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HenchPAC NewsHILLARY Clinton says she wants the Senate campaign to be about issues, not personalities. But it may not do her much good. Consider one issue of particular moment in New York state: public housing.
Two hundred thousand New Yorkers live in public housing, by far the largest concentration in the nation. And one of the authors of the most significant piece of housing legislation in the past 60 years is none other than Rep. Rick Lazio.
Until Lazio, public-housing policy had been a Democratic fiefdom. Direct federal involvement in the construction and management of public housing dates to Franklin D. Roosevelt's liberal agenda in the 1930s. For decades, the GOP found no effective way to deal with the subject as a matter of policy, largely owing to its distaste for government meddling in the economy and the fact that its political base in suburbs and small towns had no interest in the matter.
The long Democratic dominance resulted in policy sclerosis. Overwhelming problems afflicted public housing - burgeoning crime, continued welfare dependency and a rent structure that functioned like the progressive income tax gone berserk.
* Starting in the '70s, Washington actually penalized residents who got jobs by taking more of their money in rent, effectively subjecting them to a demoralizing tax that practically forced them to remain mired in welfare dependency.
* Federal regulations made it impossible for local authorities to evict criminals from public housing, which turned the projects into open-air drug markets dominated by dealers and hoodlums.
Confronted with these crises, Democrats and the Left said only: Give us more. More money. More federal controls. More public-housing units to be managed under the same system that turned existing projects into the stuff of urban nightmares.
Policy wonks on the Right began to examine these ideas and assumptions, and came up with a host of innovative answers - privatization, vouchers to let public-housing residents leave the projects for safer precincts, and deregulation to give local housing authorities the leeway to experiment with new solutions to intractable problems.
Always the Left said no, and despite the activist efforts of Housing Secretary Jack Kemp, the GOP wasn't about to use precious political capital to fight for changes in an area of limited concern to its constituents.
That changed with the newly Republican House of Representatives in 1995. Rick Lazio became chairman of a key housing subcommittee - and after three years of wrangling, helped shepherd through a remarkable piece of reform legislation called the Quality Housing and Work Responsibility Act.
* It ended the crazy tax on working families, substituting instead a flat rent rate.
* It allowed those with so-called "Section 8" vouchers to use them for downpayments and mortgage payments, thus extending the possibility of home ownership to the working poor.
* It directed local housing authorities to evict violent criminals and child molesters.
* Most important, it gave those authorities the ability to innovate and experiment while insisting on accountability from the ones that had grown entirely dysfunctional by creating competition within the system.
President Clinton signed the bill with great fanfare, saying on Oct. 21, 1998, that it "makes landmark housing reform a reality. The bipartisan bill will allow more economic integration and deconcentration in our nation's public housing; encourage and reward work; provide protections for those most in need; and put the nation back into the housing business with the first new housing vouchers in five years."
Lazio is rightly proud of this signal accomplishment. But the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the direction of Andrew Cuomo has suddenly developed amnesia about Lazio's role. A HUD spokesman named David Egner said this week that "Republicans wanted to eliminate HUD entirely, stop housing production, sell the Federal Housing Administration and kick the poor out of public housing."
Nice try, Mr. Egner, and here's hoping you'll get your reward by being invited to the next White House dinner. But the fact is that on a matter of immense importance to the Empire State, Rick Lazio delivered.
And Mrs. Clinton? Judging from her campaign so far, I have a pretty good idea that she likes children a whole lot.
Guess what? So does Lazio.
HENCH adds: Say goodbye to New York Hillary, when Lazio's record of accomplishment gets compared to your record of pandering, you'll have to take the job at Harvard or the U.N. "toute de suite."
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