As Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens crosses his 100th day on the job, some top city officials will be headed back to the job market. But Atlanta Housing CEO Eugene Jones said he’s confident he’ll be asked to stick around the city’s newly rejuvenated housing authority.
Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant will step down in June, after he and Dickens agreed the city should have a new top cop, the mayor’s office announced April 15.
Dickens made a campaign commitment to give top city officials a probationary period, telling Atlanta Civic Circle in November that Jones and other higher-ups would have 100 days to make their case.
The mayor’s office did not comment on the CEO’s future at the agency, but Jones said in an email that he’s “feeling very good” about his job security.
Dickens’ predecessor, Keisha Lance Bottoms, hired Jones from his post as CEO of the Chicago Housing Authority in 2019. With nearly 40 years of experience as an affordable housing leader, Jones has helped extricate Atlanta Housing (AH) from an era marked by leadership turmoil and lawsuits and put the agency back on track to produce affordable housing.
At Dickens’ urging, Jones and Egbert Perry, the CEO of developer Integral Group, in February settled a years-long legal dispute over development rights to dozens of acres of city-owned land. It marked a major win for the housing authority CEO.
On the mayoral campaign trail in November, Dickens signaled his approval of Jones’ AH leadership. “Gene is definitely the right leader, with his history of actually building complicated projects” he said, nodding to Jones’ stints as a public housing agency head in Chicago, Toronto, Detroit, Indianapolis, and other cities.
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