What was going on when I was born?

More than 2,000 new housing units are scheduled to come on the market in Queens in the near future and sales of 500 more units are under way. Some single-family homes are included, but the bulk of development is in high-rise condominium apartments and in two- and three-family houses in which the buyer also gets rental units. Many of the new housing units are in projects that have been tied up for several years by community opposition and litigation. No rental apartment buildings are under construction. ''Queens is the best market for the immediate future,'' said Larry Hahn, who has built more than 4,000 homes on Long Island over the last 26 years under the name House Beautiful. He does not anticipate growth on Long Island over the next five years and he sees Queens as a stable, attractive borough for middle-class housing with easy access to Manhattan. He is building 109 town houses in Bayside.

AS they sought to assess the impact of the proposed Reagan budget cuts on government programs in Westchester, county officials warned last week that they contained sharp reductions in Federal funds in the field of transportation and highways. Many millions of dollars in Federal assistance now flow each year from Washington to help run or equip bus and rail systems or to pave roads in the county. If the proposals are adopted by Congress, the officials said, several millions of that aid would be eliminated. The money would have to be replaced locally or services cut back. It is the latter option that Westchester officials seem particularly loathe to consider, especially when its buses and commuter rail lines have been in the midst of a resurgence in recent years, reversing long-term declines.

The United States is becoming increasingly Republican, but it is becoming more conservative only selected issues, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll. Democrats still outnumber Republicans, but the Democratic lead is only half what it was when last year's Presidential campaign began. The changes, as measured by the poll, offer Republicans an opportunity to effect a classic political realignment comparable to the Democratic accession to power in the 1930's. Charles T. Manatt, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said his party's losses among younger Americans and Southerners had only identified groups the party must work on. Richard Richards, the Republican National Chairman, said he thought the shifts did not yet mean realignment, but that ''people are giving the Republican Party a chance.''

The Senate Ethics Committee will meet tomorrow or Tuesday to begin considering action against Senator Harrison A. Williams Jr. of New Jersey because of his conviction Friday night on bribery and conspiracy charges. The panel, headed by Senator Malcolm Wallop, Republican of Wyoming, will meet privately in Washington to discuss ''steps necessary and appropriate to the discharge of its constitutional responsibility to determine the fitness of this member of the Senate to continue to hold an office of public trust,'' a committee spokesman said yesterday. The announcement came amid expressions of regret by the New Jersey Democrat's Senate colleagues, mingled with concern for the image of Senators and other public officials. 'A Great Personal Tragedy' There was also criticism of the tactics used by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in its Abscam operation to uncover political corruption. Senator Bill Bradley, the junior Senator from New Jersey, said the conviction was ''a great personal tragedy for Senator Williams and his family.''

AGE By JOHN VINOCUR AUTHEUIL, France Over the past few years, Simone Signoret has played an aged prostitute, a revolutionary, a failed actress, an East European spy, a Gaullist underground fighter, an alcoholic with a limp, a peasant from the Dijon countryside, a housekeeper, an aristocrat called Lady Vamos, and on and on. She has forgotten for the most part about Alice Aisgill, the role in ''Room at the Top'' that won her an Oscar and launched, like little ships, a generation's fleet of private dreams. A couple of decades ago, Miss Signoret represented the kind of mature seductiveness that many young men, but particularly Americans not quite at ease with the Gina Lollobrigidas and Jayne Mansfields and the sex-by-the-centimeter standards of the times, wished for themselves. As Alice, the French mistress, she was not really beautiful, but better - at the edge of beauty - and she seemed what was called, a bit euphemistically, knowing, mature and wise. For a while back there, she could have lunged at a kind of stardom that probably would have made it difficult or impossible for her to portray, much later, either a cleaning lady or a ruined old whore, or, as in her latest film, ''I Sent a Letter to My Love,'' which opens in New York today at the Paris Theater, an old-maid sister - frustrated, passionate, pathetically and touchingly conniving.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- WARREN LERUDE, formerly the publisher of The Nevada State Journal and The Reno Evening Gazette, is a writer based in Reno. By WARREN LERUDE In the 1870's Mark Twain observed, ''Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would restore an Egyptian mummy to his pristine vigor and give him an appetite like an alligator.'' The remark still rings true. Our family finds that at Tahoe -which lies astride the California-Nevada line at an altitude of 6,298 feet in the Sierra Nevada range - it is difficult to feel anything but robust. We live in Reno, about 55 minutes by car from Tahoe City on the northwestern shore. For us the lake is a family vacation spot in many ways: a day on a beach, a week in a beachfront motel or a cabin in the woods, an overnight stay in a high-rise hotel, a lazy afternoon in our boat.

