Atlanta Advisory Committee Meeting with Eugene Jones, Jr. Atlanta Housing

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Name: Atlanta Advisory Committee Meeting with Eugene Jones, Jr. Atlanta Housing
Date: October 7, 2020
Time: 8:15 AM - 9:15 AM EDT
Registration: Register Now
Event Description:
Join the Council for Quality Growth's Atlanta Advisory Meeting featuring Eugene Jones, Jr. President & CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority. 
After a month in Atlanta as the new CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority, Eugene Jones Jr. is stirring new life into an organization fraught with leadership turmoil, lawsuits and limited building activity of new affordable housing units for nearly a decade.
In his first interview with the Atlanta Business Chronicle he stated, “We want to be aggressive,” said Jones, who added that the authority also is considering becoming its own developer where it would hire architects and general contractors. He is interested in any pilot programs, including modular homes, to build “better housing for less cost.”
Jones is globally recognized as turnaround/recovery expert delivering strong results while creating public/private business partnerships in this highly regulated housing industry. Jones has a proven track record spanning over 35 years of public housing leadership experience in management, public/private partnerships, operations, finance and governance in the public housing industry. Billion-dollar P&L responsibility for organizations requiring strategic planning, revenue management and risk management. Responsible for building over $3 billion of housing developments including leading the financing structures for these developments.
Jones most recently served a four-and-a-half-year stint as CEO of the Chicago Housing Authority. Former Mayor Rahm Emmanuel in a speech at the City Club of Chicago said of Jones, “The real measure of what Gene, the Board and his team have done in Chicago is that under his stewardship public housing was reconfigured from building housing to building a community.”
“And that is what the true measure of Gene's leadership. He realized that CHA of old was just housing, isolated, and basically only counting units. If you're going to build a place where residents feel part of a neighborhood and a community, you have to have all the pillars that build a residential and retail economy - so a neighborhood where kids grow up and feel like a community.”
“I think that the legacy that Gene has built as CHA is to re-invent, rethink, and re-imagine what a housing authority can be. It is not, by itself, just counting housing units, whether it's CHA vouchers (the Section 8 vouchers) or how many units you build.
“But when you put those units around with all the other pillars that build a neighborhood and community, then you build something where the residents that rely on public housing become part of a neighborhood and community where they can raise their kids and their kids can go to school, go to an afterschool activities, go to a sports activity, get on the train and make it to school, and then have a grocery store, a coffee shop, and a restaurant in their neighborhood. And then you're building neighborhoods, not housing. That is what we all aspire for just for ourselves.”
“And Gene has taken the heart and interest of the residents to place and made sure that what they see in their neighborhood is like every other neighborhood, and they're not isolated from it and distant from it geographically, psychologically, and physically. And he has done an incredible job at re-inventing and re-imagining public housing in Chicago.” Jones throughout his public housing service has demonstrated expertise in transformational leadership, business strategy, construction and development, bond issuance, operations, government relations--Federal, State and Local--and public policy, and building and managing high performance teams.
Location:
Zoom Video Conference
Zoom link and meeting password will be sent to all participants via registration confirmation email immediately upon registration.
 
Date/Time Information:
First Wednesday of each month
8:15 a.m. - 9:15 a.m.
Contact Information:
Kimberly Steele
Fees/Admission:
Free to all Council Members, Elected Officials and Staff
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