Edwin Mah Lee

NY Times Obituary:

Edwin M. Lee, a well-respected civil rights lawyer who became the first Asian-American to be elected as mayor of San Francisco, died early on Tuesday of undisclosed causes, his office said. He was 65.

“It is with profound sadness and terrible grief that we confirm that Mayor Edwin M. Lee passed away on Tuesday, December 12 at 1:11 a.m. at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Family, friends and colleagues were at his side,” his office said in a statement.

Brent Andrew, the spokesman for the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, said Mr. Lee arrived at the hospital in an ambulance at about 10 p.m. on Monday.

Mr. Andrew was unable to say what condition Mr. Lee was in when he arrived. But he said that the ambulance had picked up the mayor, along with his wife, who was not a patient, at Monterey Avenue, a residential area of shops and restaurants.

Mr. Lee had been mayor since January 2011 when, after weeks of disputes, the board of supervisors elected him by a 10-to-1 vote as the interim leader of a city in which roughly a third of the residents are of Asian descent.

After consistently expressing a reluctance to hold the job on a permanent basis, Mr. Lee entered the electoral race in August 2011 and was elected in November, becoming mayor at a time of tremendous change for the city as the technology industry became increasingly influential.

Under the city’s rules, London Breed, the president of the board of supervisors, became the acting mayor.

Mr. Lee was born in 1952 in the Seattle neighborhood Beacon Hill, one of six children of Chinese immigrants who came to the United States in the 1930s. His mother was a seamstress; his father, a war veteran, died when Mr. Lee was a teenager.

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After receiving a full scholarship and matriculating at Bowdoin College, he moved to the Bay Area in 1975 to study law, and quickly became involved in the housing issues that would define his early career. His understanding of Cantonese and Taishanese helped him to win the trust of immigrant communities on whose behalf he fought as part of the San Francisco Asian Law Caucus.

After a decade, he left that organization and proceeded to work in five different city departments under four different mayors. In 1991, he became the city’s human rights commissioner, and in 2005, was appointed city administrator.

At his first swearing-in, in 2011, he commented on his rise from housing advocate to virtually unknown civil servant to city leader.

“Decades ago, I was about as anti-establishment as one could be,” he said. “But today, like you, I’m trying to make the establishment work for all San Franciscans.”

He is survived by his wife, Anita, and his two daughters, Tania and Brianna.

Mr. Lee easily won re-election in 2015, but two years later was struggling under the housing issues that are again weighing on the city. A column in The San Francisco Chronicle in May, headlined “Where’s Ed Lee, our fading mayor?,” questioned his ability to contend with the challenges facing the tech hub.

“Lee lacks the dynamic and visionary leadership that it takes to manage the explosive growth that’s been rocking San Francisco in recent years,” the columnist, David Talbot, wrote. “As a result, the city seems less affordable and more difficult to live in than ever.”

But Mr. Lee could still be forceful on issues that mattered to him, and he retained his passion for immigrant rights. In January, in his State of the City address, he insisted that San Francisco would remain a sanctuary city “now, tomorrow, forever.”