Edwin Mah Lee, San Francisco’s 43rd mayor and the third to die in office, was a man of destiny. Nearing 60 years old and finally eyeing retirement after nearly 20 years in public employment, he was on vacation in China when the momentous phone call came. It’s pat and banal, but it’s true: After that conversation, the “tremendously reluctant” bureaucrat was convinced to become mayor in a coronation in which the king was absent, and neither his life nor ours would ever be the same.
It’s fair to wonder what San Francisco would look like had Lee declined the offer to be a temporary “caretaker mayor”; or resisted the immense pressure to renege and run for a full term; or faced serious, well-funded, recognizable opposition for reelection in 2015.
But he didn’t, and so here we are: The second-tallest skyscraper west of the Mississippi River is rising in South of Market, a few blocks away from where another monolith tilts slowly into the muck. In Mission Bay, a derelict ghost town a decade ago, an 18,000-person basketball arena is under construction in what’s now a dense forest of hospitals, university classrooms, and research facilities. More people than ever before live and work in San Francisco, where the homeless population is resiliently constant, tent cities are taking over sidewalks in front of million-dollar condos, and where income inequality tests the limits of metaphor.
How much of this is Ed Lee’s legacy? All of it, since these are things that happened when he was mayor, and ergo nominally in charge of it all. In the Lee era, the city became richer, taller, and more crowded. It is harsher, wholly unaffordable, and racially and economically segregated.
How much of these successes and failures can you pin squarely on him, on the man and his policies? Much less, and perhaps even very little.
Ed Lee’s critics will say that he was an affable but pliable puppet mayor who did whatever Rose Pak, Willie Brown, Ron Conway, or his chief of staff told him to do. (His election campaign slogan, “Ed Lee Gets It Done,” has an almost Oz-like ring to it, a magician’s misdirection to the man in front of the curtain and not behind.) They would say the housing affordability crisis, SFPD’s racism and corruption scandal and troubling propensity to shoot unarmed people of color, and the epic Uber- and Lyft-wrought traffic gridlock are his fault. This would be wrong.
Ed Lee isn’t responsible for passing Prop. 13, restricting housing development throughout the state, or setting the forces in motion that have rendered most of us pawns in a great casino game played by Peter Thiel and his venture capitalist friends on Sand Hill Road. Ed Lee didn’t start the Great Recession and he didn’t end it. It’s not Ed Lee’s fault robots are replacing workers and that Silicon Valley office culture resembles well-moneyed frat parties. Ed Lee didn’t make the first plate of four-dollar avocado toast, any more than he himself raised the minimum wage to $15 or any of the other myriad accomplishments assigned to his resume. Ed Lee didn’t even start the negotiations with Twitter that would lead to the “Twitter tax break” alternatively praised or blamed for ushering in the stampede of tech firms and their youthful, upwardly mobile, and sometimes deplorable workers.
Then again, Ed Lee didn’t do much to halt these transformations, or even try to stand in the way.
Ed Lee leaves behind a legacy that includes rehabbing public housing and creating a city affordable housing fund. RIP Mayor Lee. https://t.co/MmXmp9jwCx
— Mark Hogan (@markasaurus) December 12, 2017
An illustrative example of how Ed Lee’s record is misunderstood can be found in his origin story. Most every biography of the man published in the hours after his death from a heart attack Tuesday mentioned his humble upbringings in public housing. It’s worth noting the Seattle housing blocs that housed the Lees and provided Edwin and other members of his generation a subsidized springboard to the middle class—and, in his case, ultimately, the marble-walled halls of power—bears little resemblance to today’s crumbling firetraps infested with vermin, lead paint, and toxic mold.
That’s not Ed Lee’s fault. That was decades of intentional neglect and under-investment from a Congress hellbent on destroying LBJ’s Great Society and any semblance of the government largess--you could say welfare--that made much of America great. At the same time, when Ed Lee later inherited a Bill Clinton-era program that semi-privatizes public housing in order to rebuild it, and later saw it expanded across the city, he is credited with its rehabilitation. .
What is the truth? It’s somewhere in the middle. Ed Lee saw it done.
One of the sad ironies of Ed Lee’s life is that he died with what he believed would be his record physically incomplete. A year ago, the San Francisco Chronicle listed Chase Arena, where the Golden State Warriors plan to relocate before the decade is out, and a proposed museum for George Lucas’s movie memorabilia collection on Treasure Island as the mayor’s “legacy projects.” Today, Lucas’s museum is headed to Los Angeles and the hole in the ground in Mission Bay, which will someday become Chase Arena, for now, remains incomplete. And none of that matters.
Fifty years or a century from now, when rising tides overwhelm the docks on the bay, San Franciscans will seek refuge in Lee-era high-rises. Lee’s lasting public legacy has already been cemented, in the lakes of concrete poured into bay fill while he sat in City Hall. To be in Ed Lee’s boomtown San Francisco was to live, work, and attempt to play in a near-permanent construction zone.
A while back, in the San Francisco Examiner newsroom, there was discussion about what Ed Lee’s “king name” would be. If he were a royal, what would be his sobriquet? Richard the Lionheart, William the Conqueror, Willie the Slick—what would Ed’s be? The questioner knew his answer before he asked. “Ed Lee, the builder,” he said, triumphant. It was hard to argue then and harder now. San Francisco went vertical with Ed Lee in charge.
It’s never enough to please everyone. In 2014, with housing affordability replacing jobs as the city’s central crisis, Ed Lee made a bold promise: 30,000 new units of housing by 2020. Even this vow had to be retrofitted--altered to include the renovated public housing--but according to his office, as of May, we were more than halfway there, which means we were on pace to miss this goal, badly. (Not that it mattered: Fixing the city’s affordability problem would require 100,000 new units, the stuff of pure fantasy.)
With the pace of new construction slowing to 2,600 homes a year, this fall, the mayor demanded an annual output of 5,000 homes, and ordered city agencies to speed up their approval processes to do it. Whether it will work was always out of his control. A mayor can’t hope to alter market forces all by himself. A mayor can’t compel banks to lend to developers at a rate to generate sufficient profit. Liquid capital flowed into San Francisco from all over the world, coalesced, and took form as skyscrapers just as it did in New York, London, and everywhere else money is found.
In a real way, Ed Lee was a caretaker mayor after all. And he got it done. He took care of the store, grinned at the paying customers on their way in and out, and shrugged his shoulders when the regulars couldn’t afford to shop there anymore.
Take stock of his public profile and his approval rating at the end. Then remember what he was doing when this whole thing started. Nothing emerges more than the impression of a man waiting and watching the clock run out, wistfully staring at his golf bag, clubs shined and ready to go.
Ed Lee wanted to retire, play golf, and hang out with his family. This was true way back in 2010, when fate—or Rose Pak, or whomever—intervened. He was on his way out the door when he was called into work, where he died.
Ed Lee, you start to think, was just here weathering the storm with the rest of us, riding the same wave, waiting for a lull long enough for him to safely escape.
The thing is, though, he was the mayor, and so the captain. He didn’t have that luxury. Neither did we.