San Francisco's Mayor Ed Lee Dead at 65

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee died early Tuesday morning, his office confirmed. He was 65.

The mayor died at 1:11 a.m. at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Former Mayor Willie Brown said Lee was shopping at his neighborhood Safeway at 625 Monterey Blvd. when he suffered a heart attack. He was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

City Hall flags were being flown at half-staff Tuesday morning.

Lee was San Francisco’s 43rd mayor.

He served largely as a behind-the-scenes city bureaucrat — holding positions as the executive director of the Human Rights Commission, director of Department of Public Works and City Administrator — until he was appointed by the Board of Supervisors in January 2011 to serve as an interim mayor to serve out the remainder of a term vacated by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, who was elected to serve as California’s lieutenant governor.

Lee went on to win election later that year and was re-elected in 2015 to his final four-year term office, which concludes at the end of 2019.

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Lee and his six siblings grew up in Seattle’s public housing. He went on to graduate from Bowdoin College in 1974 and later earned a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley.

In office, Lee helped turned around San Francisco’s local economy, which was struggling like other cities from the Great Recession. Lee ushered in a tech-friendly business climate, such as by enacting a tax break for Twitter in the Mid-Market area. His focus on jobs paid off as unemployment rates dropped to record lows.

Amid his successes, Lee faced criticism from San Francisco’s more-left leaning politicians and advocates for not doing more to alleviate the adverse impacts of a booming economy, the soaring rents, increased evictions and displacement of long-time residents.

More recently the mayor established a new city department focused on homeless residents, which appears to have success. He had also remained committed to his goal established in 2014 to create 30,000 new and rehabilitated homes available by 2020, of which a third would be set at below-market rate rents.

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