Robert Dull, the new executive director of the Griffin Housing Authority, brings a lot of experience with him.

Dull has been in the business of managing and developing affordable housing for 35 years. His most recent experiences have been in the Southeast.

“I came here from Southwest Georgia United Empowerment Zone,” he said. “I was there for a year.”

The zone was a federally funded program working on economic and community development for Crisp and Dooly counties. Dull was the director of asset management — his job was to put together a portfolio of bank-owned and privately owned houses in declining neighborhoods for purchase and rehabilitation.

“We ended up buying about 98 homes,” he said.

Before that, Dull was the executive director of the Chattanooga Housing Authority, where he oversaw 3,000 public housing units and 3,000 Section 8 vouchers used to assist people with rent. There, he helped transform public housing programs, in particular tearing down existing public housing and rebuilding it.

He said Griffin has already started transforming public housing and he intends to continue the process. He said that two of Griffin’s largest public-housing communities were actually built in 1953 and “have reached the point of obsolescence.”

He intends for future developments in Griffin to have more amenities and be more in line with the original purpose of public housing — providing a temporary stay. When there is a lack of affordable, quality private housing, transitioning people out of public housing is not an easy process. However, he said that the Griffin municipal government is doing a better job enforcing building codes and holding landlords more accountable.

The authority has already contracted to sell Nine Oaks to a private party and is waiting on approval from the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In the coming years, the Housing Authority will tear down part of Meriwether Homes and replace it with a new housing facility for senior citizens, who he believes will be major consumers of public housing as the baby boomers retire, as well as the disabled. The rest of Meriwether Homes will be torn down and replaced with townhouses. After that, the authority will take a look at Fairmont Homes.

“You’ll see activity going on at the Housing Authority for probably the next five to eight years,” he said. “And public housing will not be the same in Griffin when we’re (finished).”