Former HUD Secretary Jack Kemp Remembered as Man of Big Ideas

By Anuradha Kher, Online News EditorNew York–Jack Kemp (pictured), former Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) secretary, and congressman, one-time vice-presidential nominee, and self-described “bleeding-heart conservative,” who passed away recently at the age 73, will be remembered by his peers in the housing industry as a leader and man with big ideas no matter the platform he stood on.Kemp died after a lengthy illness, according to spokeswoman Bona Park and Edwin J. Feulner, a longtime friend and former campaign adviser. “Kemp is counted as one of the most distinguished Republican HUD secretaries, but he was a strongly bipartisan person,” Conrad Egan, president and CEO of the National Housing Conference (NHC), tells MHN. “He made it acceptable even among the strongest Republican leaders to talk about housing for the very poor and very low-income families. He was a strong advocate of providing homeownership options to low-income people and started the transformation of public housing with the Hope VI program.” Egan says it would have been very easy to ignore public housing at the time when Kemp took on the cause. “Kemp was a big thinker. The fact that he was the HUD secretary did not stop him from thinking like the Secretary of State or Treasurer. He believed that affordable housing was vital to the overall economy,” says Egan. Another one of Kemp’s peers, Edwin Feulner, president of the Heritage Foundation, remembers Kemp as a leader. “whether it was in a football huddle, a national political campaign or a policy discussion about the Austrian school of economics,” Feulner says.“I first met Jack nearly 40 years ago, during his freshman year in Congress. When he introduced the Jobs Creation Act – a major legislative advance of supply-side economics – I knew I had found an ally. That ally soon became my friend“He wanted to make it possible for every American to succeed and eagerly worked with people of all races, colors and creeds toward that end.“Across-the-board tax cuts and ‘enterprise zones’ for blighted neighborhoods are now common economic prescriptions—especially during these hard times. But to make these ideas respectable, he had to fight for them constantly during his years in Congress, HUD secretary, as chairman of a national tax reform commission, and during his presidential and vice presidential campaigns.“He won those fights, and millions benefited. The tax cuts that Kemp helped engineer in the 1980s gave Americans unprecedented prosperity for decades,” concludes Feulner.