JACKSON, Miss.—Shelia Bell’s lawn mower rattled as she rolled it from inside her garage and down the driveway of her South Jackson home, a small rancher house with an enclosed garage and a significant amount of lawn to mow. It was grass-cutting day, a labor of love and pride for Bell.
South Jackson homeowner Shelia Bell is frustrated with the blight near her home, which can depress her property values. But she’s not leaving, she says. She’s planting flowers and organizing neighbors. Photo by Shaunicy Muhammad
Maintaining a good-looking yard is one of the values that her parents instilled into her as a child growing up in the Northwest Jackson neighborhood of Presidential Hills. “I grew up caring about where I stay and where I live. That’s why I keep my property up,” Bell said. “We grew up doing the lawn and having a nice home that was clean on the inside and out. I got that from my mama.”
Bell has owned her home on Stuart Street off McDowell Road in South Jackson since moving back to the capital city from Yazoo City eight years ago. Her house has a unique look. The top half features horizontal white panels; the bottom is made of layered brick.
Most days, between doctor’s appointments, yard maintenance and planning parties for her grandchildren, Bell likes to sit outside on the front porch, watch people come and go, and talk with her uncle, R.T., while he smokes cigarettes.
But Bell is fed up with blight in her neighborhood, especially the burned-out, dilapidated properties on her street with grass and brush grown up toward the windows. These houses have become dumping grounds for everything from used tires to tattered mattresses and discarded children’s toys.
“I’ve been calling the city about it for years,” she told the Mississippi Free Press that day in May 2024. “They ought to know my number by now.”
South Jackson resident Shelia Bell wanted to purchase the property where this dilapidated home sits. The home is owned by the State of Mississippi and controlled by the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office. She fears abandoned properties such as this one in her neighborhood bring down property value and invite a criminal element. Photo by Imani Khayyam
Although Bell does what she can to maintain her property, she said that the surrounding blight creeping into the area affects her quality of life. And if it continues to go unaddressed, she said it will lower her property resale value.
Hers is a common concern in a once-thriving white middle and upper-class segment of Mississippi’s capital city—that is, before white and economic flight alongside deeply embedded systemic inequity took its toll. Now South Jackson residents like Bell struggle against cycles of neglect to keep hope high and rebuild their community, block by block.
‘South Jackson Used To Be Real Nice’
Today, you can walk down the street in many South Jackson neighborhoods and peer inside homes that are damaged from fires with caved-in roofs, broken or boarded-up windows, and missing front doors.
But it wasn’t always that way. “My daddy said when white people used to live out here it was pretty,” Bell said, sitting in the living room of her home. She recalled hearing stories from her father about when he lived in the area in the 1990s.
“It ain’t nothing like it used to be,” she said.
With a still-significant number of white people living in South Jackson in the 1990s, white flight from the area had taken longer and was slower than in many parts of the city where it began in earnest in the 1970s after forced school integration. The segment of Jackson south of Interstate 20 used to be a haven for white people.
Before the late 1960s working-class, middle-class and wealthy white people all called South Jackson home, Angela Stewart, an archivist with the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University, told the Mississippi Free Press.
Jackson State University archivist Angela Stewart, who works with the Margaret Walker Center, says that after the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1969 Alexander vs. Holmes County decision, ordered the immediate desegregation of Mississippi’s schools in early 1970 after nearly 20 years of white resistance, many white residents chose to move out of cities like Jackson. Photo courtesy Angela Stewart
The whiteness of South Jackson began to shift after the U.S. Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional in the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. But many white Mississippians resisted the change and ignored the ruling.
“Mississippi whites’ response to Brown included outrage and defiance as well as some efforts to get Black Mississippians to disavow the ruling,” Charles Bolton wrote in the Mississippi Encyclopedia. “U.S. Rep. John Bell Williams called the day the decision was announced ‘Black Monday,’ and U.S. Sen. James O. Eastland claimed that the South would not obey the court order and urged resistance to the decree.”
Wingfield High School, built in the late 1960s, was born as a segregated white public school in the midst of that resistance. It, along with Callaway High School in North Jackson, were probably the last two high schools built exclusively for white people, Stewart said, and both would become virtually all-Black as white flight unfolded over the decades after the Alexander decision. Wingfield closed in summer 2024.
Wingfield High School students, teachers and alumni gathered on its campus in Jackson, Miss., on May 29, 2024, for a balloon release to celebrate the South Jackson school, which closed in summer 2024. Photo by Shaunicy Muhammad
In addition to official state government actions, individual white Mississippians rushed to join the effort to resist the Brown decision. Or, Mississippi-born racist organizations pressured them to with threats of boycotts, firings and violence.
