(Neal Peirce is a syndicated columnist who writes about local government issues. His columns do not reflect the opinions of County News or NACo.)

As if it were a generation and not just a few short years since Republican conservatives were out to annihilate it, the Department of Housing and Urban Development appears to be sailing into the George W. Bush era with scarcely a ripple of controversy.

Melquiades Martinez, Bush’s choice for secretary, won enthusiastic bipartisan support on Capitol Hill. Scandal-plagued during the Reagan administration, the department was revived by Secretaries Jack Kemp and Henry Cisneros and won widespread praise for radical management reforms effected under Andrew Cuomo, secretary in Clinton’s second term.

Now Martinez, most recently the elected executive of Florida’s Orange County, is promising to be a “frequent and forceful” spokesman for housing priorities incorporated in the HUD budget (now more than $32 billion a year).

For housing advocates, this selection seems a rare stroke of luck. Here’s a man who fled Cuba as a teen-ager, speaking no English, worked his way through law school at Florida State University and, as a member of the Orlando Housing Authority in the 1980s, fought for affordable housing for the elderly and single-mother low-income households.

Martinez became a spokesman for the Cuban-American position in the Elian Gonzalez incident — he even took Elian for a tour of Disney World. He became co-chair of the Bush presidential campaign in Florida. He’s a close ally of Gov. Jeb Bush, who appointed him chair of a critical growth management study commission for the state.

One couldn’t imagine better political cover as one arrives to enter Washington’s political wars in the GWB era.

In his HUD confirmation hearings, Martinez promised: “Far from being a caretaker, I intend to be a very active secretary.” He even suggested his department’s mandate should be expanded to taking an active role in helping states and localities curb the rapid-fire suburban growth triggered by the fast U.S. economic expansion of the 1990s.

The draft report from his Florida growth study commission can be faulted for lack of specificity on how to stop very bad projects. But it endorses “compact urban centers” and plows new ground with an analysis system focused on the full and indirect costs of development projects — described by Martinez as the “centerpiece” of the commission’s work.

The explicit goal: to level the playing field between center city projects and those on the suburban periphery. In most cases, town center projects, where infrastructure is already in place, can be counted on to “cost out” more effectively.

Significance: We have a new HUD secretary attuned to “smart growth” principles — a major breakthrough, and one especially unexpected under a Republican president from smart-growth-blind Texas. No one expects HUD to dictate conserving land-use policies. But a department attuned to the issue, and headed by a former local official, might have significant influence.

Even more critical: Martinez isn’t ducking the national affordable housing crisis exacerbated by the burgeoning boom — and growing housing costs — of the last years.

Though homeownership has risen to an all-time high of 67.7 percent, some 14 million American households are reported to have critical housing needs — either paying more than 50 percent of their income in rent, or living in severely substandard units. There’s not a single U.S. region where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford to pay fair market rent for modest rental housing. HUD last year reported 1 million families on waiting lists for public housing or so-called “Section 8” rental subsidies.

Now, in hot growth areas, increasing numbers of solidly middle class families can’t afford rentals or home down payments.

So it’s significant that Martinez, questioned by Sen. Paul Sarbanes, (D-Md.), said at his confirmation hearings he’d encourage affordable housing through tax credits, maintaining all of today’s Section 8 contracts, and push to increase homeownership — especially among African and Hispanic-Americans.

For all that to succeed, HUD will have to keep attacking the bureaucratic obfuscation, as well as waste, fraud and mismanagement that racked it for many years. The General Accounting Office recently took the department off its “high risk” list because of an array of significant management reforms.

Among the advances: a new enforcement center, which the Minnesota-based Public Strategies Group reports “is sending a clear message that flagrant noncompliance with HUD regulations and attempts at defrauding the system will not be tolerated.”

HUD’s corps of several hundred “community builders” is giving the department a more human face, resolving problems in communities. Anti-discrimination actions under the Fair Housing Act have been accelerated, including a landmark settlement favoring migrant farm workers. Cutting-edge software now lets citizens track where HUD dollars are being spent in their communities.

But the very nature of HUD’s operations, including delicate Federal Housing Administration agreements with thousands of local housing providers, invites irregularities.

Martinez may be off to a promising start, but he’ll soon discover he has a mega-management job to perform.

(Neil Peirce’s e-mail address is npeirce@citistates.com.)