Jackson business leaders Liz and Bill Brister say Mississippi’s capital city is closer than many realize to a downtown renaissance — if state leaders and private investors will help push it over the finish line.
In a recent Bigger Pie Forum podcast hosted by publisher Wyatt Emmerich, the longtime Fondren couple laid out a vision for turning downtown Jackson into the kind of vibrant urban center that can keep young people in Mississippi and attract new residents, jobs and investment. At the heart of their argument is a simple target: grow the number of downtown residents from roughly 800 to about 2,000, a “tipping point” they say would support more restaurants, retail and street life.
“That’s where you start — in the city core, the heart of our city, which is downtown,” said Liz Brister, who heads Downtown Partners, a group focused on revitalizing the central business district. “If that’s vibrant, then it makes it more attractive to develop the inner city surrounding downtown.”
Brister said the 2,000-resident goal grew out of conversations with other downtown advocates and a recent visit to Mobile, Alabama, whose smaller but lively urban core has a grocery store, breweries, restaurants and retail supported by just over 1,000 downtown residents. Because Jackson has taller buildings and more vacancies, she argued the city likely needs about twice that residential base to feel robust.
Her husband, retired finance professor Bill Brister, said Jackson’s long population slide — from about 200,000 residents in 1980 to roughly 140,000 today — has strained schools, neighborhoods and city services, leaving vacant houses and blight in many areas. He believes that decline has now stabilized and that targeted investment in downtown and housing could spark growth.
The couple rejected the idea that Jackson’s problems can still be explained by “white flight.” Emmerich noted the city has been about 85% African American for years yet continues to lose residents, which he called “just flight.” Older housing stock, high maintenance costs and better prospects for property appreciation in the suburbs all contribute to that exodus, they said.
The Bristers have tried to counter that trend on their own block in north Fondren, where they have bought 15 to 16 vacant or uninhabitable houses over the past three years, renovated them “top of the line” and sold them to young, middle-income homeowners. Bill said that small-scale infill has helped turn their immediate neighborhood around and shows that targeted reinvestment can be affordable and effective.
Still, they argued, some of the city’s most blighted areas may require larger-scale redevelopment or new construction, which is one reason Liz keeps turning the conversation back to downtown. High-rise conversions, she said, allow hundreds of people to move into a single building, quickly building density and creating customers for shops and restaurants.
A major piece of that strategy is already underway. The Bristers highlighted the growing downtown footprint of investor Kumar Bhavanasi, whom Liz described as a “significant player” in Jackson’s emerging renaissance. Bhagat now owns Regions Plaza, the Pinnacle building, the old Deposit Guaranty building, the Electric Building and, in a recent “newsflash” during the podcast, the former Marriott hotel.
Regions and Pinnacle will remain focused on Class A office tenants, but the old Deposit Guaranty building is slated for a major residential conversion, and the former Marriott could become a hotel, apartments or a mix of both, Brister said. Together, those projects could move Jackson much closer to the 2,000-resident mark downtown.
Existing downtown residential properties are already effectively full, she noted, citing one former federal courthouse with more than 100 units where 97 were leased and the remaining apartments had applications pending. “Our downtown spaces are full. There’s more demand than supply,” she said.
Emmerich argued that state government should see downtown investment as a relatively modest, high-impact alternative to large manufacturing subsidies. He estimated that $100 million in public support — far less than what Mississippi has offered some industrial projects — could help finance five residential high-rises in the capital city.
The Bristers said they sense a shift at the Capitol, driven in part by broader worries about Mississippi’s population loss. Mississippi was one of only three states to lose population in 2024, Liz noted, even as the state has racked up some industrial recruitment wins. Metropolitan areas like Little Rock and Birmingham are growing in double digits, she said, while the Jackson metro area is growing by about 1%.
They credited state leaders for creating the Capitol Complex Improvement District, funding major water and infrastructure upgrades, and expanding the presence of Capitol Police. Liz called the CCID and the state police presence a “game changer” that has made downtown one of the safer parts of Jackson, even as perceptions of crime lag behind reality.[1]
“I hear people say all the time, ‘I never come to downtown Jackson. It’s dangerous,’” Bill said. “It’s not. … The perception … is inaccurate. I encourage everybody outside of Jackson: give us a chance.”