“Sunflower County plantation owner Robert B. Patterson spearheaded the creation of the White Citizens’ Councils, which soon spread throughout the state and the region. The groups comprised white elites who utilized their prestige and financial power to intimidate (B)lack supporters of civil rights through such strategies as firing (B)lack employees known to be members of civil rights groups, refusing to make loans to (B)lack business officials or farmers who supported civil rights activity, and evicting black renters involved in the freedom struggle,” Bolton wrote.
“The Council claimed that it did not advocate violence and tried to distance itself from the Ku Klux Klan, but the Council’s activities ultimately created an atmosphere in which Klan-style racial violence could thrive,” Bolton continued.
Patterson soon passed the leadership torch to several men based in the capital city. By 1960, the Citizen Council was headquartered in the Plaza Building in downtown Jackson, which William J. “Bill” Simmons ran with outsized influence on the Legislature a block north and the Governor’s Mansion across the street, as well as local newspapers like the Jackson Daily News and Clarion-Ledger that routinely took a stance against any form of racial integration. For years, he edited Council publications that fixated on the threat of Black crime as a propaganda tool for white resistance.
The Council even set up its own openly racist Council schools, such as Council McCluer in South Jackson where future Gov. Phil Bryant would later attend high school. The Council schools openly taught that Black people were inferior to whites in its schools—an argument anti-integration attorneys would use in Mississippi courtrooms to try to get Brown overtuned.
Gov. Phil Bryant attended Council McCluer High School, a segregationist academy the racist Citizens Council established, during his junior (left) and senior (right) years of high school. The Mississippi Legislature gave financial assistance, now called vouchers, to white families to send their children to these private schools, which openly taught Black inferiority. Photos McCluer High School Yearbook
The Citizens Council, which grew to chapters across the nation as far away as San Francisco, was the primary driver of racist lies and scare tactics to get white Mississippians to resist integration, especially in schools, against “the forces of evil bent on the destruction of our civilization,” as the Jackson Citizens Council chapter warned in its “Aspect” newsletter in February 1965.
That bulletin also foreshadowed the ultimate re-segregation of and white flight from public schools, which exploded starting in the 1970s, leaving Jackson’s schools deeply underfunded as many white Mississippians worked to redirect public funding into private schools.
“Intelligent white citizens have always found legal ways and means to avoid race mixing, and they are continually searching for new ways and means to lawfully maintain this social separation,” the February 1965 Citizens Council newsletter declared.
The 1969 Alexander vs. Holmes County lawsuit accelerated desegregation in Mississippi—and white flight to the suburbs, following a trend that happened in many cities across the country.
“It was not true integration,” Stewart said. “Before true integration could happen, people abandoned the schools. The Blacker the schools got, the more people moved further and further away.”
William J. “Bill” Simmons, who ran the racist Citizens’ Council for years in Jackson, worked with scientific racists nationally to keep schools segregated and Black schools underfunded. He spread fake “science” that Black children were inferior to white kids to keep segregation in place, which anti-Brown v. Board attorneys used in federal courtrooms to unsuccessfully overturn the decision. AP Photo/Jack Thornell
Facing forced integration, many white Jacksonians opted to leave the city for the surrounding suburbs or move their children to the rapidly multiplying whites-only segregation academies as well as Council schools, both of which drew vouchers and public resources until federal courts later stopped the misuse of tax dollars for segregation. Developers seized the opportunity to build up the rural areas surrounding Jackson into what are now bustling suburbs where many businesses as well as prominent white churches have moved.
“As desegregation happened, suburbanization happened,” Stewart explained. “At the same time that public schools in Jackson were desegregating, white people were moving to Clinton, Pearl, Brandon, Madison and Ridgeland. Most of these places were fine print on maps before 1969. But as schools desegregated, they got bigger and bigger.”
That meant that the Black population of Jackson and Hinds County grew in both sheer numbers and proportion of population even as white folks fled to other counties and towns.
“During the second half of the twentieth century Hinds’ population increased by about 58,000 people, and between 1980 and 2010, it grew by nearly 70,000, reaching 245,285. The county’s racial profile shifted dramatically, as a two-thirds white majority became a two-thirds black majority, a consequence not only of new African American arrivals but also of white flight to neighboring counties,” the Mississippi Encyclopedia explains.
Jackson’s Legacy of Redlining Out Black Wealth
The exodus of residents after forced school integration meant the City of Jackson was collecting less tax revenue for services and infrastructure maintenance—especially since many of the remaining Black residents had not had the opportunity or the training to earn the same wages or acquire wealth as the fleeing white residents.
