Housing and Urban Development

Mel Martinez
Secretary
202-708-0417
For the low-income families served by the Housing and Urban Development Department, Secretary Martinez may be an inspiration. At age 15, he fled from Cuba to Florida, where he lived with two foster families until his parents also escaped to Florida. Martinez worked his way through Florida State University as an undergraduate and as a law student. After graduating, he became a successful trial lawyer and a powerful civic leader in Orlando, one of the country's fastest-growing cities. He served two years as chairman of the Orlando Housing Authority and three years as president of the Orlando Utilities Commission. Most recently, he was chairman of the Orange County government. In the process, he earned a reputation as a good manager, an attentive listener, and a strong consensus builder. Martinez, 54, shook things up at the Orlando Housing Authority by periodically holding board meetings at public housing developments to make it easier for residents to attend. Last year, he caught the eye of then-presidential candidate Bush while serving as co-chair of Bush's campaign in Florida. After winning the White House, Bush wooed Martinez to Washington to oversee HUD, a backwater federal department with a reputation for chronic mismanagement. Like many of his predecessors, Martinez has vowed to put HUD's house in order. In fact, he says that is his top priority. He's also planning to shift the responsibility for hundreds of HUD programs to state and local governments. Martinez is intent on increasing homeownership, especially among minorities. So far, Martinez has struck the housing community in Washington as a Secretary who's unpretentious and serious about his job.

Alphonso Jackson
Deputy Secretary
202-708-0123
"He is not a man of small gestures," says a former colleague of Jackson, the new deputy secretary. Jackson has served as president and CEO of the Dallas Housing Authority, executive director of the St. Louis Housing Authority, and director of the Department of Public and Assisted Housing in Washington. At the Dallas Housing Authority, he showed a commitment to renovation and tough crime-fighting efforts, and he also displayed an air of toughness. He had a habit of going into public housing apartments without notice to search for drugs and other illegal activities. As deputy secretary of HUD, he's chief operating officer. Jackson, 55, grew up in Dallas and earned a B.S. in political science and an M.A. in educational administration from Truman State University in Missouri, and a J.D. from the Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. He's been a two-time member of an All-America college track team, a lawyer, a university professor and administrator, and the owner of an urban consulting firm. Most recently, he was president of American Electric Power-TEXAS, in Austin.

Angela Antonelli
Chief Financial Officer (designate)
202-708-1946
When she was a policy analyst and assistant branch chief at the Office of Management and Budget in the early 1990s, Angela Antonelli was responsible for scrutinizing HUD's finances. Now she's taking over those finances. As chief financial officer, Antonelli will be advising Secretary Martinez on financial management issues as well as developing and monitoring HUD's budget. That's not an especially easy task in an agency that was just removed from the General Accounting Office's list of "high-risk" agencies early this year, but retains the "risk" label for its rental housing and single-family Federal Housing Administration programs. Most recently, Antonelli, 37, spent six years at the Heritage Foundation, where she was director of the Thomas A. Roe Institute for Economic Policy Studies, coordinating research on budget, tax, regulatory, labor, and environmental policy. She spent two years as a senior consultant with Lewin-VHI, a health care consulting firm. She grew up in Lowell, Mass., and received a bachelor's degree in political economy from Cornell and a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton.

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