Maybe it was the tennis sweater–a white, cabled woolen with red and blue piping at the V-neck.
Whatever it was, I first took U.S. Rep. Rick Lazio (R-N.Y.) to be a lightweight.
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Big mistake.
It’s also a mistake Hillary Rodham Clinton had better not make … or the first lady will be looking for work next year along with the first man.
But you couldn’t blame Mrs. Clinton for being fooled. East Coast columnists have been making great sport of “Ricky” Lazio ever since he replaced the self-destructive Rudolph Giuliani in the New York senatorial race. Last week one Big Apple pundit compared the 42-year-old congressman to a puppy dog. Another likened him to TV’s Ricky Nelson.
Let me assure them, Rick Lazio is neither an eager beagle nor an all-American adolescent. He is very ambitious, it’s true. But he is also very smart, engaging and good at getting things done … his way.
This I learned in 1996, after Rep. Lazio had taken over the chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Housing. He was a protege of then-Speaker Newt Gingrich and full of wild, Gingrichian ideas about reinventing public housing. Then again, more extreme Republicans were talking about getting rid of public housing. Even presidential candidate Bob Dole talked of giving every tenant a rent voucher and selling off the real estate.
Lazio was in Chicago to hold a hearing on his more modest ideas and to tour the Chicago Housing Authority’s Robert Taylor Homes–our national monument to rotten public housing. He also stopped by Tribune Tower for a sit-down with myself and reporter Flynn McRoberts, who then covered CHA.
Having followed public housing here since the reign of Charlie Swibel, I tried playing Stump-the-Kid. But this kid would not be stumped. He had done his homework. Turned out, his proposed Housing Opportunity and Responsibility Act anticipated the regulatory changes that would be needed if Chicago was to fix the worst public housing in America.
Lazio wanted to do away with the “Brooke Amendment,” a clause that for 25 years had chased working families out of public housing by requiring them to pay 30 percent of their income as rent.
Lazio wanted to collapse the long list of federal operating and capital subsidies to local housing agencies–each subsidy with its own set of rules–into just two block grants. That way agencies like CHA could decide where and how to focus resources.
Lazio wanted to scrap the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s requirement that local agencies build one new unit of housing for every decrepit one they tore down. Instead, they could give the displaced rent vouchers for private apartments.
Lazio wanted housing authorities to do periodic cost-benefit analyses to find out if it would be more cost-efficient to demolish, rather than repair, older buildings and then “voucher-out” tenants.
Lazio wanted to let local authorities screen and select tenants–not just take the next name from the waiting list–and to reject applicants with a history of drug abuse or sexual violence.
There were a few duds on his list, to be sure. Lazio wanted to completely repeal the original public Housing Act of 1937 (a gratuitous slap at New Deal liberalism) and to make tenants perform mandatory, unpaid public service (when what they really needed was real jobs or job training in anticipation of welfare-reform deadlines.)
With those exceptions, the Tribune supported Lazio’s plan editorially. So did the main lobbying group for large public housing agencies, many of which, like CHA, had been hamstrung by HUD’s red tape.
It took Chairman Lazio two more years to pass his reforms. HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo, a New York political rival, did not take kindly to their implicit criticism of the old ways. Over in the Senate, then-incumbent Sen. Alphonse D’Amato was in no hurry to make his fellow Long Islander look like a wunderkind.
But it was Rick Lazio’s vision, only slightly amended, that was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in the fall of 1998.
And one year later, after taking direct control of the CHA, it was Mayor Richard Daley who insisted HUD grant Chicago every last flexibility authorized by Lazio’s law. Without it, there’s no way Daley’s CHA could knock down 51 high-rises and build or rehab 25,000 replacement units. No way.
One could fairly argue that Rick Lazio, tennis sweater and all, is the father of reform at CHA.
And speaking of reform, Mrs. Clinton, how’s that health care redo coming?
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