From the tall windows of WIRED’s offices in San Francisco’s South-of-Market neighborhood I’ve watched almost a decade of radical change made physical in concrete and glass. The city’s forest of new skyscrapers is at least in part the legacy of Mayor Ed Lee, who died early Tuesday morning after almost seven years in office.

San Francisco is rolling into the second quarter of the 21st century with the purposeful but cautious stutter-step speed of a first-generation self-driving car—the wealthiest, youngest, smartest people on earth live alongside some of the poorest; utopia and dystopia are barely a few blocks apart. That’s the city Ed Lee built.

It’s a cliché to say upon a politician’s death that he or she had a complicated legacy, but here we are. Lee was a housing advocate who presided over a city in a deepening housing crisis, facing massive gentrification, displacement, and homelessness. He was, by most accounts, a quietly competent bureaucrat in charge of a city undergoing a tech boom, fueled by Silicon Valley’s weird strain of technolibertarian, oligopoly-friendly capitalism (and its handmaiden, #disruption). Not everything wrong in San Francisco was his fault or even under his control, but hey, he was the mayor when it happened.

As always, San Francisco is surfing the wavefront of the future. Every American city will have to deal with increasing inequality, housing problems, and the concentration of wealth in businesses that need fewer human workers and endanger independent retail. The policy decisions that those cities make, and how they think about their relationship with capital, will be shaped by San Francisco’s outcomes.

It has always been a city of booms. When Richard Henry Dana came to the Bay Area in 1834, having bailed out of Harvard for a couple of years on a trading ship, he found a whole lot of nothing—rolling hills, beautiful views, and backbreaking work moving hides. But as Dana wrote in an afterward to his book about the experience, Two Years Before the Mast, when he returned in 1859, a city had spread across the hills, the staging point for gold miners headed up the Sacramento River and steamers to the southern part of the state. Dana himself was a celebrity; Two Years Before the Mast had been one of the only books about California many of the new Californians had read about their adoptive home before moving.

California has always been America’s spatial instantiation of the idea of the future if not the actual future itself; the booms the state periodically emits are iterations of the idea that westward equals forward equals onward. For most of the 19th and 20th centuries San Francisco was a lab for technological advance alongside social experimentation. There’s a reason Star Trek locates Starfleet Academy and the United Federation of Planets headquarters there. It just fits.

As a civil rights lawyer and then administration appointee, Lee was already fighting for improvements to public housing in San Francisco when the dotcom boom came in the mid-1990s. He was a respected bureaucrat with limited political ambition in 2010 when then-mayor Gavin Newsom was elected lieutenant governor. As The New York Times reported then, Newsom and the Board of Supervisors thought they had the juice to appoint a progressive to the job, but former mayor and political macher Willie Brown, and Rose Pak, head of the powerful Chinatown political machine, rolled over the more left-leaning possible replacements for Newsom and instead found … Ed Lee.

Granted, being politically moderate in San Francisco is like being a communist anywhere else. And Lee was generally well-liked. He’d be the first mayor of Chinese descent in a city with a large Chinese-descended population, and while he’d still be an advocate for affordable housing and LGBTQ rights, he’d also look for compromise with the city’s real-estate developers.