Jackson isn't just losing people. It's trying to run a city built for nearly 200,000 residents on the wallet of a city with 141,000. And almost nobody piling on from outside seems interested in understanding that math.
I should say upfront, I'm not an economist or a municipal-finance guy. I'm a Pittsburgh transplant who's called Mississippi home for more than 20 years, and Jackson is part of that home. So take this not as an expert diagnosis, but as one guy who got curious enough to run the numbers on a city that gets thrown around this state like an insult.
Jackson takes it from every direction. Podcasts, out-of-state pundits, suburban critics who haven't set foot downtown in years. Behind a lot of that criticism is this assumption that the people running and working for the city either don't care or don't know what they're doing.
I don't buy that.
City employees are being asked to stretch limited resources across a footprint that's barely shrunk, even as the population and tax base supporting it have. I've met with folks in city services, and I can tell you, these people work. They just have a lot of ground to cover.
Jackson covers almost 112 square miles and maintains more than 1,200 miles of streets. It's got 21 fire stations and water and sewer systems built decades ago for a much bigger population.
That works out to about 118 residents for every mile of street Jackson maintains. Shreveport, a reasonable comparison, has roughly 201 residents per street mile.
The pavement doesn't care how many taxpayers live nearby. A mile of road still has to be patched, drained, patrolled, and eventually repaved. The roads didn't move to Madison County when the residents did. The pipes stayed put.
That's a fiscal-capacity problem, not a motivation problem. From a distance, the two can look alike. They aren't.
Jackson's general fund is about $135.5 million, roughly $960 per resident. Little Rock's got about $1,328 per resident. Mobile's around $1,740. Savannah's close to $1,952.
Jackson is trying to provide big-city services with a lot less operating revenue behind each resident and each square mile than cities we'd naturally compare it to.
There's another part of this story critics rarely acknowledge. Jackson can't collect property taxes from every parcel inside its own boundaries. State-owned government buildings are exempt from local property taxes, even though the city still has to provide streets, drainage, fire protection, and everything else around them.
Jackson's tried to get compensated for that before. A 2015 bill would have required the state to make payments in lieu of taxes. It died in committee, like most bills that would actually help Jackson tend to do.
Then there's the abandoned-property problem. In 2024, the Mississippi Secretary of State's Office reported roughly 1,900 state-owned, tax-forfeited properties inside Jackson, plus about 700 more owned by the city itself.
Those properties aren't just sitting there doing nothing. They're still costing the city money. Grass has to be cut. Structures have to be secured or torn down. Police and fire still show up when something goes wrong on that lot.
Jackson keeps carrying the fixed costs of the historic central city even as families, businesses, and property wealth have spread out into Ridgeland, Madison, Flowood, Pearl, and Brandon.
The metro area didn't lose all that wealth. It just crossed a municipal boundary.
And when that happens, Jackson loses the tax revenue, the consumer spending, the political influence. What it doesn't lose is the responsibility for maintaining the capital city's streets, neighborhoods, and public facilities.
None of this means every dollar's been spent wisely. City officials should answer for bad decisions, failed projects, and waste wherever they happen. But accountability starts with an honest set of facts.
A city with fewer dollars per resident, fewer dollars per square mile, and fewer taxpayers supporting each mile of infrastructure is going to struggle. No amount of ridicule changes that equation.
Instead of asking whose fault Jackson is, maybe we should ask a harder, more useful question: how do we finance a central city after so much of the population, wealth, and taxable property that once supported it has moved beyond its reach?
I love this state. I've built a life here. Jackson, whatever its shortcomings, is part of the house we all share.
The people still here, still working to hold it together, deserve better than blame for arithmetic they didn't write.
Brett Kenyon is a Northsider.