Discriminatory redlining had long been a practice throughout the country and segregated white Jackson, including the city’s southside, and even continued in the South as recently as 2016 by BancorpSouth, which is based in Tupelo, Miss. Because so much American wealth is built through home ownership and values, this systemic racist practice of intentionally denying paths to prosperity to Black Americans was one way to limit uplift in families, households and segregated communities.
Hope Policy Institute analysts Calandra Davis and Sara Miller explained the legacy of redlining in Jackson in an April 8, 2021, essay in the Mississippi Free Press. “Redlining policies allowed banks and mortgage lenders to deny loans based strictly on the borrower’s race and where they lived,” they wrote. “These efforts successfully supplied housing to white, middle-class families, while simultaneously preventing Black families from gaining equity in homeownership and building generational wealth. Redlining was made illegal in 1968 with the passage of the Fair Housing Act. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 was intended to address its harms, but redlining’s legacy persists.”
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The 2023 census data showed Jackson’s population as roughly 146,000 people. That’s a decrease from the 173,514 residents counted in the 2010 census and the city’s peak of 202,895 residents in 1980. The city had 144,442 residents in the 1960 census—including many civil-rights activists and a strong, if segregated, Black middle class after a long period of growth, but still under white rule and control since the city’s founding in 1821.
“Jackson is doing the opposite of what it was doing between the end of Reconstruction (Era) to 1964. It’s shrinking (now),” Angela Stewart said.
That steady decrease in population has led to major changes in the city, including the continued closing or consolidating of many schools such as Wingfield High School, the former all-white high school—which Phil Bryant also attended—that closed at the end of the 2023-2024 academic school year.
Jackson Public Schools Superintendent Errick Greene said in an October 2023 school-board meeting that the closures are necessary because of the district’s declining enrollment, staff shortages and the costs to repair aging buildings.
“As cities lose people, they lose tax dollars. To recover the revenue lost from white flight, some cities have raised taxes, trimmed municipal budgets, and cut government funding. As city services decline, other residents with the means to do so—often white residents—move away, creating a vicious cycle,” the Mississippi Encyclopedia explains.
Economic Flight and Decay Follow White Flight
Jackson has also seen a prevalence of Black middle-class families leaving for neighboring suburbs like Byram, Ridgeland and Rankin County over the years as well, often seeking what they believe to be a better education system for their children, Stewart said.
It’s a form of economic flight that inevitably follows white flight as services decline and businesses and even schools close with a diversity of people fleeing cities often due to factors many did not control. The capital city is, thus, left behind economically, and it originated with racism. The push started with the Citizens Council stoking fear of integration and calling for “all legal means available to us (to) resist it, contain it and expel it” before the danger became “permanent and irrevocable,” as the 1964 Aspect newsletter warned.
Candlestick Park was just one of many bustling South Jackson shopping plazas in the 1960s as this Aug. 21, 1967, Clarion-Ledger ad shows. “Back to School” for white families in South Jackson still meant the local public schools. (Click to enlarge.) Source: newspapers.com
“If we quit resisting, we will be committing cultural, and probably racial, suicide,” the Citizens Council newsletter added.
White flight and disinvestment creates a widening vicious circle over time, even as it often later affects places that draw them away such as parts of Ridgeland have experienced with people moving farther north out to Madison and then places such as Livingston and now Gluckstadt. Those fleeing out additional distances often leave empty suburban buildings and boarded-up businesses behind them, as well as the cemeteries where many of their loved ones are buried. Then businesses, and jobs, follow as well as services and amenities that keep residents happy and their property values higher.
As people continued to leave Jackson, companies, local businesses and even large churches moved out of the capital city into the suburbs. Job opportunities dried up for those who remained, and areas like South Jackson, which were packed with businesses—like the Dog N Suds, Liberty Super Market, the Van-Go-Shop, First National Bank and the Candlestick Driving Range—back before integration, become food deserts where even Black middle-class families have few nearby options for groceries. And for those needing cars or access to public transportation to get to work, jobs and fresh food options are often literally out of reach.
Kroger opened a store on Terry Road in South Jackson in 1974. The company closed the Terry Road location in 2015. Source: newspapers.com
Burlington Coat Factory, the last major retail store inside Jackson’s Metrocenter Mall, closed its doors on Feb. 18, 2022. The Metrocenter, in West Jackson not far north of the Interstate 20 boundary of South Jackson, was at one time the largest and most popular mall in the state with white people crowding into restaurants like Widow Watsons after University of Mississippi and Mississippi State University football games that, until the 1990s, were often played in Veterans Memorial Stadium near Fondren. That stadium now hosts Jackson State University games and is about four miles from JSU’s campus in West Jackson.
