Edwin Mah Lee, San Francisco’s 43rd mayor and the third to die in office, leaves behind a city in transition. 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.
