Ed Lee — a mayor who got things done
By Corey Cook Dec. 12, 2017 Updated: Dec. 12, 2017 3:12 p.m.
Willie Mays has a laugh with Mayor Ed Lee at the Cable Car Museum on Friday, May 6, 2016 in San Francisco, Calif. Mays, a San Francisco Giants legend and Baseball Hall of Famer, turned 85 today. Cable car No. 24, the same number he wore when he played for the S.F. Giants, was dedicated and named after Mays.
Photo: Santiago Mejia, Special to The Chronicle
Ed Lee's appointment as San Francisco's first Asian American mayor was historic and wholly unexpected. Of the names bandied about in January 2011 as possible interim successors to Mayor Gavin Newsom, Lee's seemed to emerge at the last minute. He appeared the least likely candidate to be called by a progressive Board of Supervisors freshly liberated from a multiyear confrontation with Newsom. In comparison to some of the dynamic larger-than-life political personalities for whom he served, Lee's tenure promised to be an intriguing footnote, not a full chapter, to San Francisco history.
Yet that interim year vastly exceeded expectations, and his mayoralty has turned out to be one of the city's most consequential.
Lee proved to be a popular technocrat whose public service career spanned multiple mayoralties. As interim mayor, he repeatedly rejected the idea that he would seek a full term himself — then jumped in less than 100 days before the November election and soundly lapped the field.
His simple slogan, "Ed Lee gets things done" seemed to perfectly capture the desires of the electorate.
Rather than just keep the lights on in City Hall, Lee engaged the board in a collaborative and collegial budget process, which turned down the volume on the acrimony at City Hall and started to yield results.
Lee's legacy on public policy was both considerable and contentious: He presided over a prolonged tech boom that shifted the fulcrum of Silicon Valley north, which resulted in an affordable housing and homelessness crisis. He brokered a standard redevelopment tool to revitalize a barren stretch of Market Street — a payroll tax exemption that became known as the "Twitter tax break" — that became a political controversy wielded against him.
The city today looks very different from the one when Lee took the helm. Lee presided over the city's changing skyline and a substantial evolution of the very essence of San Francisco. Those changes will be debated for years to come.
He had been a community organizer, civil rights attorney and advocate for affordable housing with deep ties in Chinatown and throughout San Francisco. He forcefully advocated for San Francisco values and the city's sanctuary status at a time when the national discourse had shifted dramatically against sanctuary protections for undocumented immigrants.
The era of good feelings that resulted in his election to his first full term certainly didn't last. Lee wasn't able to consistently bridge the moderate and progressive camps, but he remained nearly universally well-liked. His abiding love of the city he served for four decades endeared him to even his staunchest opponents.
Corey Cook taught political science at the University of San Francisco for nine years and San Francisco State University for three years. Today, he is the dean of the School of Public Service at Boise State University.