Johnny Campo said for weeks that Pleasant Colony would win the Kentucky Derby, and racing people scoffed. He buttonholed passersby at racetracks, and they shrugged him off. But at 5:43 p.m. today, Pleasant Colony turned it on at the head of the Churchill Downs stretch and swept to a three-quarter length victory in the 107th running of America's most prestigious thoroughbred race. Campo screamed with joy as he watched Jorge Velasquez guide Pleasant Colony under the wire ahead of two long shots, Woodchopper and Partez, in a field increased to 21 by court order yesterday. ''I told you so! I told everybody!'' yelled Campo, the selfproclaimed Fat Man. Those in the crowd of 139,195 who believed him laughed all the way to the cashier's windows to collect $9 for each $2 bet.

In late January, eight days after the inauguration of President Reagan and three days after the new Administration's first Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism, Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. accused the Soviet Union of ''training, funding and equipping'' international terrorists. His words caught the Government's intelligence agencies by surprise. Now, three months later, with resistance to terrorism firmly established as a main focus of foreign policy, the agencies are still scrambling to catch up with Mr. Haig's comments, intelligence officials said. An intelligence report on terrorism, begun after Mr. Haig had spoken, is nearing completion after several false starts. Officials said that it supported some but not all of Mr. Haig's sweeping charges.

On Monday morning, 100 foreign businessmen who control hundreds of billions of dollars in investments are to assemble in the Old Executive Office Building for the start of a three-day, invitation-only conference on the Reagan Administration's policies toward foreign investment in the United States. The listed host for the opening meeting Monday, according to a spokesman for the General Services Administration, is the Treasury Department, and Treasury Secretary Donald T. Regan is the chief speaker. Similarly, the hosts for many of the other sessions will be top Administration officials, most of the meetings will use Government facilities at no cost, and the Army's Old Guard Fife and Drum Corps is to provide what the program terms ''a fanfare reception.'' Some White House aides, such as Richard V. Allen, assistant to President Reagan for national security, have helped make the arrangements. Each to Pay $3,000 Fee The organizer and actual host of the conference, however, is The National Journal, a weekly magazine of governmental affairs, and its publisher, the Government Research Corporation, which is hoping, according to its chairman, Anthony C. Stout, to make a sizable profit from the conference by charging the businessmen an average of $3,000 each.

-------------------------------------------------------------------- R. V. DENENBERG is a frequent contributor to the Travel Section. By R. V. DENENBERG Out in the Canadian west, where the North Saskatchewan River flows swiftly between high bluffs, fur traders' longboats lie beached beneath the graying palisade of a log fort. At the Mounties' office long-tailed snowshoes hang in readiness for cross-country pursuit, and in the one-room schoolhouse the lesson is neatly chalked on the board: ''Today is August 31, 1887.'' But there is something terribly amiss at Kelly's Saloon. The only things they will mix at the bar are chocolate and maple walnut - ice cream, that is.

BRIDGEPORT ''WE are going to have fairly large numbers of people seeing their bills going up quicker than is customary,'' according to David J. Harrigan, vice chairman of the State Public Utilities Control Authority. To consumers familiar with annual increases in their electricity and natural gas rates, that might not seem to be news. But Mr. Harrigan was talking about water rates, which have begun to increase sharply and rapidly. Bridgeport Hydraulic Company, the state's largest investor-owned water utility, for example, received a 19.5 percent rate increase in November, worth $3.7 million in annual revenues; an additional 21 percent increase, worth $4.9 million on April 15, and announced last week that it would soon file an application with the P.U.C.A. for an addition 36 percent increase, worth another $10 million. As of last week, before the rates authorized April 15 took effect, the typical residential customer paid $33 per quarter. The formula applying the April 15 rate order to each customer's bill is expected next week. In January, the Connecticut Water Company, which supplies 26 towns, secured rate increases ranging from 1.3 percent in its Terryville division to 77.8 percent in the service area that extends along Long Island Sound from Guilford east to the Connecticut River and inland to Chester.

February, Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Elizabeth Taylor stands center stage, one hand on her hip. Her eyes are heavily made up, neo-Cleopatra style, her lips are the same blood-red as the toenails that peek saucily from her gold spikeheeled sandals. She is thin now -thinner than she's been since her 20's -having lost 40 pounds at a Florida spa before she began rehearsing Lillian Hellman's ''The Little Foxes'' one month ago. She has just finished a scene that calls for much angry screaming. ''How did I do?'' she asks Austin Pendleton, the director, in a voice of such absolute innocence that one wonders if her bawdy appearance is a mirage. ''Well, Elizabeth,'' Mr. Pendleton answers in affectionate, relaxed tones, ''by now the audience will have completely given up hope that this is going to be 'National Velvet,' so you will have lost them!''