Business, economics, and what is coming next in Jackson.
Section
What is being built, what is proposed, and what is stuck: projects, permits, incentives, and the votes that move them.
The Ward 3 councilman introduced an ordinance to repeal the data center moratorium he voted for in July. WLBT reported the meeting was recessed for an hour after an argument that appeared to involve critic Candace Abdul-Tawwab.
City Attorney Drew Martin told the council Oct. 27 a draft is days away. The sales tax exemption MDA advertises for certified data centers covers the equipment and building materials a project would buy.
The council tabled the surplus-property option Oct. 6 after Ward 1’s Ashby Foote questioned the price. A state lawmaker pressed the deal Monday, and the land sits in the Pearl’s floodplain.
Commissioners authorized a predevelopment deal with a Carlyle-led team on Oct. 26. The only cost figures on the record cover design, not construction, and the airport got one proposal.
MDEQ records show draft air permit modifications for Amazon’s Canton and Ridgeland data centers opened for comment Aug. 17 and Aug. 24. No hearing is posted for either.
The city announced a full $3.1 million match in four installments. Mississippi Home Corporation’s published manual caps supportive services at $300,000 and rental assistance at $500,000 per applicant.
The 754-megawatt plant Entergy says data centers help pay for cleared its last major state environmental hurdle on Oct. 14, and a pretreatment draft went to the facility a day later.
The five-story building is the largest single capital commitment on the UMMC campus in years. Private donors have pledged $100 million, the state added $100 million, and $8.5 million in federal money pays for site work.
Arlington’s own press release is dated April 29 and puts first deliveries in fall 2027. It states no project cost, and no rents or floor plans are published anywhere yet.
Prado Lofts is under construction and the Dolce hotel has started dirt work. The Prado Conservatory, rezoned in August, is still on paper, and the land is held by a company that is not PraCon.
The council packet lists a surplus-land option near the Pearl River, three federal grant applications worth $2.17 million, and the airport grant to restore Chicago service. The casino item is the one that stalled.
MDEQ posted its formal response to public comments on Entergy’s 754-megawatt Ridgeland plant, the document the Permit Board will use to decide Tuesday. A newly posted transcript also shows Ridgeland’s zoning board voted no before aldermen overrode it.
The state’s Workforce Housing Program will fund only new single-family construction, capped at $4 million per project. Hinds County is the largest of six qualifying areas, and no local government has yet signed on.
The city posted RFQs for asphalt milling, paving materials, and housing rehab on Oct. 8, the same week the council amended engineering contracts for a resurfacing program that began in 2023.
The only maintenance commitment the Wire found in published coverage is one sentence: 2C Mississippi for three years, then the Jackson Redevelopment Authority. The coverage the Wire reviewed mentions no irrigation system, watering schedule or upkeep budget.
Two March appraisals valued the city’s riverfront tract at $110,000 and $112,000, based on comparable sales of $1,566 and $3,500 an acre. The developer’s own consultant says comparable land costs up to $1 million an acre to make buildable.
The Capitol Green Connector between the GM&O Depot and Hal & Mal’s is expected to finish construction this month, an $8 million bridge over Lakeland Drive broke ground in August, and planners want the trail to run from Jackson State to LeFleur’s Bluff. The identified money so far is roughly $10 million, not counting the connector. A May 2026 study counted $14.2 billion in private investment along Atlanta’s BeltLine.
MDEQ’s air division has concluded the 754-megawatt Traceview plant can meet every state and federal standard, and the decision now rests with a nine-member board that meets the second Tuesday of each month. The draft permit’s own fine print says the permit expires if construction does not begin within 18 months.
The Jackson Redevelopment Authority is taking proposals through Oct. 30 at 4 p.m. on JRA-owned parcels in the 200 and 300 blocks of North Farish Street. Its own property list prices the largest of them at $440,320, and the whole Farish Street inventory at roughly $1.9 million.
The Oct. 6 agenda asks the council to accept a federal Small Community Air Service Development grant for Jackson-Medgar Wiley Evers and to schedule a public hearing on the Downtown Jackson Business Improvement District’s district plan. Both are money decisions with named payers.
Mississippi Today has described the five-story Cancer Center and Research Institute as located on State Street across from the medical center, with construction starting in late October and an opening about four years out. No plan the Wire could find includes retail. Here is everything on the record about the building, the money, and the land.
The state imploded the 50-year-old Department of Public Safety headquarters at I-55 and Woodrow Wilson Avenue on Sunday morning. It has announced no plan for the land. Nearby, UMMC’s $250 million cancer center is about to break ground, and a 60,000-seat stadium’s future is tied to it.
Midtown Partners won a three-year Community Economic Development award to expand three existing enterprises in Jackson. The money started Sept. 30, and the only public notice came from Rep. Bennie Thompson’s office.
