Giving Compass' Take:

• Cooperation Jackson is working to create affordable housing in Jackson, Mississippi to start to repair the damage done by racist home-loan policies that prevented Americans of color from growing their wealth through home ownership. 

• What other steps can be taken to undo the lasting impact of racist housing policies? Is this program a cost-effective way to address the problem? 

• Learn about the relationship between race and homelessness.

Denise Fitzgerald’s property abuts the string of quiet, empty lots that line Ewing Street in Jackson, Mississippi. Fitzgerald is familiar with the empty lots of Ewing Street, just a few blocks from Jackson State University.

She’s lived here since 2008, and she remembers when Ewing was a series of derelict buildings smeared across the neighborhood. Only two empty houses remain.

Every other week volunteers with Cooperation Jackson, a local workers’ cooperative that owns the lots, pick up litter. Cooperation Jackson has big plans for the street, and Fitzgerald stands behind them.

Once a thriving neighborhood before the 1980s, the area is now CJ’s proposed site of a series of price-capped homes and gardens organized into a community land trust that it hopes will form a tight-knit community. Cultivating an intimate community in Jackson’s neglected western territory is no easy feat, however. The mean annual income in the area surrounding Ewing, according the Census Bureau, is about $22,000.

Concentrated poverty is measured by the percentage of poor individuals living in high-poverty neighborhoods, and for Black people in Mississippi, that rate is 29.7 percent—made possible, in part, by a long history of discrimination. Until the 1968 passage of the Fair Housing Act, U.S. lending institutions restricted Black families from many home loans.

Cooperation Jackson wants to clear some of that damage by giving people the transferable wealth of affordable homeownership.

Read the full article about reapiring racist housing by Adam Lynch at YES! Magazine.