Emmerich, who has lived in New York and Los Angeles, said Jackson already has many of the amenities of a great mid-sized city — including strong independent restaurants, churches, museums, music venues and sports facilities — but lacks a single, lively pedestrian corridor. He and Liz both pointed to Capitol Street as the obvious candidate for a “walking street,” citing the recent Mississippi Folk Festival there as a glimpse of what a busier downtown could look like.
They said attracting and, if necessary, subsidizing coffee shops, bars and other street-level venues on Capitol Street would pay dividends in talent retention and economic development. Emmerich likened it to college football recruiting, where players are swayed by stadiums and locker rooms as much as by scholarship offers.
“If you want bright young people to come back to Mississippi, you’ve got to give them what they want,” he said. “They want a cool, vibrant downtown.”
Liz warned that a “let it go down in flames” attitude toward Jackson hurts the entire state, particularly when industrial prospects fly into the capital and judge Mississippi by what they see downtown. She urged business and political leaders to “put our best foot forward” in the capital city, calling Jackson “Mississippi’s only real downtown” and “the solution to many of our state’s issues.”
Below is a full transcript of the podcast:
Good afternoon. I'm Wyatt Emmerich. I'm here on behalf of the Bigger Pie Forum. I've got Liz and Bill Brister here, longtime Jackson residents, and we're going to talk a lot about downtown and how we get a vibrant downtown.
Liz is the head, CEO, whatever you call it these days, of Downtown Partners, and a lot of people in the community are really excited about that because Liz is a mover and shaker. We're just going to dive right in and address the issue of downtown Jackson and how we turn it into something that everybody wants to come and be part of.
So let's start off. Let's talk about you two and why you decided to stay in Jackson, how you came to Jackson, that kind of stuff.
Bill: Okay, well, I'll start off. I'm from Brookhaven, Mississippi. That's where I was raised. I went to Southern Miss, the college, and got two degrees from there. Then I went to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville to get my PhD. And that's where I met Liz.
When I finished my degree there, I was looking for a job and I got a job at Millsaps, which was wonderful. It's the job I wanted. So it was kind of like coming home, pretty close to home. We came to Jackson for my job. I brought her here. I always say kicking and screaming.
Liz: I didn't think I would spend my life in Jackson.
Wyatt: So you're not a native Mississippian.
Liz: No.
Wyatt: From Arkansas?
Liz: Arkansas.
Wyatt: Okay, great. So I said, "Where do you want to live?" She said, "I don't know, New York, Paris." And I said, "What about Jackson, Mississippi?" And she said, "Let's go see it. Let's go check it out."
So I brought her down here, and interestingly, I wanted to impress her. I wanted her to be impressed with Jackson. The first place we went was Hal & Mal's. I said, "This is it. You'll get a dose of Jackson."
We were there for lunch, and it worked. She stayed. And we've been here 37 years. That was in 1989.
Wyatt: And y'all live where?
Liz: We live in Fondren, in the north part of Fondren, formerly known as the top of Fondren or Broadmeadow. Now they call it Fondren North, but it's an area between Meadowbrook and Northside Drive in a house that we outgrew a very long time ago. But we love our community and have really been committed to that. That's probably part of the story of how I ended up working in downtown.
We've really loved our neighborhood, loved our neighbors, and we've been leaders there. That's how it all started.
Wyatt: Great. Jenny and I live in LoHo. We're also North Siders. We live in the Jackson city limits. LoHo used to be "Leftover"; it got rebranded. Somehow someone in our neighborhood association decided "Leftover" didn't sound very good. So we became LoHo, after SoHo, which stands for South of Houston.
But LoHo, there is no "south of Ho" or anything. There's just LoHo. At any rate, I always wonder what it stands for.
Liz: It doesn't stand for much of anything. You can kind of get a connection between "Leftover" and LoHo if you stretch your mind.
Wyatt: But we certainly understand the love of living in the city and an urban environment. Quite frankly, I love its diversity. That's one of our factors. We like to go to Aladdin and it's just, you really feel like you have a diverse experience. It's not boring, it's exciting. So glad to hear you say that.