PJ Waldrop took over the Mississippi Development Authority on Oct. 1 after Bill Cork’s retirement, inheriting 12 divisions and roughly $400 million in annual spending. The metro’s biggest projects, from Amazon’s Madison County campuses to Jackson’s own incentive pipeline, run through the agency he now leads.
The 183-day moratorium the council passed July 14 runs out in about 16 weeks, and the city attorney told the council in August there is no new draft ready. A 230-acre rezoning request in northwest Jackson is waiting on it.
The city’s own RFP says its legacy permitting system is hard to maintain, unintegrated with GIS, and still accepts paper. It also says a formal project budget has not been established, and that vendors’ cost proposals will set it.
A deed from three sellers named Hood to a single LLC tripped the Wire’s new land-records feed. The paper trail behind it shows four years of buying at Spanish Moss Lakes, a platted lake subdivision outside Utica where half-acre lots list for $2,400 to $2,800.
The council’s new weight-based fee schedule reads like an increase. Run the arithmetic on the old volume-based rate and a pickup load of debris gets cheaper. Mississippi already has the lowest landfill fees in the country, and the last cell filled past its permit in 2024 with no replacement ready, which kept the gate shut for the better part of two years.
A Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business won the sealed-bid contract on Sept. 21, with work starting Sept. 30. The 18-month job is fully funded and drew just three bidders.
The county’s new criminal justice facility is running into supply delays, WJTV reported Monday, the same day supervisors held a special called meeting and one day before a work session. The millage that pays for it was adopted Sept. 10.
The Sept. 22 agenda carries two amendments to Verizon Wireless antenna agreements at city tower sites on Riverside Drive and West Northside Drive, extending terms and swapping equipment on land Jackson owns. The city has not published what the extensions are worth.
The agreement runs 25 years with automatic renewals, sets Amazon’s peak-day draw at 82 percent of what all of Ridgeland uses, routes 1.8 million gallons a day of cooling wastewater into Jackson’s West Bank interceptor, pays Amazon back from future developers, and contains no clause about who comes first in a shortage.
The city’s 183-day moratorium took effect in mid-August and runs out in February. Council members are still debating what the replacement rules should say, while a $23 million budget hole keeps the revenue question alive.
Two supervisors wanted a new land appraisal and a clawback on a $10 conveyance clause before the county borrowed $48 million. They lost 3-2, and the developer who brought Topgolf to Ridgeland now builds the county’s signature venue.
The council paused data center construction for 183 days in July, then voted in August to explore sites anyway. The clock runs out in January, and the city’s zoning code still has no definition for a data center.
The city transferred operations of the McNair Davis Planetarium to the Mississippi Museum of Art in July. Reopening is expected in about six months, once digital screens go in.
The city received close to $4 million from HUD three years ago to replace the Eudora Welty Library. No location has been picked, and the drawdown clock is running.
A week after the council voted to explore data center sites, records show the city’s hired consultant cautioned that the industry’s defining input, water, is the one most directly tied to Jackson’s vulnerabilities.
The six-month moratorium on data centers goes into force today, banning them at most Jackson locations. On Tuesday the council voted 5-2 to urge the administration to find places to build them anyway.
A New York brokerage arranged the sale of the 214,000-square-foot Robinson Road center at a 9 percent cap rate and 83 percent occupancy. The price tells you what investors think of west Jackson retail risk.
The council set an August 25 hearing on tax-increment financing for a Vieux Carre expansion that adds 84 apartments and a medical office building. The TIF only pays out if the project generates new property taxes.
Arlington Development’s 234-unit Class A project, its fourth in Jackson, is betting on pent-up demand for high-end rentals in a city where the median rent sits near $1,100.
Prado Vista will put a county-owned conference center, a 250-room luxury hotel, and four restaurants on 77 acres off I-55. The developer is Gabriel Prado, the same man asking to build an off-grid AI campus while Jackson debates banning data centers.
The 3-1 vote authorizes urban renewal bonds for a 1,800-person venue near Sunnybrook Road. A private developer plans a 250-room hotel next door. Critics say taxpayers are on the hook if revenue falls short.
Con Edison cut power to thousands and reduced voltage for 400,000 customers during the heat wave, a preview of what a grid without slack looks like. Jackson votes on its data center rules July 14. The two stories are the same story.
A rezoning brawl over 230 acres in northwest Jackson has the protests and the deadline. But a separate developer’s off-grid gas plant — the project state regulators just declined to touch — may set the precedent that lasts.
A quiet office building on Ridgewood Road is becoming luxury lofts. The developer has done this before, and the math is the reason.
An essay: for twenty years Jackson couldn’t give away a downtown lot — and when investors finally arrived with a private jet and a yacht, they turned out to be the FBI.
In barely a year, New Jersey tech founder Kumar Bhavanasi has quietly bought five of downtown’s most important buildings — and he’s planning to spend more than $100 million bringing them back to life.
A New Jersey firm wants to rezone 190 acres for what looks like a data center, just as the City Council weighs a moratorium — part of a boom that’s made Mississippi one of the country’s hottest markets.