Jackson Rising

Thank you. Thank you to the Greater Jackson Chamber Partnership for having me — and for the work you do for this city and this region.

What I’m going to share with you today is a three-act story.

I know you come from all across Greater Jackson — three or four counties represented here today, thirteen-plus communities. And today I’m going to talk to you about Jackson, because both the data and my thirty years of experience show the same thing: a region can’t be successful with a hole in its heart.

I’ve been coming to Jackson since I was eighteen. Thirty years of walking, watching, and now working. Thirty years of meals and memories — great times at the Subway Lounge, then mopping it up at Frank’s World Famous Biscuits; my weekly trips now for greens at Mr. Bully’s and fried okra at the Mayflower. Let me be clear: I’ve always loved Jackson.

I'm going to try a group project. Would you all stand up right now? At each table, I need four seats to be empty. If you don't have four empty, a couple of you sit down.

The room feels completely different after we look at these empty seats. This is what's happened in Jackson. What just happened at your table is what's happened in Jackson. Look around. Those are neighbors gone, customers gone, taxpayers gone, choir members gone, Little League coaches gone. Four empty chairs at Thanksgiving. One out of three Jacksonians are gone.

Not to mention that just before we started losing population, between 1970 and 1980, we increased the size of the city by about two-thirds. Imagine I pushed the walls out even further. Think about all of the loss. The truth is that this goes all the way back to World War II.

In 1980, there were 203,000 people in Jackson. Today, our best count is around 143,000. That's like taking an entire Hattiesburg and vacuuming it out. And still, for whoever is working on this city, the land remains the same 113 square miles. In that same space, you must still have police and fire. You've got to pave all these roads. You've got to light all these houses and all of these light poles and all of these red lights. You've got to try to educate. You've got to deliver water. That same footprint with fewer shoulders, higher millage, fewer services, and a higher cost of doing business. Cities, in some ways, are a math problem. And this math problem doesn't work.

So let's talk about the real culprit, because every city I've worked in has a long blame list. We blame a class. We blame a race. We blame a political party. We blame another political party. We blame businesses. We blame the youth. We blame the schools. We blame those who left. We blame those who were left behind. We blame each other.

But thirty years of studying the data has led me somewhere different. What happened in most American cities wasn't moral failure. It was faulty design. This country was built at a time of horseback. Our county lines and borders were drawn during that era. In many places, a county was literally the distance a person could ride a horse in a day, each one designed to be a self-supporting ecosystem. And that worked pretty well until the end of World War II. The GI Bill fueled new housing. The Federal Highway Act of 1956 built Eisenhower's interstate system, which now lets you move 55, later 65, now 75 — and around Jackson, sometimes 85 — miles an hour without friction.

What followed wasn't just white flight. What followed was resource flight. Everybody who could get out did get out, or they cloistered. On average, those with means moved toward lower taxes, bigger yards, newer schools, fresh pavement. But you could still work in the city, use its roads, use its hospitals, attend its universities, go to the fair, see a concert, visit a museum, eat and be entertained — and then take your income taxes, your property taxes, and most of your sales taxes back across a county line. Those left behind either paid more, received less, or both. That's not evil. It's bad game design. A downward spiral that slowly hollows out a city from the inside out.

I have this person I admire. His name is Raj Chetty. He's a professor at Harvard University. Raj does research on economic mobility. Economic mobility, made very simple, is whether I can do better than my daddy and whether my son can do better than me.

Raj's research looks like this: if you were born between 1940 and 1950 in the United States of America — man or woman, Black, white, brown, other, doesn't matter — you had a 93 percent likelihood that you could do better than your parents. That's what it looked like for my father's generation and how they would fare economically in the United States.

For my cohort, born between 1970 and 1980, it was a 50 percent chance. A fifty-fifty shot that I can do better than my parents.

I have a baby boy named Joseph Bull McManus, twelve years old. For children born between 2010 and 2020, the number drops again. That's what Bull's life looks like right now. Imagine me looking at my son and telling him that. In his school right now, there are twenty kids in the class. Four or five of them may do better than their parents economically.

I call that the right to rise. I believe that's the moral foundation of democracy. When the right to rise collapses — which is what it has done right now — institutions crumble, anger becomes oxygen, and our civility devolves.

Jackson is not broken. Jackson is unfinished. Jackson is a signal. Jackson is a canary in the coal mine for the broken promise of democracy. Jackson is ground zero for determining the future of the right to rise.

In 2025, something interesting happened. We had a water crisis that was terrifying, crime that was exhausting, schools that started bleeding students, and population loss that was accelerating. And yet there was a group of people who shifted the conversation. That conversation shifted from "They have a problem" to "We have a problem." And in some ways, that shift changes everything.

In a blue city, in a red state, in a polarized country, folks here started asking themselves: What if working together might work?

Mayor Horn is here today, and he was one of those people. I believe a lot of the folks who voted for Mayor Horn believed that too. What might happen if working together worked?

So Mayor Horn called my friend Ray Nielsen, and he asked a question that ultimately landed at this: How do we begin to fix seventy-five years of loss in the next four years?