Metrocenter’s multiplex theater was routinely packed, and popular businesses from BeBop Records to El Chico encircled it—as recently as 20 years ago, but as additional flight occurred in the area, fewer white faces showed up followed by fewer of other communities. Business after business closed. Now, grass grows high in the Metrocenter parking lot, used mostly by city employees and a police precinct and as an occasional spot for roll-off dumpster pickup. Most of the former businesses are gone.
Northeast Jackson has also shifted dramatically in the last 20 years. The Burlington Coat Factory on East County Line Road, which became the southern border of the then newly alluring suburb of Ridgeland, Miss., by the 1970s remains open today in a space that was a Barnes & Noble well into the 21st century. The capital city’s last remaining chain bookstore, Books-A-Million, closed in North Jackson during the pandemic leaving an empty retail space next to the North Jackson Kroger. Nearby towns in Madison County and, as of July 2024, Rankin County—both bustling commercial areas following Jackson’s economic flight—have Barnes & Noble bookstores.
Larry Wayne Shoemake, a white supremacist and Nazi sympathizer from South Jackson, used an AR-15 in a sniper attack targeting Black shoppers at the Ellis Isle Shopping Center in South Jackson on April 12, 1996. He wanted to provoke a race war. Source: newspapers.com
Likewise, the busy retail strip at the top of South Jackson just off Interstate 20 at Ellis Avenue went through dramatic, and even bloody, shifts since the 1990s. On April 12, 1996, a white Vietnam veteran left his family home near Wingfield High School and drove to the Ellis Isle shopping center where he set up outside an abandoned Po Folks restaurant building with an arsenal of weapons. Larry Wayne Shoemake was a graduate of Central High School in downtown Jackson that had closed in 1977 due to white flight to suburban schools and segregation academies.
By then, more than 20 years after the federal government made segregated businesses illegal, Ellis Isle attracted many Black shoppers, many from South Jackson neighborhoods that then were perhaps as integrated as they would ever be with white residents who would continue to leave well into the new millennium.
With racist “race war” and Nazi materials spread out in his home for authorities to find later, Shoemake used his AR-15 for a mass sniper attack specifically to kill Black people. He managed to kill D.Q. Holifield in the parking lot, leaving the father’s son injured, as Black shoppers panicked and tried to hide from the rapid fire. He fired upward of 100 rounds over 40 minutes, hitting eight people, including The Clarion-Ledger’s second Black reporter there to report on the attack. He then killed himself.
The attack, which is little-remembered now, especially for the Jackson man’s racist motive in a nation then inundated with the Black “superpredator” myth, marked a pivotal moment for South Jackson. It is an area now considered a dangerous part of the capital city, with property values, businesses and services steadily declining and worsening the systemic chicken-egg dilemma today’s residents face.
Out-of-State Investors Eye South Jackson Property
Those who have remained in South Jackson after white flight and economic flight, and the systemic problems the shift created and helped sustain, must deal with the aftermath.
The City of Jackson’s lack of financial resources due in no small part to shrinking sales tax from businesses relocating to the whiter suburbs, coupled with ongoing staffing shortages across the municipal service departments, can leave residents who remain feeling left behind and worried that the intentionally created spiral will get worse.
They now want answers.
Association of South Jackson Neighborhoods President Ernest Ward said during a July 18, 2024, meeting that some residents believe Jackson, Miss., leadership has failed them. Photo by Shaunicy Muhammad
On the evening of July 18, 2024, less than a 15-minute drive from Shelia Bell’s home, South Jackson residents packed into the Peggy Calhoun Community Center on Willowood Boulevard for an Association of South Jackson Neighborhoods meeting.
“Our leadership has failed us,” Ernest Ward, a long-time resident and president of the Association of South Jackson Neighborhoods, said during the meeting.
Despite paying taxes, Ward said, residents do not believe they are receiving adequate municipal services. “We are not getting the quality of life we’re supposed to get. What y’all gonna do?” Ward asked the crowd of about 50 people gathered that evening. “Are you going to continue to stay silent?”
Ward cited a lack of investment from the city’s 1% sales tax, lackluster code enforcement of city ordinances, a desire for increased police presence, and ongoing issues with water and sewer services as some of the problems.
The U.S. Census warns that the extreme race wealth gap in the U.S. leaves many more Black families without “a direct safety net to draw upon in times of need.” Many systemic factors, often driven by historic racism, contributed to this “negative wealth” problem in areas like South Jackson. Graphic courtesy U.S. Census Bureau
While homeowners like Bell and Ward share concerns, investors have flooded the housing market in Jackson, particularly in the city’s West and South neighborhoods—but to create rentals more than to sell homes to families and individuals. That, in turn, limits the ability of residents in the majority-Black city to use home equity to build wealth and to leave it to their children—the way many white Americans have done over time.