Now Fondren is booming, of course.
Wyatt: Is Fondren in your domain as Downtown Partners?
Liz: It is not. I mean, it's where I live, and I've served on the Fondren board. That's again, probably some of the experience that led me to working on the downtown issues. But no, downtown is downtown.
Wyatt: So let's talk about that. One of the things that I think Liz and I have discussed in the past is you have to have a critical mass of people living in downtown Jackson, and that's critical. I think right now we have about 800, and Liz has put forth the idea that 2,000 is the magic number. Explain that to me.
Liz: Well, it comes from some people who've been working on this longer than I have, and also from a recent trip that I made with a board member to Mobile, Alabama. We went there to look at their downtown business district. It feels different. Mobile is definitely different than Jackson, but it feels more vibrant. It feels more robust.
You have a grocery store, you have a number of breweries, you have more restaurants. You even have some retail shops in downtown Mobile. And we started asking, "How many people live in downtown Mobile?" It was only a little over a thousand, which surprised me because it felt like it was a lot more than that.
But I thought, okay, we're close to some tipping point that's going to make a difference. Certainly Jackson has a different demographic. Our buildings are different than Mobile, which has more of that kind of French Quarter look to it, smaller buildings. So for us, especially based on the number of vacancies that we have in some of our downtown buildings, we feel like 2,000—double that Mobile number—will really start to feel vibrant and robust, and fill up some of our buildings based on current occupancies.
Wyatt: And I calculate that to be about five residential high-rises or so.
Liz: Which is doable. Now it's going to take some incentives and some help from the state.
Wyatt: What I don't understand is why the state leadership feels perfectly happy to put hundreds of millions in subsidies into a big-box manufacturing facility, which may be obsolete in a few years, and they won't put a little money into downtown Jackson, which could change the whole tenor of downtown forever. Why are the state leaders so interested in manufacturing, and why is it so hard to get everybody on board to support the state’s urban core? Although this is changing, right?
Liz: I was going to say, we're on the eve of the legislative session, so I'm going to throw the optimism out there and say they are going to support those things.
Wyatt: It wouldn't take that much. If you look at what went into the data centers or the tire plant, roughly I did some calculations and a hundred million could probably get five residential high-rises off the ground in downtown Jackson. In the scheme of subsidizing manufacturing plants, a hundred million is not a lot of money. I think Amazon is probably going to be close to a billion by the time it's all over with subsidies.
So let's talk about the state leadership and how they seem to be coming around. For a long time it kind of seemed like it was, "We don't care about Jackson. Let it crash and burn." But I think that's changing now, right?
Liz: I think part of that is tied to our success as a state. Bill, I know you've looked at this a lot—the population loss issue. We are hemorrhaging people out of the state. Last year in 2024, not 2025, Mississippi was one of three states in the country that had population loss. So even though we may have some successes with manufacturing and certain job creation, we're still losing people, which is not a good outcome for our state overall.
I do think people are recognizing that that's a problem. Talk a little bit about the population loss issue, because I think that goes to the heart of why we're starting to get the attention of our state leaders.
Bill: Right. Just some statistics: In 1980, the population of Jackson, the city—not the metro area—was about 200,000 people. Currently it's about 140,000. So we've lost 60,000 residents in the last 50 or so years, and it's been a steady decline.
Of course, that affects schools, businesses, neighborhoods where people have moved out. It leads to a lot of problems, including vacant houses and blight. The population loss may be a symptom of other problems, but it has caused a lot of other problems in Jackson too.
I think it's stabilized, and I think it's going to start growing. That's one of the things I think Liz and our new mayor—who is also very well thought of at the state level—are going to have to work on: getting residents back into Jackson and getting businesses, both new retail-type businesses and law firms and other businesses, to rent office space downtown. We've got to turn that population loss around.
Wyatt: Forever we blamed this on white flight. But as we all know, Jackson's been about 85% African American for a long time, and the population loss is even greater now. So this is not white flight. It's just flight.
I think part of the problem is that the houses in Jackson are older because Jackson developed first before the suburbs. So you have a lot of older houses, and older houses are very expensive to maintain. Sometimes it's just easier to move to the suburbs, where you have a better chance of property appreciation and getting a return on your investment, and you don't have the maintenance that you might have in an older house.