Ray's answer was, "I think we'll have to change the method."

So Ray called Travis and Ansley Crabtree. Then they called me, and I called my business partner Joel and my other business partner Elizabeth, and we got to work.

Thanks to our friend Jeff Goode, the Kellogg Foundation, the Community Foundation for Mississippi, Ray and Nancy Nielsen, the Great City Mississippi Foundation, Trustmark Bank, and fourteen other supporting entities, a process called Jackson Rising was born.

We set out to facilitate as large a group as possible as quickly as possible. We had four constraints. The ideas had to take no more than a year. They had to cost less than a million dollars. They had to happen within a focused geography — ten square miles or less. And they had to represent public-private partnership.

The effort was led by an incredible steering committee, starting with the mayor himself, Mark Hosemann, Ray Nielsen, Carol Puckett Palmer, Donna Barksdale, Bishop Ronnie Crudup, Kane Ditto, Robert Gibbs, Beverly Hogan, Taylor Nicholas, Chip Pickering, Rhea Williams-Bishop, and Kenneth Wilson.

What we ultimately arrived at was fourteen work groups covering everything from infrastructure to downtown to neighborhoods. We generated more than five hundred ideas and distilled them into more than fifty investable ideas.

But what mattered most was that more than three hundred people participated. Those participants voted, and all of the work they created together now lives in one place at JXNrising.com.

In my experience, cities drift into decline, but they decide into greatness. I think ten years from now we'll say we either turned it around or we missed the opportunity. After thirty years of working in shrinking cities, I believe this is Jackson's moment.

Mayor Horn has called for a Marshall Plan. I had the good fortune to be a Marshall Fellow. George Marshall helped create transformative change after the devastation of the World Wars, both across Europe and in the United States. That would lead us on a pathway to Jackson 2050.

Jackson 2050 must create pathways from today to prosperity for lifelong residents. From decades of this work, I've lifted up five pillars.

Jackson 2050 will have to lay out a bold vision. We'll have to decide what we want to be. Do we want to be the best place to be born in Mississippi and in the United States? Do we want to be the best place to raise a family? Do we want to be the best place to build a business? Whatever we do, let's define it clearly.

Do we want to build 10,000 small businesses, starting with lifelong residents, because ownership is the way to help lifelong residents rebuild? Do we want to modernize government — not shrink it, not patch it, but generation-skip it? Do we want to reimagine the business model of a city to be both independent and interdependent? Do we want to reconnect neighborhoods? Do we want to build a full citywide greenline trail system, something like the Atlanta BeltLine or the Katy Trail in Dallas — not something cosmetic, but economic connectors reversing the red lines of the past?

Do we want to build at scale? Do we want to take our eds and meds — our hospitals and educational institutions — and build new centers of excellence and world-class facilities?

What are we going to do about the AI revolution? We know we're going to have the back office of AI. We know data processing is going to be here. But what about the three million Mississippians? Will they be on the front lines of the AI revolution, or will they be left behind?

What about a massive housing and commercial growth push? What about $10 billion of building? What about 10,000 new homes? What about 10,000 new residents?

I can tell you from all my years of doing this what won't work: silos. Going it alone. A scarcity response to an abundant opportunity. Superficiality. Southern nice won't transform a city. Comfort. The status quo. The usual suspects never reimagine a place.

And how do we measure success? We've got to slow, then stop, then reverse population loss. We've got to grow Jackson's GDP and the region's together, not apart. We've got to reverse the decline of the right to rise, starting with our lifelong residents.

So what am I asking you to do? Read this list of investable ideas. If one of them moves you, take it on. Join forces. Invest. Lead. They are there for you. If none fit, create an idea. There's a submission form on the website. Bring it forward.

What am I going to do? We're going to help catalyze demonstration projects. At Chastain Middle School, we're already supporting the Redeemer community's vision for a twenty-acre commons in the heart of Broadmoor, bringing that school back to life. With Liz Brister and Downtown Jackson Partners, we're launching the Urban Studio on Capitol Street, bringing students from across Jackson's colleges together to work on our biggest opportunities.

Finally, I want to close with something personal.

I've done this work for the last thirty years, and it has been inspired in no small part by Mississippi's own Samuel Mockbee. If you didn't know Mr. Mockbee, he was an artist, an architect, a teacher, a father, a MacArthur Fellow, and the visionary founder of the Rural Studio.

Around 1967, Sam Mockbee enlisted in the military right here in Mississippi. He lived shoulder to shoulder with Black soldiers and white soldiers, city boys and country boys. They shared hardship. They shared humanity. What they realized over time was that they were better together.

Everyone, rich or poor, deserves a shelter for the soul.Samuel Mockbee

A city can provide pipes and pavements, or it can provide belonging. Through working together, Jackson can become a shelter for the soul for all who call it home.

You are not just a Chamber of Commerce. As business leaders, you are this community's custodians of the right to rise for all. Not just for you. Not just for your families. Not just for those who work for and with you. But for the child who will be born tonight in one of our hospitals. For the entrepreneur who stayed in the neighborhood when everybody else left. For the teacher who never backed down in that public school. For the grandmother who still believes.