The U.S. Census reported in April 2024 on this growing race wealth gap in the U.S. “Households with a White, non-Hispanic householder had 10 times more wealth than those with a Black householder in 2021,” it warned. Black households have more unsecured debt (61.3% vs. 53.4%), including student loans (25.8% vs. 17.2%) and medical debt (22.5% vs. 13.4%). About one in five white households one in 20 Black households with a Black householder had wealth over $1 million. Even more jarring, one in four Black households had zero or negative wealth compared to one in 12 white households.
The report concluded: “Households with negative wealth do not have a direct safety net to draw upon in times of need; they are more likely than other households to experience higher rates of financial insecurity and are vulnerable to economic shocks.”
Jackson native and real-estate broker Theresa Friday has worked in the real-estate industry for nearly two decades; showing homes to first-time home buyers was always her favorite part of the job, she told the Mississippi Free Press.
But in recent years she has shown more Jackson properties to investors looking to rent to tenants than to first-time home buyers looking to purchase a starter home in Jackson.
“I’ve actually seen a decline in (homeowners) buying homes in Jackson, but for investors, it’s kind of a goldmine,” Friday said. “We have a lot of out-of-state investors actually come and scoop up our properties, to be honest with you. Unfortunately, it’s become especially, in certain areas, primarily rental areas.”
Jackson native and real-estate agent Theresa Friday has seen a decline in first-time home buyers wanting to buy in Jackson. “The crime issue, the school issue, especially if they have children, the trash issue, the water issue. I could go on and on,” she said. Photo courtesy Theresa Friday
When asked why, Friday said she saw a significant change in the housing market after the 2008 subprime lending crisis that left homeowners owing more for their homes than the properties were worth.
A 2014 American Prospect report said that the housing crisis caused “a staggering loss of Black wealth.” This problem was heightened, ironically, due to efforts such as the Community Redevelopment Act, enacted to finally try to reverse the harmful outcomes and legacy of historic redlining and century-old covenants that kept Black people from moving into white neighborhoods. Many lenders rushed to engage lower-income people with predatory lending promising a quick reversal of the institutional-wealth problem—which backfired, especially for many Black Americans believing they could finally get their fair share of the American dream.
“Across the nation, (B)lack homeowners were disproportionately affected by the foreclosure crisis, with more than 240,000 (B)lacks losing homes they had owned,” Nathalie Baptist wrote in the American Prospect report. “The foreclosure crisis not only caused (B)lacks to lose their homes and their slice of the American dream; it will also present new challenges to the next generation as the likelihood of receiving wealth passed down from their parents is disappearing very quickly.”
Homeownership data from the National Association of Realtors’ “More Americans Own Their Homes” show that the Black-white Homeownership rate gap is the largest it has been in a decade. The group calls it “racialized gaps.” Graphic courtesy Brookings Institution
Additionally, Friday said in an interview, local issues affecting Jackson, Miss., specifically also led to homeowners either moving out of the city or avoiding buying homes in the capital city altogether. “The crime issue, the school issue, especially if they have children, the trash issue, the water issue. I could go on and on,” Friday told the Mississippi Free Press.
That is, systemic inequities have intertwined over many decades to create a downward, hard-to-win cycle such as for the Black people of South Jackson.
Ten years later and 54 years after forced integration, that cycle keeps spinning in Jackson in larger and larger concentric circles. The jobs, the pay, the tax base, the home values, the public resources and services and the remaining businesses just aren’t enough to form a healthy ecosystem in which all the needed elements grow and thrive.
That means that the very infrastructure of daily life in Jackson—not just the water and sewer system—is crumbling and often close to failure.
‘This Is Decades and Decades of Divestment’
Jackson’s beleaguered water system, with its internal decay and shrinking resources in play for decades, finally captured the nation’s attention in 2021, seven years after the Flint, Mich., water crisis blew up. And finally, the nation’s media started to pay more attention to the long-time systemic factors that led Jackson’s capital city to that crisis, with the help of a viral Nick Judin series in the Mississippi Free Press and follow-up media appearances that focused, in part, on systemic conditions in South Jackson beyond the immediate crisis.
In 2021, at the same time that the world was reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, powerful storms and flooding caused a shutdown at the O. B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant. It forced Jacksonians to deal with the ramifications of crumbling water infrastructure that had been neglected for decades by federal, state and local officials.
Mississippi Free Press culture reporter Aliyah Veal, who grew up in South Jackson, wrote about the systemic backdrop water crisis issues on the ground in Jackson as part of a series of stories illustrating what the COVID-19 pandemic revealed about ongoing systemic inequities and historic racism in Jackson, Miss.
