State, local leaders meet to discuss abandoned properties in Jackson

JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) – A pandemic problem.

That’s how Police Chief Joseph Wade described the thousands of dilapidated properties that dot the capital’s landscape during a briefing before lawmakers at the Mississippi State Capitol.

The House Select Committee on Capital Revitalization held its first meeting Thursday, during which lawmakers spent much of the time discussing the large number of abandoned state-owned properties within city limits.

Wade said these properties attract squatters, prostitution and other criminal activity, and harm the city’s overall quality of life.

“The abandoned library next to a school had been condemned. Squatters had taken over the building and she was worried that the kids would come back to school and see naked people lying around that building,” he said, referring to a conversation he had with Key Elementary School principal about the Richard Wright Library.

“We called Public Works and had the building boarded up. But this is a major issue that we have to deal with in the city,” Wade said. “It’s an epidemic, a pandemic — whatever you want to call it, it’s a major issue in the city of Jackson.”

According to figures provided by the Mississippi Secretary of State’s office, Mississippi has 1,900 abandoned, dilapidated and vacant buildings within Jackson city limits, just under a third of the 7,000 it has statewide.

This is in addition to the 700 that the city has, according to data from the Secretary of State.

The state acquired the properties after the owners failed to pay their taxes for at least two years and after the county was unable to sell them to new owners.

“All real estate in the state is subject to ad valorem taxes, except for government entities and other things,” Deputy Secretary of State Bill Chaney said. “You pay in December. If you don’t, then the following August, the land is sold on the courthouse steps.”

Property owners have two years to buy back their unpaid taxes. If that doesn’t happen and the properties aren’t sold, they are turned over to the state. The clerk’s office, in turn, tries to sell the properties to get them back on the tax rolls.

Chaney said it was not an easy task.

“As you can imagine, the assets we get… we get the dregs of them,” he said. “If it has value, most of the time it’s a private investor who buys it (before the secretariat receives it).”

Of Jackson’s 1,900 plots, about 300 have “some form of habitation.”

The challenge is maintaining these properties until they can be sold, which has become more difficult since lawmakers cut funding for such work nearly a decade ago.

“If part of a state-owned property needs to be cleaned, we cannot do it,” he said. “For one thing, we do not have the funds. For another, we do not have the authority to clean it.”

Chaney told committee members that state law allows the secretary of state to reimburse cities and counties for cleaning up state-owned parcels. However, the Legislature defunded that program in 2016.

Efforts to restore funding have fallen flat, with Chaney saying several bills have been introduced since 2021, including one in 2024, when lawmakers were working on a bill to give the secretary’s office funding to remove dead trees.

In the meantime, he said, the office has worked to give cities and counties the authority to clean up properties themselves.

“We’re very proactive in our efforts to try to clean up the disaster areas,” he said. “I think the other day we signed nine letters to different cities asking them to come out and mow their lawns.”

Jackson leaders have also been working to address the problem. In June, the City Council passed a nonbinding resolution to form a task force on blighted properties. At the time, Ward 1 Councilman Ashby Foote said there were about 2,400 tax-forfeited properties in Jackson.

During last week’s budget deliberations, the council said it wanted to set aside $3 million for demolitions in the next fiscal year, including $2.3 million to demolish 11 abandoned commercial properties. Two of those properties, Chaney said, are state-owned.

Ward 5 Councilman Vernon Hartley told lawmakers the task force has already spoken with Chancey and some state lawmakers, including Sen. John Horhn and Rep. Ronnie Crudup, and is looking forward to further discussions with the federal government.

“First of all, it affects the value of our real estate. In every house or every house on a street, there are dilapidated properties and the value of real estate goes down,” he said. “A lot of people have invested their whole lives in their home and property, and then they take a loss.”

“It also affects the appearance of neighborhoods. We need strong neighborhoods and it’s hard to have those strong neighborhoods when there are vacant lots and burned buildings.”

Hartley also addressed the problem of squatters, saying entire streets have been taken over by homeless people, who move into abandoned houses and steal anything of value they may have.

“We want to present the best possible face to anyone who comes to Mississippi, to any outsiders, to our state capital,” he said.

Chaney made several suggestions to lawmakers to help address the problem, including providing his office with more funding to clean up properties. Additionally, he suggested reducing the time it takes for a property to be forfeited and changing the law to prevent people from buying property that has been forfeited by the tax authorities and then selling it before the two-year deadline is up.

He explained that some people buy property that has been confiscated by the county, hold on to it for two years, and then decide they no longer want it. If that happens, the process starts over again, meaning the county has to sell it again and wait two years before it can be turned over to the state.

“We’ve had properties that could have been rehabilitated, but they’ve been sitting in the tax auction system for nine years before they’ve been turned over to us,” he said. “You can imagine what that was like. (You should consider) changing the law so that if you buy it for two years, you buy it.”

The deputy secretary said efforts also need to be made at the municipal level, saying Jackson has too few code enforcement officers to meet the city’s needs.

Jackson currently has five code enforcement officers, down from at least 15 just over a decade ago.

Code enforcement officer Robert Brunson said the problem was low wages.

“We can’t keep qualified officers here on the salaries we pay them, period,” he said. “It’s not that they don’t love what they do, but you can’t raise a family, you can’t pay your kids to go to school, you can’t buy a house when you’re about to have to apply for government subsidies.”

Brunson said the code enforcement officer position is currently open on the city’s website, and the hourly wage ranges from $12.42 to $15.36. By comparison, Clinton pays its officers about $3 or $4 more per hour, while the city of Madison pays $19 per hour.

“If you want better patrols, you want a better quality of people working for the city, you just have to pay better wages,” he said.

As part of his budget request, Planning and Development Director Jhai Keeton asked for additional pay for officers, saying city council employees in the code services division earn $2 less per hour than their “regional counterparts.”

Hartley said the council is committed to finding additional funding for those increases and said Jackson could obtain federal blight abatement funding and could help provide those increases.

Chaney also told the special committee that the Jackson environmental court was overwhelmed and that faster processing of cases would help.

“You have to start there,” he said. “If you start there, the property is not likely to get to a state of disrepair where no one will buy it at a tax auction.”

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