Atlanta Habitat for Humanity’s board of directors voted on Monday to replace CEO Alan Ferguson with Rosalyn Merrick, the nonprofit’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, Atlanta Civic Circle has learned exclusively.
Ferguson announced his resignation to the board on May 2, after securing a job at another organzation. He plans to stick around until the end of the month to facilitate his successor’s transition, Merrick said in an interview.
Merrick joined Atlanta Habitat as chief development officer in 2020, after holding positions at the Georgia Community Foundation, United Way of Greater Atlanta, and other nonprofits.
The news comes nearly a month after Ferguson told Atlanta Civic Circle that the local Habitat branch, long known for building single-family homes that first-time buyers can afford, would be moving into multifamily development “to facilitate more housing supply coming into the market.”
Atlanta Habitat will build its first duplex later this year in southwest Atlanta’s Sylvan Hills neighborhood, Ferguson said in April.
Those plans aren’t going anywhere under Atlanta Habitat’s new leadership. The pilot duplex will be part of an eight-acre development, Merrick said, “which could include townhomes, duplexes, and our traditional single-family builds.”
Master-planned developments
The Sylvan Hills project reflects Atlanta Habitat’s new ambitions to build entire neighborhoods filled with homeownership units — not just individual homes scattered around the city. It began with the groundbreaking last August for Browns Mill Village, a community of 134 single-family homes on 31.4 acres in south Atlanta’s Orchard Knob neighborhood.
“We’ve had this strategy that’s formed around higher-density options as a way to serve more families with the finite resource of land,” Merrick said. “We can’t make more land. So with the land that we have, what’s the best possible use that allows us to create more affordable homeownership to serve more families?”
The eight vacant acres Atlanta Habitat owns in Sylvan Hills, near Tyler Perry Studios and the Lakewood MARTA station, are currently zoned for light industrial development. The nonprofit has asked the city of Atlanta’s planning department to rezone the property for residential construction.
Merrick said Atlanta Habitat has been discussing its Sylvan Hills plans — the nonprofit’s second master-planned development, after Browns Mill Village — with community members for years.
She acknowledged that NIMBYism (a “not in my backyard” mindset) can pose roadblocks for affordable housing developments, but thinks that Habitat’s knack for building high-quality homes that are virtually indistinguishable from market-rate houses should assuage most concerns.
“Like all affordable housing developers, we’ve faced NIMBYism,” she said. “But I think we’ve deployed two really effective tactics [to dispel neighbors’ worries].”
One comes in the form of Tia McCoy, Atlanta Habitat’s neighborhood engagement director. McCoy has long been speaking with Sylvan Hills residents “to begin building that reputation with the community,” Merrick said.
The other aspect is the quality of Atlanta Habitat’s housing, she added. “We all have one picture in our minds of what affordable housing looks like. It’s the infamous projects, many of which in Atlanta have been taken down.”
“That’s why Browns Mill Village is so important,” she continued. “We knew that creating this master-planned, beautiful community of mixed [rate] affordable housing would help tremendously to shift that paradigm — to shift that perception in people’s minds of what an affordable housing community could look like.”