So I think a lot of the problem stems from the fact that houses get old, and after a point people don't want to live in old houses. You end up with large swaths of Jackson with dilapidated old houses. It's not economical to refurbish them in many cases. So what you've got to do basically is have a developer come in and take a large area, buy everything out, tear everything down, and start over with newer homes. Is that something that can happen?
Bill: Let me take that. I'm going to brag on Liz here a little bit. In our neighborhood in the north part of Fondren, we had a lot of vacant houses, as you were just describing, many of them uninhabitable. We bought them. We've done 15–16 houses in the last three years or so. We buy them, we fix them up, top of the line.
Liz: And that's affordable. You can do that. You can buy these houses that are uninhabitable for not a lot of money, so that leaves you more money to basically rebuild.
Bill: Liz puts in a lot of money to make them very, very nice. Then we sell them, and we sell to homeowners. That's the big deal. We're trying to get young, middle-income homeowners back in our neighborhood. She's fixed up maybe 15–16 houses within a half mile of our house over the years, and it's turned the neighborhood around. So it can be done, and it is affordable.
Wyatt: I do Meals on Wheels, and we deliver in West Jackson. There are some streets where I don't think those houses are salable. We go down streets where maybe one out of three houses is occupied and the other ones are just falling in. What do you do with an area like that?
Liz: I think most of the houses, especially in some parts of West Jackson, have potential. You have some beautiful Craftsman houses that are built around the Jackson State area that probably do have possibility for renovation. But to your point, we have areas of the city that are blighted and are going to take a lot of investment to bring them back and maybe have to infill with new construction.
I'm going to turn that toward downtown, because I do think that's possible downtown. Perhaps that's where you start—in the city core, the heart of our city, which is downtown. Because if that's vibrant, then it makes it more attractive to develop the inner city surrounding downtown.
Wyatt: Exactly.
Liz: You have more density. You've got the ability to take, like you said, a high-rise building and put a couple hundred people, or 300 people, into that building. It starts to build back density and population.
Also, for the state's interest in downtown, we know that population right now is moving toward urban centers. Younger generations want to live in a city, which makes the decline of the population in Jackson such a conundrum. But if we build back an urban center that's exciting and interesting to younger generations, they'll come back to our state. They may start in Jackson and end up in Natchez or Tupelo or somewhere else, but Jackson is the commercial center of our state. It's the largest city in the state, the only one over a hundred thousand, and right in the middle of the state.
It's kind of like, that's where you start to rebuild our city and also to rebuild our state as far as the population loss we've experienced as a state. Back to your question about the leaders, I think that's why they're interested. They know this. Even in the metro area where Jackson has lost population to some of the suburban counties, all of those areas are starting to flatten as far as growth.
When you look at metropolitan growth in places like Little Rock or Birmingham, we're leaving a lot on the table. They're growing in double digits. Our entire metropolitan area is growing 1%. That's not growth. So I think we all have to recognize that Jackson is part of this story, and Jackson is the solution. It is the solution to many of our state's issues.
Wyatt: You look at Nashville and Austin. Every young person wants to go there because they're vibrant and they're cool. I look at it like football recruiting. If you want the best football players, you've got to have a great stadium and really fine locker rooms and a good campus. If you want bright young people to come back to Mississippi, you've got to give them what they want, and they want a cool, vibrant downtown with coffee shops and bars and nighttime venues and a cool street to hang out and walk around on.
If we give that to them, they will come. If we don't give it to them, they're going to go to Nashville and Austin and we’ll have this huge brain drain. If we can bring those people in, like you said, it turns the state around.
Now, let's talk about some of the big buildings that are being acquired by—what's his name? I've forgotten.
Liz: Kumar Bhavanasi.
Wyatt: Kumar Bhavanasi, yeah. We're really excited about that because, as we all know from COVID, office space has changed. It used to be you had to go to the office because that's where the computer was, and you had to have the computer to do the work, and you had to be where the network was. We all know that's changed with the smartphone and Zoom and all that. COVID proved it.
Now you have this huge glut in office space, and you see this going on in New York especially, where huge 50-story office buildings are being transformed into residential units and they're profitable. So let's talk about Kumar and what he's doing and what that means for Jackson.
