SAN FRANCISCO _ San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, who led the city during a development boom fueled by unprecedented tech wealth, died early Tuesday. He was 65.
Lee's death was announced by the city in a statement. No cause of death was immediately given. London Breed, the president of the Board of Supervisors, was sworn into office as acting mayor.
"It is with profound sadness and terrible grief that we confirm that Mayor Edwin M. Lee passed away on Tuesday, Dec. 12 at 1:11 a.m. at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital," the statement said. "Family, friends and colleagues were at his side. Our thoughts and prayers are with his wife Anita, his two daughters, Brianna and Tania, and his family."
Lee became mayor in 2011, becoming the first Asian-American to hold the job. He was first appointed in 2011 to replace Gavin Newsom, who was elected as California's lieutenant governor, and subsequently ran for a full term later that year. He was re-elected in 2015.
Lee led San Francisco just as the tech boom began to take hold in the city. Unemployment plummeted, and the city saw a wave of development, symbolized by a new tallest building, the Salesforce Tower.
Under Lee, San Francisco saw a crop of new high-rise buildings, and the city gained enhanced status as the global capital of the tech industry.
But Lee also became a magnet for criticism as rents and property values soared and many residents of moderate means said they no longer could afford to live in the city.
In a city famous for its sophistication and activism, Lee cut a decidedly down-home figure, known for his folksy jokes and political consensus-building.
Lee and his six siblings grew up in a Seattle public housing complex before his father, a cook, and his mother, a garment worker, built a modest home. As a youth helping with deliveries from the family restaurant, he had listened to hostile customers berate his dad with racial slurs.
"It was an awakening," Lee told the Los Angeles Times in 2015. "'Why do we as people take this?'"
As a young lawyer, he joined the San Francisco Asian Law Caucus, helping in 1978 to organize a rent strike by residents in Chinatown's decrepit Ping Yuen public housing project after a young woman was raped and killed there.
In 1988, then-Mayor Art Agnos hired Lee to run a whistleblower program, followed by a stint heading the Human Rights Commission, where he pressed for fair hiring practices for women and minorities. In his next post, as city purchaser, he opened contracting doors to those same groups. Later, he became public works director and city administrator.
In a 2011 interview, Agnos described Lee as "charming, self-deprecating and competitive."
Lee was not a natural politician _ his temperament had long been of an affable low-key bureaucrat, known for his chunky mustache. As city administrator, he somehow sidestepped the city's pitched battles between moderate liberals and more left-leaning progressives.
But he was pressed to leave his administrative job, first to become interim mayor and then _ breaking a promise to not run for election _ asking voters to elect him to a full term. Among those who pushed him to do so was former Mayor Willie Brown, the late Chinatown power broker Rose Pak, and then finally Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who was said to have persuaded him that San Francisco needed him to steer clear of the paralyzing battles between moderates and more liberal progressives that have marred recent administrations.
Lee easily won re-election two years ago. In 2015, voters also approved a $310 million bond for affordable housing _ the largest in San Francisco history _ which he championed.
Lee's election was a milestone for San Francisco's influential Chinese-American population, many of whose ancestors came from China to San Francisco during the gold rush era but faced decades of ugly discrimination by both residents and the government. At the turn of the 20th century, the city shuttered all Chinese-owned businesses and quarantined and barricaded Chinatown.
Former San Francisco Mayor Brown told KGO-TV that Lee suffered cardiac arrest. The San Francisco Chronicle said he collapsed while shopping Monday night at a Safeway grocery store near his home.
Tributes poured in as news of Lee's death spread.
"Ed was an excellent mayor of a great but sometimes challenging city. His equanimity and quiet management style was effective and allowed him to solve problems as they occurred," Feinstein said in a statement.
State Sen. Scott Wiener, a San Francisco Democrat who served on the Board of Supervisors until he was elected to the state Legislature a year ago, said he was "just floored" that Lee was gone; Wiener said he had just attended a news conference with Lee on Monday and said he "was his normal jovial and friendly self."
"Ed served as mayor during a period of unprecedented growth in our city and an unprecedented housing shortage. Ed never got the credit he deserved as arguably the most pro-housing mayor in the history of San Francisco, with a huge amount of affordable housing created or approved under his administration," Wiener said in a statement. "San Francisco has lost a great leader."
The acting mayor, Breed, is a native San Franciscan who was raised by her grandmother in a housing project in the Western Addition neighborhood. She was first elected to the Board of Supervisors in 2012 and was elevated to serve as president in 2015, succeeding David Chiu, who was elected to the state Assembly.
A special election will be held in June 5 to elect a candidate to fill the remainder of Lee's term, which ends Jan. 7, 2020.
For now, Breed remains acting as both acting mayor and a member of the Board of Supervisors. The board may, but does not have to, choose to appoint an interim mayor, which would require approval of six members of the 11-member board.
