opposition.
Lee’s time in office came during, and was largely defined by, the Bay Area’s latest and biggest high-tech boom. As jobs and new money poured into the city and San Francisco became the global hub of a new digital age, the contemplative bureaucrat who preferred working behind the scenes was thrust into the high-profile position of juggling the city’s soaring economic success with the growing issues of traffic, housing affordability and homelessness.
Lee navigated a fine line between backing the burgeoning tech industry and pledging to ease its fallout by supporting new housing and boosting social programs. The challenge was unrelenting.
He took heat for pushing tax cuts for Twitter and other tech companies to draw them to the rundown Mid-Market area and for opposing a ballot measure intended to halt short-term rentals by Airbnb and other lodging providers, which were accused of depriving residents of needed housing. Meanwhile, street drug use and homelessness became more visible, as did the city’s striking contrast between rich and poor when home prices soared to the highest in the nation.
Over Lee’s tenure, the median home price doubled to $1.2 million.
Even as the mayor spearheaded new Navigation Centers for the homeless and went as far as creating a homelessness department, the city’s progressive faction lambasted Lee for doing too little to uphold San Francisco’s reputation as a haven for the needy and underrepresented.
While critics saw his time in the mayor’s office as selling out his earlier work on civil rights and affordable housing, supporters say his empathy for the less fortunate never left him and remained a guiding principle.
“He cared about people in need his whole career,” said Charlotte Mailliard Shultz, the city’s chief of protocol and a friend of Lee for three decades. “I never saw him out of sorts. And in that job, it can bring it on. He was low-key in such a wonderful way, but you could see the wheels were always turning.”
As focused on his work as he was, Shultz said, Lee maintained a steady sense of humor, even a certain “silliness.” She remembers laughing, sometimes inappropriately, when he would whisper goofy jokes at City Hall meetings.
And when starting a speech, he often began, to the chagrin of his staffers, “I’m going to keep this short, because I am short.”
Lee was born in Seattle on May 5, 1952, the fourth of six children of parents who immigrated to the United States from Taishan, China, in the 1930s. His father was a cook, his mother a seamstress. The family lived in public housing projects. His father died, also of a heart attack, when Lee was 15.
In a tribute to her father published shortly after he became mayor, Brianna Lee said he would sometimes tell her and her sister, Tania, vivid stories of his childhood that underscored a difficult but largely happy upbringing. He would laugh when he recalled “scavenging the basement” with his brothers and sisters for Christmas gifts for one another, exchanging mismatched shoes or other bits of junk.
There were less pleasant memories, too: of watching his father deal with racist customers or his mother take on extra work after she was widowed.
Lee left the West Coast after winning a scholarship to Bowdoin College in Maine, where he graduated in 1974. He met his future wife, Anita, that year while studying in her native Hong Kong, where she was his Mandarin tutor. The two married six years later.
Lee went to UC Berkeley Law School, where he cultivated his interest in civil rights. As a law student and intern at the Asian Law Caucus in 1978, he represented residents of the Ping Yuen public housing complex in San Francisco’s Chinatown as they launched the first tenant rent strike against the city’s Housing Authority. The residents were protesting unsafe and unsanitary living conditions, which they said led to the shocking rape and murder of a 19-year-old woman in a stairwell.
Lee’s activist credentials were boosted over the next decade by lawsuits against the police and fire departments for civil rights violations. He also continued to support Chinatown in battles over development that threatened to undo the neighborhood’s cultural milieu.
It was in 1991 that the attorney’s pursuit of justice came to City Hall. Lee became the director of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission under then-Mayor Art Agnos, the first of four mayors he would work under in what would become a lengthy, and initially humdrum, career in government.
“It’s kind of ironic, because what Ed did for 12 years was fight the city and county of San Francisco,” Dale Minami, cofounder of the Asian Law Caucus, told The Chronicle in 2011.
When Mayor Willie Brown was elected four years after Lee’s move to government, Lee asked for the job of purchasing manager, a request he later acknowledged was quite obscure.
Brown “looked at me and he said, ‘You are a civil rights attorney. Why would you want to be purchasing stuff ?’ ” Lee said in 2015 interview.
“I said, ‘Because the city spends a billion dollars a year buying things. And if I could make a change in the way we buy things so we can buy more locally, I could support small businesses.’ That was the beginning of my making decisions that are, in my opinion, more in tune with the way civil rights ought to be” practiced.
During his two decades with the city, Lee would serve as public works director and, ultimately, city administrator, supervising multiple departments.
Lee’s shift to politics came in 2011 when the Board of Supervisors was forced to appoint an interim mayor after Newsom’s move to Sacramento. A number of big names were floated for the job, including former Mayor Agnos and former Supervisor Angela Alioto, but the board opted for the relatively unknown policy wonk, who promised not to seek a full term.
After a few months of solid job reviews and at the urging of the Chinese American community along with support from the tech industry, Lee decided to run for a four-year term. Brown, now a Chronicle columnist, Chinatown power broker Rose Pak and, ultimately, Sen. Dianne Feinstein backed him.
Lee won handily after a campaign in which supporters emphasized affability over political savvy. This included a video, funded by tech investor Ron Conway, where everyone from Twitter co-founder Biz Stone to then-Giants bullpen ace Brian Wilson joined with hip-hop artist MC Hammer in declaring that Lee was “2 Legit 2 Quit.”