“When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, Jackson was already in a precarious state,” Veal wrote. “The city’s infrastructure had crumbled for years as potholes and sinkholes, big enough to fit orange traffic cones and sometimes people in, littered the streets. In 2019, the capital city was in the midst of a lawsuit against Siemens Inc. over faulty water meters across Jackson households in 2014. The botched effort cost local taxpayers millions even as residents received expensive water bills or none at all, leading to people on fixed incomes owing so much that they cannot pay it back.”
Then a year into the pandemic, the situation exploded at the worst possible time as if all the systemic inequities had collided at once. “Due to old water pipes, many residents went without water for nearly a month after an ice storm froze the pipes back in February 2021. Food deserts in large sections of Jackson have left some communities food-insecure due to a lack of grocery stores or healthy food options. And many young people say that basic hunger, among related problems, often leads to crime inside the city limits,” Veal’s report continued.
Left to right: Shaneika Green, Odella Green, Shirley Green and Sheneika’s grandchildren, Tramaine Green and Queenshley Langston, stand with a photo of her son, Tramaine Green, who died from gun violence in South Jackson in July 2020. Both the Jackson water crisis and the pandemic made their lives more difficult on top of existing challenging, they say. Photo by Acacia Clark
Theresa Friday, the Jackson real-estate agent, said the prospect of buying a home that may not have good resale value has also kept some first-time buyers away from Jackson. “The depreciation (of property values). They don’t want to get a home and can’t sell it,” she said.
Such drops in value has a devastating impact on wealth creation for the future, including children who would inherit it, keeping many local residents stuck in cycles of poverty or, at least, inabilities to pursue the American dream that many families took with them to capital city’s now thriving suburbs back when their public schools had to integrate and share resources.
But the issue isn’t unique to Jackson, the Center For Community Progress’ Education, Leadership and Engagement Vice President Justin Godard said.
While every community hasn’t seen their water system collapse, systemic legacies of racism and white and then economic flight have had negative consequences on Black homeowners across the country.
For many, a prevalence of vacant, blighted properties in their neighborhoods can turn the American dream of building wealth through homeownership into a nightmare.
“It has impacts on the people still living there,” Godard said. Today, he works in Washington, D.C., educating people about the systemic issues that lead to chronic vacancies in neighborhoods and how those who remain are affected.
Center for Community Progress Education, Leadership and Engagement Vice President Justin Godard says that systemic failures lead to a prevalence of blighted property in neighborhoods, such as South Jackson and other capital-city neighborhoods. Photo courtesy Justin Godard
But Godard grew up seeing these issues up close when visiting his grandmother in Flint, Mich.
“There are health impacts, there’s increases in crime around vacant properties, often properties can fall down and that can cause safety issues for people,” he continued. “Being next door to a vacant property also immediately lowers your home value. So to be in a situation where you’ve put much of your earnings to be able to access home ownership only for any gains from that—in terms of how we think about property in this country—are washed away because of vacant property in your community and disinvestment in your community that is also an impact.”
People should understand that decades of systemic failures and intentional divestment has led to what we see today as blight, Godard said.
“The important thing to take away is that the property itself is a challenge, but it is also just a symptom of a deeper systemic issue. We have to address the underlying systems causing those properties to appear,” Godard said.
A Center for Community Progress graphic explains how former vibrant neighborhoods can spiral into what it calls a ”cycle of systemic vacancy.” Graphic courtesy Center For Community Progress
These systemic issues spark what the Center For Community Progress refers to as the Cycle of Systemic Vacancy. “In most cases, these challenges didn’t happen overnight,” Godard said. “This was decades upon decades of divestment. We advocate for addressing the broken policies and broken systems at the state level that could help support the solution.”
Godard encourages cities to be intentional about building better relationships with residents before homes are vacated and properties get into a state of disrepair.
But for the City of Jackson, the process for identifying, locating and citing neglectful property owners can be daunting. And financial resources to clean up the properties are limited.
Neglectful, Missing Property Owners
Shelia Bell grabbed a spiral notebook from her bedroom on Stuart Street in South Jackson and flipped through the pages.
She keeps a list showing the different days and times she has called the City of Jackson and the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office inquiring about when the abandoned property to the right of her home will be demolished. The State of Mississippi owns much of the abandoned property in the capital city.
Her neighboring dilapidated home, covered from above by sprawling tree limbs and surrounded by overgrown grass, is barely visible from the street. “People be living in them abandoned houses. They set them on fire. They need to tear them down if they’re not going to rent them out,” Bell said.
