Exclusive: Mayor Lumumba defends West Jackson MS homeless project, sets ambitious goal

A new city-project aimed at shrinking Jackson's homeless population has caused controversy among residents of West Jackson and members of the Jackson City Council.

Sitting in his third floor office at Jackson's City Hall Thursday afternoon, Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba spoke candidly with the Clarion Ledger in an exclusive interview defending the project called "Safe Place, Safe Space." He addressed what he sees as misinformation and discussed the overall goals he thinks the project will bring to the city.

"I've been talking about this since we first took office." Lumumba said. "We've been talking for a long time, it's time that we actually demonstrate some action and that's what we're doing."

The project will build a 60-unit tiny home village, each unit equipped to serve one person and their pet, on 18-acres on Capers Avenue in West Jackson. A communal kitchen and other resources will also be available in an effort to transition the residents into permanent housing. The Jackson Resource Center, a nonprofit servicing the homeless, is heading up the project after responding to a request for proposals by the city's Department of Planning and Development.

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"We can select candidates so that when we understand what category of unhoused condition that they're in, we can create a plan that not only provides them immediate housing, but deals with the underlining issue that led them to be unhoused in the first place," Lumumba said.

The mayor pointed out that homelessness isn't just a Jackson issue, but a regional one. Whether we like it or not, the city needs resources to fix it, he said.

Reducing the homeless population

Lumumba said the overall goal, and something he hopes the tiny home village will help with, is to get the city to functional zero homelessness by the end of 2025.

"What functional zero homelessness means is that we want to get to a place where no person is unhoused or on the streets of Jackson for more than 30 days, unless it is by their choice," Lumumba said. "We have to come up with a well thought out, programmatic solution to how we deal with homelessness."

He admitted this was an "aggressive goal," but "we believe unless we state publicly our goals and measure our success then we aren't sincere, nor do we really believe that we can make the impact we must make."

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"Being able to create transitional housing, being able to layer that with social services, drug and addiction services, whatever the person may actually need in order to move them out of a state of being unhoused is what we want to do," Lumumba said.

He also created the position of homeless coordinator, naming Frederic Brandon to the position.

How will the project be funded?

The village will be built by using $2.9 million in funds from a federal grant given to the city through the HOME Investment Partnerships American Rescue Plan Program, or HOME-ARP. The council approved using the funds at their meeting on Tuesday after a heated debate.

"The first clear misinformation is that this comes out of the general fund of the City of Jackson," the mayor said. "We're using this on behalf of a federal grant that the city has available to us."

The funds must be committed to a project by 2024 and spent by 2026. The mayor said he is confident the Jackson Resource Center will be able to meet that deadline.

Construction is set to start in the Fall of 2024. Currently, the property is filled with abandoned buildings that were once used as a transitional housing program for patients leaving the Mississippi State Hospital. It was closed in 2016.

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Backlash from West Jackson residents

When plans of the project went public, some residents of West Jackson and Ward 5 Councilman Vernon Hartley talked with the Clarion Ledger and voiced their opposition. They're concerned about how the tiny home village will affect public safety in the area, their property values and their standard of living. They questioned why the project can't be built in other areas of the city. They point out that West Jackson is already home to 19 facilities that serve the homeless.

Lastly, many felt like the city decided to go ahead with the project without any input from their West Jackson neighborhoods.

"The Jackson Resource Center did have public meetings, most recently on February 8 I believe," Lumumba countered to claims that public input wasn't heard sufficiently. "They've had other public meetings ... so the notion that the public has either been unaware or uninformed is not factually correct. And the notion that the city is somehow violating the law is blatantly false and it is disinformation."

Lumumba acknowledged other areas of the city do not experience the various issues of homelessness the same way that residents of West Jackson do. But he was firm in his argument that a majority of the city's homeless population is in West Jackson already, in part, due to the number of facilities that are there.

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"The point is the people (the homeless population) are already there. Let's be clear on that, right? ... They're just on the streets, they're just behind abandoned buildings, they're in abandoned buildings, they're burning down buildings when it's cold outside because they're setting fires to stay warm," Lumumba said. "We can't provide a solution to an area where they're not at. It makes no sense."

The project isn't big enough to solve homelessness in Jackson, Lumumba admitted, but it is a starting point to help with some of the West Jackson residents' concerns.

"They're (West Jackson residents) asking for relief in terms of what the unhoused condition looks like. They're asking to not have people on the corner, they're asking to not have tents in their community," Lumumba said.

As far as the issue of public safety, the mayor said, the tiny home village will be gated and have 24-hour security measures.

"There isn't statistical evidence to show there is a severe safety threat by the presence of the unhoused," Lumumba said.

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: Jackson MS mayor defends tiny home village plan for homeless