In Columbus, at the intersection of Eighth Street South and Fifth Avenue South, Mississippi University for Women’s campus touches a residential neighborhood peppered with antebellum homes and smaller, more modern houses. Many of them are being rented. Some are in disrepair.
John Fields wants to change this.
Fields, a dentist who has lived in the city’s Southside most of his life, has become something of an amateur home renovator and developer. He has bought, renovated and resold around 20 Columbus houses in the last 20 years.
The most prominent might be Primrose on Third Street South. That house took a year and a half to remodel, said Phil Hamlett, who helps Fields with all his renovations. Though not a licensed contractor, Hamlett has been renovating and remodeling houses since he was a child helping his father with home projects.
Now, he and Fields are working their way through southside toward MUW’s campus, hoping to turn the area into an inner city suburb of single-family homes one house at a time. The average house takes about five or six months to renovate, Hamlett said.
Fields currently owns eight houses around the intersection of Fifth Avenue and Eighth Street. He has contracts for several more. His goal is to fix the houses up and sell them to families. He hopes to have the houses renovated within two years.
“Single-family owners are what we’re looking for,” Fields said. “This is a rental area (right now).”
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The block between Eighth and Ninth streets is a fenced-in grassy area where Barrow Memorial Elementary School sits surrounded by more derelict buildings.
Built in 1907, Barrow was an elementary school for decades. Now the three-story, brick building is used for maintenance, according to Nora Miller, senior vice president for administration at MUW.
Barrow and the other structures on the lot are enclosed by a chain link fence, which, along with the “No Trespassing” sign, discourages visitors. Though the university’s long-term plan is to eventually turn the area into faculty and staff housing, Miller said MUW has no current plans to renovate the block.
She added that Barrow is on the state’s historic register, meaning that the university, before making any alterations, would have to get approval from the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
Miller, talking about potential changes at Barrow, said, “It’s on a back burner. It’s in bad shape.”
But Fields has a plan for the area. Barrow and the surrounding maintenance buildings face many of the houses that Fields currently owns and plans to renovate. He envisions the block as a park.
Fields doesn’t want anything to happen to the school — his father went to elementary school there. But the surrounding buildings can be torn down, he said.
“We’d like to see the south end portion made into a park and (have) trees and maybe have (MUW) have functions or come over here and have movie nights,” he said. “That’s what my vision is. To plant trees. Because it’s always been green and it needs to stay green.”
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The park is a more long-term aspect of Fields’ vision, which he has had for about 15 years.
He hopes that years from now, when the park is ready to be built, there will be enough homeowners in the area that the neighborhood will get involved in the renovation of the Barrow lot.
His whole plan will improve and extend the neighborhood and it will help MUW too, Fields said.
Last spring he and MUW president Jim Borsig talked about Fields’ plans for renovating the neighborhood. Fields also showed him one of his renovated houses.
“The house that we looked at was four or five blocks away from Barrow School,” Borsig said. “He indicated an interest in that area, and we had a conversation about home ownership, strengthening those neighborhoods.”
Borsig supports Fields’ renovation projects but said MUW has no plan in place at this time.
“In general,” Borsig said, “turning rental property into home ownership strengthens neighborhoods and so that’s something, adjacent to the campus, that personally I would support.”
Fields is enthusiastic that the homes around Barrow and the whole area of southside can be transformed. With one home on Fifth Avenue ready to sell and several others about to be renovated, the hazy vision Fields had 15 years ago may be starting to become reality.
“With The W trying to grow and this neighborhood trying to grow, people wanting to move into historic houses…this is a place where you can do it,” Fields said. “Southside’s a great area.”
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