Columbus Redevelopment Authority leaders say they will be ready to request proposals from developers for their Burns Bottom project by summer 2023.
By that time, it will have been seven years since the CRA began acquiring property and six years since it began receiving city tax money to help fund the redevelopment initiative. That timeline starkly contrasts other area developments, including the West Jackson Street Project of Tupelo, which saw development begin within two years.
CRA President Marthalie Porter told The Dispatch the board has adopted the goal of having Burns Bottom ready for developers to review and begin the process for redevelopment in the five-block area near the Lowndes County Soccer Complex — between Third and Fourth streets and Second and Seventh avenues.
The board will create a request for proposals, detailing the outline of the project’s landscaping and architectural designs for the single-family townhomes and duplexes and commercial construction.
“It’s like the beginning of a conversation with the developers,” Porter said. “It lets them know what we have already completed and what our view for the project is.”
In February, the CRA told city leaders it would need an additional $6.4 million to complete site preparation and infrastructure work. Porter said the CRA is still seeking those additional funds, and the RFP will include any infrastructure work the CRA cannot complete by that time.
“We are still making contacts through some possible state grants that might be available,” Porter said. “We’re looking at all avenues to come up with that funding.”
The CRA was established in 2015 to help redevelop key areas in Columbus. It began purchasing parcels within the Burns Bottom neighborhood in 2016. In 2017, it received $3.2 million in bond money from the city to acquire and demolish blighted properties and prepare the area for redevelopment. An initial one mill of taxpayer money in Fiscal Year 2018 was allocated to service the bond debt, and that amount was expected to ramp up to 2.5 mills.
The CRA has spent approximately $1.74 million in purchasing property and another $1 million in landscaping, dirt work, environmental work, demolition, permitting and legal and court fees, CRA attorney Jeff Turnage said.
The $500,000 left of the bond money will be spent on demolishing the four remaining houses left in the project area and may be used to begin some of the infrastructure work before developers receive the RFPs.
There are also two properties left unpurchased. Board member Robert Rhett said the CRA does not plan to purchase them at this time.
Miracle Valley Holy Ghost Temple of Deliverance, at 306 Fifth Ave. N., is one of the two properties in the target area not owned by the CRA. Pastor Napoleon Jackson has preached there in Burns Bottom for 31 years. He told The Dispatch when the CRA approached him in 2020 with a proposal to purchase his church, he was disappointed by the $18,000 figure.
“To me, it felt like an insult,” Jackson said. “I mean, where can you go with $17- to-18,000 and get anything? Nowhere.”
Jackson also said the CRA offered to trade his church for another building in town, but before the deal could be completed, a separate entity purchased the building; Jackson has not heard from the CRA since.
Similar developments
In Tupelo, the West Jackson Street Project, run by the Neighborhood Development Corporation, a private nonprofit, had a different strategy for its similarly sized project of 65 parcels.
In 2013 the city granted the Community Development Foundation, a private economic development organization, and committed $1.89 million over nine years from its General Fund to purchase, demolish and prepare blighted properties for a mixed-use redevelopment. The city also spent $1.48 million on infrastructure. That same year, CDF passed the project onto the NDC because of that organization’s real estate and development expertise, CDF President David Rumbarger said.
“I think that development expertise for Neighborhood Development lies within the city and its jurisdiction,” Rumbarger said.
The NDC began purchasing lots along the West Jackson Street area in 2013; within two years, it had already sold off the first few lots and construction was underway. Since then, it has sold 59 parcels, and there are now only a few vacant lots left to build on. NDC Chairman Duke Loden and a few colleagues plan to develop these themselves, Loden said.
Loden told The Dispatch the strategy was to use the money allocated to them by the city to purchase and prepare lots, then sell the lots a few at a time and use the sale money to continue purchasing and demolishing blighted houses and other vacant properties.
The CRA and NDC had different rules when purchasing the lots in their respective projects. Because the NDC is a private nonprofit, it is unrestricted by the same procurement laws as the CRA. Its status allowed the NDC to use the money it received from the Tupelo General Fund and the CDF how it saw fit and could pay less (or more) for the properties without the need for an appraisal or the need to give notice for demolition or purchase of property, Loden said.
“Because we are a nonprofit organization, we could negotiate our purchases and our own conditions of removal with residents,” Loden said. “So, we were able to do it much easier and much less expensive.”
When asked why the CRA decided to purchase and prepare all 73 parcels in Burns Bottom instead of taking a similar route as the NDC, Turnage told The Dispatch the board did not want to bring developers into the project to build new homes next to other blighted properties.
“It (the board) didn’t feel like developers would be interested in buying a block of property next to blighted property,” Turnage said. “Who’s going to want a $200,000 house next to an $8,000 abandoned shack with a drug addict living in it?”
Columbus trails in new home starts
In the last five years only 20 building permits to construct homes were issued by the Columbus Building Department, Building Official Kenneth Wiegel said. In 2020, The Dispatch reported on a new housing development in Starkville that had 36 houses under construction. Starkville has seen numerous such developments in the past five years. Officials in Starkville and Tupelo could not immediately quantify the numbers built in their cities, with one saying quantifying that number would be “a project.”
Trey Pace, a developer with Crosstown Development, LLC, told The Dispatch that compared to cities like Starkville, whose need for housing grows with every increased first-year class at Mississippi State University, Columbus’ need for housing isn’t there.
“It’s 10-to-1; there’s a tremendous difference,” Pace said. “So many people come into that town (Starkville). There are also so many game days, small house buyers coming here and that’s gotten bigger and bigger over the last seven or eight years.”
Within the Burns Bottom project, Porter told The Dispatch it began taking phone calls and serious inquiries on the project in March. The CRA has received about three calls from developers interested in the residential development and about four for the two commercial lots on the corner of Fifth Street North and Fifth Avenue.
“We’ve had some good initial calls from interested parties,” Porter said.
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