Dilapidated homes are left behind by property owners in so many parts of Jackson that young people and their parents refer to them as “bandos”—which a 2016 state-funded BOTEC Analysis Corp. study of Jackson crime and potential solutions warned are a major (and preventable) factor in crime in communities.
A gas leak destroyed this home in early 2024, adding to South Jackson’s blight problem, and causing fear in residents. Photo by Imani Khayyam
A 2019 WAPT report found 4,000 blighted properties existed then in Jackson, many of which were tax-forfeited properties that the State of Mississippi owned.
Promises to clean up abandoned houses in Jackson are perpetual, but seldom result in much progress since the City has a limited budget to do so. Every year, the City of Jackson Department of Planning and Development has a budget to clean blighted property, but “they’re stressed,” Mississippi Secretary of State Public Lands Division Bureau Director Tyrone Hickman said in an April 11, 2024, interview with the Mississippi Free Press.
The City of Jackson has the arduous task of trying to track down property owners—many in other states—to cite them for not maintaining their properties. “The challenge for code enforcement is those people who set up these P.O. boxes that play the game and (code enforcement) is stuck chasing them,” Hickman said.
“And chasing them doesn’t get the property cleaned up,” Hickman continued. “Code enforcement pulls their hair out because most of these people set up P.O. boxes. Then, after a year, they’ll close it, and you can’t get in contact with them. And then another company does the same thing,” he said.
Properties can sit in limbo for years because of this convoluted process, and that’s before the State ever takes over ownership of the property, Hickman explained.
Graphic showing “Ways Vacant, Abandoned, and Deteriorated Properties Negatively Impact Communities.” Courtesy Center For Community Progress
Bell knows the process well.
While she is actively trying to get the City of Jackson to address the run-down home next door to her, to the left of her home sits an empty lot where a dilapidated property sat for years before Bell bought it, had the home demolished and had the lot cleared.
The State of Mississippi had owned it. Once Bell bought the home, a nonprofit organization paid for its demolition and clearance.
When a blighted property is approved for clearance, the cost of demolition usually comes out of the City of Jackson’s budget.
“So a house that could’ve been in pretty good shape before we got it, now we’re getting all the calls with people saying ‘when is the State going to clean this property up,” Hickman said. “Three years plus the time for us to process them. It’s been over three years. Then, yes, the grass has grown up. There’s a lot that could have happened. Transients could have went in and set it afire. So it causes a lot of stress on our office because people are looking at it like, ‘This is state property.’ But what about those three years before it got to the state?”
Hickman said it takes legislative action to get additional funding. And while the City of Jackson has renewed its efforts to conduct code enforcement, demolish blighted property and clean illegal dumpsites, Hickman said the problem is too big for the City to tackle alone.
He said the Mississippi Secretary of State’s Office is primarily concerned with making sure properties are sold back into the marketplace, but he would like to see more locally based investors rehab and maintain properties.
“What I really like is when people within a 50-mile radius are buying property. There’s a greater chance that those properties are being maintained and taxes are being paid,” Hickman said. “But when I get a person out of New York that’s buying it, their whole idea is that they want to flip it and turn it over. Or if they don’t flip it and turn it over, it’s coming back to us within three years.”
“If you get enough moms-and-pops buying two or three here and there, it really helps the process,” Hickman continued.
Visionaries Work to Rebuild South Jackson
Still, some Jacksonians have made it their personal mission to invest in the revitalization of South Jackson.
Mississippi State Rep. Ronnie Crudup Jr. spent nearly a decade trying to transform the South Jackson area through home ownership. Under his nonprofit New Horizons Ministries—which is ironically housed in the old Citizens Council’s Council McCluer school complex in South Jackson—he started with homes that people could rent to own, then shifted his focus to rehabbing homes and getting them back onto the market.
Today, Crudup uses his position as a legislator to speak with lawmakers to get capital to fund blight cleanup and maintenance projects at Jackson’s public parks.
Rep. Ronnie Crudup Jr. grew up in South Jackson’s Alta Woods neighborhood and bought a house there as an adult. He worked for years before joining the Legislature to rehab homes and help get people in his community into home ownership. He is now renovating The Ark, a new multi-sport recreating and fitness center behind the old Ellis Isle shopping center turned New Horizon Church. Photo by Imani Khayyam
Crudup grew up in South Jackson’s Alta Woods neighborhood and returned and bought a house there as an adult. “I remember what Jackson used to be like for me when I was growing up. Jackson had the mall, movie theaters, skating rinks, water parks, everything you can name of,” he said during an interview at The Ark, a multi-sport recreation and fitness center he opened in South Jackson in 2023 with business partner Charles Lewis.
