But it wasn’t enough. Chicago still has the worst of the 3,400 housing authorities in the United States. Last week the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development seized control of the Chicago bureaucracy, which had grown increasingly corrupt as Lane focused on his big-picture agenda. The takeover was engineered by HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, who needs a success story to impress congressional budget-cutters, and Mayor Richard M. Daley, who wants to clean up dilapidated projects around the gleaming new arena where he’ll host the 1996 Democratic National Convention. Both men promise huge–and expensive–improvements. For Lane, that’s a rueful victory. The defrocked visionary will now watch the Feds spend big bucks to make his plans come true.

Lane was never able to make that happen. HUD sources say his agency was badly mismanaged. Last June, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged that a CHA administrator and others defrauded the employees’ pension fund of $12.5 million. Internal investigators found suppliers and security firms cheating the agency out of more millions. More recently, HUD auditors found that Chicago’s Section 8 program, which helps poor families rent private housing, was near meltdown: some families had waited 15 years for vouchers the CHA hadn’t bothered to distribute. But Cisneros says none of this mattered as much as the enduring climate of gangs, guns and drugs. “What moved me is the plaintive cry of the mothers,” he told NEWSWEEK, “one of Whom said, ‘Please, just make it stop’.”

Squalor: That’s what Lane, 53, had tried to do. He grew up in a cold-water flat on Chicago’s South Side, envious of the families in what was then desirable public housing. With an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago, the conservative Democrat developed low-income housing before taking on the CHA. His biggest achievement: Lake Pare Place, a mixed-income experiment. There the poor learned from working families that jobs are the way out of squalor.

Lane, however, was too often the visionary, too rarely the manager. Not enough got done. It wasn’t all Lane’s fault; in dispatching the Feds to rescue Chicago, Cisneros said he hoped his team would succeed where “one individual stacked against the bureaucracy” could not. Lane is unapelogetic. “Should I have dealt with the details? No!” he told NEWSWEEK. “I’d have spent all my time making sure nobody stole from the store. The real problem is that the store is burning down.”

Now Cisneros can try to put out the fire. It isn’t lost on Lane that Cisneros’s plans echo his own. Cisneros wants to level high-rises, create mixed-income communities and help families escape public housing, Some of Cisneros’s pending successes are already in the pipeline: 1,300 decaying units are slated to be demolished by autumn. And after Lane spent years arranging a $200 million rehab of the Henry Homer Homes, Cisneros will get the glory when TV cameras pan the improving neighborhood around the Democrats’ convention center.

That’s just the beginning. The CHA is in for more embarrassments, including a still-secret corruption report that could lead to major indictments. As housing secretary, Cisneros may be able to help the city with the sclerotic HUD, which recently put the CHA through an 18-month exchange of 27 letters before giving permission to flatten a single empty building. But if he can’t tame an intractable Chicago bureaucracy of bribe takers and clock watchers, Cisneros’s grand plans for reform will wind up on the shelf–right next to Vince Lane’s.