“Ed was an excellent mayor of a great but sometimes challenging city,” Feinstein said in a statement Tuesday. “His equanimity and quiet management style was effective and allowed him to solve problems as they occurred.”
“He was the first nonpolitician in the mayor’s office,” Brown noted. “It brought to the office a level of dignity and respect and inclusiveness that the office never had naturally from a mayor.”
The problem that continued to dog Lee and his colleagues at City Hall was reconciling San Francisco’s growing wealth and its growing inequities.
As new tech companies took
root in San Francisco, success for some meant untenable housing costs for others. New luxury residential towers rose along with sprawling homeless camps. While the city’s population grew to its highest point — above 850,000 — many people simply chose to move somewhere less expensive.
The policy that brought some of those tech companies to the city became known as the “Twitter tax break.” It is now an indelible part of Lee’s political legacy, but it drew near-instant criticism.
Lee proposed the measure in 2011, after Twitter, then a still budding social media company based South of Market, announced it would leave the city and move to Silicon Valley, in large part because of extra financial burdens in San Francisco. The incentive program granted businesses in the blighted Mid-Market neighborhood a welcome exemption from the city’s payroll tax.
Not only did Twitter ultimately agree to expand into the long-empty Western Furniture Exchange and Merchandise Mart building at 10th and Market streets, but the tax break lured other companies to the neighborhood. The tech boom took off, eventually drawing startups such as Uber, Airbnb, Dropbox and Pinterest. About 20 companies have taken the tax break.
But critics blasted Lee for doing favors for his tech friends and political supporters at the expense of San Francisco’s struggling low- and middle-income residents. He gave up tens of millions of dollars of city revenue, they charge, while exacerbating the city’s housing crunch by adding many more workers to the population.
At a protest in April 2014, a few hundred workers wearing fake black mustaches that mimicked Lee’s marched to the Twitter building to present a symbolic multimillion-dollar tax bill.
While championing business, Lee never veered far from his commitment to affordable housing. Lee had recently been focused on the opening of a series of support shelters dubbed Navigation Centers for those struggling to find homes and jobs.
The centers allow homeless people to move in with their partners, pets and possessions and offer expanded services to get those people housing. Last year, Lee created the city Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing to centralize the city’s efforts in its fight against homelessness.
The department’s first director, Jeff Kositsky, said Tuesday: “I’m shocked and saddened and heartbroken.
“He sometimes drove me crazy, but in all the good ways,” Kositsky said. “We would be walking down the street together, he’d see someone experiencing homelessness, he’d want to know why and what we could do. He would call or text me when he found someone. I was always happy to work with a man who cared so deeply about every person he saw struggling.”
Lee, who helped build San Francisco’s thriving sister-city program of 18 communities abroad, including seven in Asia, drew respect across the Pacific, where he frequently visited as an unofficial ambassador of the United States.
“I think in China, in a way in political circles, people saw him as a tremendous symbol of success, as the first Chinese American mayor(s) of an American city but also because San Francisco has a special place in the world to most Chinese,” said Doreen Woo Ho, a longtime friend of Lee’s and international banking executive who serves on the city’s Port Commission. “They treated him as someone who was bigger than someone who was just mayor.”
Lee’s renown also pushed outside the city limits in the national debate over sanctuary cities with the shooting death of 32-year-old Kate Steinle at San Francisco’s Pier 14 two years ago.
The city came under fire from conservatives, including President Trump, for having freed shooting suspect Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, who was undocumented, from jail just months before the crime. An old warrant alleging Garcia Zarate had fled marijuana charges had been dropped.
Although the discharge was in line with the city’s policy of not holding immigrants solely for being undocumented — an effort to help those from outside the country feel at ease and build trust in local authorities — Lee initially sought to distance himself from the release by then-Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi. But by and large, the mayor supported the policy.
“We stand by our sanctuary city because we want everybody to feel safe and utilize the services they deserve, including education and health care,” he said at a news conference this year. “It is my obligation to keep our city united, keep it strong . ... Crime doesn’t know documentation. Disease doesn’t know documentation.”
The mayor had previously tussled with Mirkarimi when he removed him from his job as sheriff after a domestic violence arrest involving his wife. The Board of Supervisors voted to reinstate Mirkarimi, who later lost his re-election bid.
A low point in Lee’s tenure came with the resignation of Police Chief Greg Suhr in May 2016 after a string of department scandals. Lee had handpicked Suhr and stood by him through two controversial police shootings and revelations that some officers in the department had been exchanging racist text messages.
But Lee finally asked Suhr to leave, when both men agreed that the police chief had lost the confidence of the city’s minority communities.
Of all the things to alter the map of San Francisco during Lee’s era, none was a bigger priority for the mayor than the Golden State Warriors’ arena now rising in Mission Bay.
“My legacy project” was the phrase Lee used when the basketball team announced its desire, in May 2012, to move from Oakland to Piers 30-32 on San Francisco’s Embarcadero.
“I’m going to be on top of it personally,” Lee said.
When neighborhood opposition and regulatory concerns caused the team to change course in 2014 and head to Mission Bay instead, Lee, who had predicted in 2012 that “we’re still going to have a lot of bumps in the road,” embraced the new location.
“The legacy for me was getting the Warriors to come back to San Francisco,” he said. The team plans to open the 18,000seat venue in time for the 201920 season.
Lee is survived by his wife, Anita, and his two daughters, Brianna and Tania. No information on services has been announced.