The dedicated South Jackson resident has long given tours of the once-thriving community, expressing frustration with so many dollar stores and so few thriving locally owned businesses. He points to churches with too few resources to keep up well. And Crudup bemoans the loss of community centers like the old and once all-white Southwest YMCA on Flowers Avenue in South Jackson that became a huge eyesore once it closed. That organization, originally established “to help young men escape the dangers of the streets, tenement housing and negative influences,” gradually closed or moved all of its fitness facilities to the suburbs of Jackson, leaving no Y to serve the young people of the capital city.
“My childhood in Jackson was beautiful, and I don’t see the same thing anymore. Where does it exist now? You got it in the suburbs. You got it in Pearl, in Ridgeland. In Jackson, we don’t see that anymore,” Crudup says in frustration.
The Ark serves youth from across the city in its location behind the former New Horizon International Church and event facility in the old Ellis Isle shopping center run by his father Ronnie Crudup Sr. The slab of the old Po Folks restaurant is still in the church’s parking lot.
Ronnie Crudup Jr. (pictured) and Charles Lewis opened The Ark, a multi-sport recreation and fitness center in 2023. It has become a safe haven for Jackson’s youth. Here, Crudup sits inside the facility. Photo by Imani Khayyam
The facility has already become a safe haven for Jackson’s young people.
“South Jackson is going through a real change right now. Most of our restaurants are gone. We’re losing a lot of our stability,” Crudup said. But he is determined to change that reality.
A renewed vision led Crudup to pivot his focus from rehabbing housing to commercial real-estate development. “I did that intentionally,” Crudup explained. “At one point, I thought that housing was one of the ways to help change the community in Jackson. But I’ve come to the realization that one house at a time doesn’t make a big enough dent.”
The results of the economic flight and disinvestment in South Jackson and decreasing wealth and healthy activities for kids—outcomes such as crime, thieves breaking into the remodeled homes, stealing materials like wiring and copper—does not help.
“Crime has been very impactful,” Crudup said. “To be honest, there’s a lot of gunfire at night, a lot of folks don’t feel safe going to gas stations because of robberies. The lack of police presence makes it difficult for families just trying to make it. And the blight does sometimes create an element of crime. People don’t want to live next to an abandoned property.”
“The lack of police presence makes it difficult for families just trying to make it,” he added.
Visual artist and film producer Curtis Nichouls plans to build a film studio at the former Metrocenter Mall in Jackson, Miss. “With this building, we’re positioned to have at least two films going at the same time,” he said on April 11, 2024. Photo by Shaunicy Muhammad
Today, Crudup is focused on developing commercial businesses for the people who live in South Jackson now and to attract future homeowners to the area.
“We did it with housing, now we’ve got to do it on the commercial side,” he explained at the Ark. Crudup didn’t go into specifics about his plans but said he is working on a number of other projects, including a restaurant and an entertainment venue.
Despite crime, Crudup said, he is determined to provide recreational outlets for those who just need things to do, in turn, helping to decrease criminal activity: “Everything that I’m doing, I’m doing because I see there’s a lack. We’ve got to provide something for the people here. We’ve been talking a lot about all these ideas. Now it’s time to do it.”
Crudup is not alone in that sentiment.
Former NBA player and Jackson native Erick Dampier plans to build a multi-million dollar sports complex at the site of the former booming Jackson Square Promenade shopping center on Terry Road in South Jackson.
The Metrocenter Mall in nearby West Jackson has a new tenant, Curtis Nichouls, a filmmaker who plans to convert the site into a film studio. Although Nichouls is not a Jackson native, he hopes to be part of an economic boom for the area and the entire capital city.
“One of the biggest things that Jackson needs is a resurgence of people moving here,” Nichouls told the Mississippi Free Press. “With a thriving film studio, you’d have money circulating throughout the community and (it would) give people pride. That would be huge.”
‘I’m in This House Until I Die’
Whatever happens next, Shelia Bell said she’ll be around to see it. She does not plan on leaving South Jackson.
In an effort to inspire more neighborhood unity and pride, Bell has talked with a couple of the other residents on her street about hosting a community block party and clean-up event.
And she has plans for that lot next door that once housed an old, abandoned house.
“I’m gonna plant some fruit trees. Some peaches, some lemons and some plums. I’m gonna make an orchard out there,” Bell said, pointing toward the empty lot.
“The Lord told me to do that, in a dream. He told me to plant fruit trees there and feed his people. And that’s what I’m gonna do. I ain’t selling,” she said.
“I’m in this house until I die.”
Shaunicy Muhammad is the lead reporter of the Mississippi Free Press’ “From White Flight to Water Crisis: Struggles of South Jackson” with initial funding by the Center for Disaster Philanthropy. Visit that link for related stories.
Donna Ladd contributed historic information to this report.
