DITCHING SCHOOL | PAGE 1, 2
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By Weiss' own confession, this dedication to public policy has had some personal costs. "I wanted to come to Washington and my wife, a lawyer, really didn't. I went anyway and that's a large part of why she isn't my wife anymore," he says. As an academic, Weiss' claim to fame rests on his one major book: "The Rise of the Community Builders: The American Real Estate Industry and Urban Land Planning" (1987). The book, written in straightforward prose, describes how commercial builders urged the government to create a system of rules and regulations that encouraged Americans to buy private homes.

Ideas like this have made Weiss popular among Democrats like Clinton who want to establish bona fides with the business community. Time and again, Weiss' book shows that the right kind of government intervention can help private industry achieve goals that benefit society. Although Weiss believes that America couldn't have increased home ownership so quickly without suburbia, he's no friend of the great sprawl that deadened urban centers and destroyed open space. "Government policies played a big role in building suburbia," he says. "But it didn't happen for free."

Even though it was his academic career that paved the way to his current political clout, he traces the roots of his work to a much earlier age. "From the time I first took part in civil rights demonstrations in Chicago when I was 13, I knew I wanted to change the world," he says. "It wasn't so much that I wanted to become an academic, but it was just that the position gave me a good deal of freedom and some time to really think about policy and maybe the opportunity to make a difference." This desire to make a difference led to a year-long stint as a bus driver when indecision struck Weiss after a year of graduate school.

"The San Francisco schools had just been integrated and I went in and got a job as a bus driver to forward integration. I was a real driver -- a member of the union and everything -- driving a 40-foot-long school bus down those hills," he says proudly. After a two-year tour of duty writing movie and restaurant reviews for the Pentagram -- a publication for Defense Department employees in the D.C area -- he left the Army and returned to graduate school at UC-Berkeley at age 27. His Ph.D. took another seven years. But no sooner had his academic career begun with the publication of his dissertation than politics again raised its seductive head. A friend asked him to write housing policy for Michael Dukakis. One of the few good days in Dukakis' otherwise disastrous 1988 campaign for the presidency came when he went out to a 1950s tract-home development on Long Island to announce plans to make home ownership easier, plans that Weiss had played a key role in developing.

"That was when I realized [this] was the sort of thing I had always wanted to be doing," says Weiss. "I knew how to play the academic game but I missed the idea of actually implementing the policies I was writing about." Weiss' desire to make policy rather than study it only grew as Dukakis' defeat ensured his fellow Democrats another four years out of power. As Clinton's campaign started to heat up in 1991, Weiss approached people he had met during the last campaign and soon he was touring the country selling groups on candidate Clinton's plans to make more Americans into homeowners. Weiss served as Clinton's transition team advisor on housing and urban policy and then landed a job as a senior analyst at HUD. For Weiss, this job in the public sector represented a huge change. "I had taught public policy for years and, after a little while in Washington, I realized that you can't teach public policy at all," he says. "I had no idea at all how things actually worked here, no idea how to get things done. I was suppose to be a teacher of this but actually I knew next to nothing about it."

It was then that Weiss began to feel the tension between the worlds of academia and government. "It made me realize how messy politics can be," he says. "But it also made me realize how much I liked doing it." Despite his relative inexperience, Weiss threw himself into the political maelstrom. He devised new and restructured loan and purchasing policies that made it a bit easier for low- and moderate-income people to buy housing. The Hope 6 grant program, which he helped devise, began to tear down and replace some of the country's worst public housing units. After years of decline under Reagan and Bush, American homeownership rates began to rise thanks in part to policies that Weiss implemented.

Today, despite the residue of the ivory tower lingering on his shirttails and his vocabulary, Weiss' concerns have become increasingly unacademic -- focusing more and more on the local problems of his adopted hometown. Indeed, it's sometimes difficult to get him to stop talking about new Metrorail stations, traffic patterns and high-tech development zones -- so fixated is he on the gritty details of his work. If the seduction of academia is in the power of the imagination to give birth to ideals far beyond implementation, the lure of public service is the exact opposite. As Weiss moves away from the rarefied world of ideas and becomes enmeshed in the tedious logistics that often mean the difference between successful cities and failing ones, he embodies a simple and difficult lesson: that it is often only through the careful attention to tedious facts and figures that American dreams come true.
SALON | Jan. 22, 1999

Eli Lehrer is a staff reporter for the Washington Times' Insight Magazine and a contributing writer for the American Enterprise.

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