Liz: Newsflash: he just bought the old Marriott.
Wyatt: Wow.
Liz: So he is definitely becoming a significant player in our renaissance, our revitalization of downtown Jackson. He owns Regions Plaza and the Pinnacle building, which is the newest building in downtown and one of the newer office buildings in the state. He bought the old Deposit Guaranty building, and that's going to be a major residential conversion project. Last week he bought the Electric Building, which is already partially residential and partially office space, and now the Marriott Hotel.
Wyatt: So five buildings.
Liz: Yes, and this really is a newsflash. I haven't even quite absorbed all this yet. We found out today he is the buyer of the Marriott.
Wyatt: Is his plan to do everything residential in these buildings, or do we know?
Liz: Regions and Pinnacle, he is certainly continuing to try to recruit Class A office tenants and is having some success. These are nice office buildings with beautiful spaces. Regions Plaza was actually already mostly occupied, one of the more robust office buildings downtown as far as occupancy rates. So that one we're maintaining. In Pinnacle, he is trying to regrow some of the law firms that we lost through the years to the suburbs.
He's putting a lot of money into security and amenities. We have a new coffee shop in Regions Plaza. I'm working really closely with Kumar to bring the kind of excitement that people want in a downtown. He's really easy to work with.
I'm assuming that the Marriott—he has said hotel space in the article I just read—but it's perfect for residential conversion and maybe even some combination of hotel and residential. Between the old Deposit Guaranty building, which is going to be a residential project, and potentially the Marriott, we're going to start getting closer to that 2,000 figure that we need downtown. So it's an exciting day.
Wyatt: So we've already got a private market initiative here. If we could just get the state leaders to come in too, I think this is achievable. We hit 2,000 residents and then suddenly we start to grow. Because Jackson is the core. Louisiana has Baton Rouge, Shreveport, New Orleans. Mississippi just has Jackson. You've got Biloxi, but that's on one very extreme end of the state. Jackson is the capital. When people fly into the airport, they're going to want to see what Jackson looks like. If it's vibrant and teeming, they go away with a great impression. If we want to change the perception of this state, we've got to have a great downtown.
It's my understanding that the residential that's here now has done pretty well. Can we talk a little bit about that?
Liz: It is absolutely the truth. The buildings we have downtown that are currently residential are full. They just are. They may have a vacancy because of a move in or move out, but the Courthouse, which is a residential conversion across from Trustmark Bank—it used to be the old federal courthouse—has 102 or 103 units. Ninety-seven of them are leased. They say, "We don't really have any availability," which means the other ones already have applications.
That's just one indication. But yes, our downtown spaces are full. There’s more demand than supply.
Wyatt: For all the Jackson doomsayers out there who think Jackson's going to crash and burn and there’s no hope, it's a sellout for residential space in downtown Jackson. That should be an indication of hope and progress.
And like you say, look around—Birmingham's done it, Mobile's done it, Memphis has a vibrant downtown. This can be done. All those cities were grappling with the same sort of problems that Jackson had. Now we've got a private developer. I think he's from the tech sector, so hopefully he has lots of money. We've also got the Capitol Police in there.
So let's talk about the Capitol Complex Improvement District and what part they play in the revitalization of downtown. Now we’ve got two police forces. You combine the numbers and you're looking at a pretty hefty police force now.
Liz: Security is not one of our problems. It's really not. Jackson has had a lot of challenges that cities all over America have. We aren't unique in some way, but our leadership here, especially the state leadership, has really helped Jackson.
When I talk to other city leaders around the country that do what I do—the downtown people—they go, "How did you do that? You've got Jackson Police and a state police force. They put all this money into water and roads. How do we buy into that? We need this."
Wyatt: The water was kind of land—well, we had to go through some crisis to get the water money.
Liz: That's true, we did. But my point is, things are lining up for Jackson to be successful. Our state has invested a lot through the CCID, and we are getting new roads and new infrastructure. We have had a significant overhaul of our water system. Water systems in cities are old all over the country and falling apart and having problems. If anything, our crisis got us in line early to get help with this issue.
So I do think that Jackson, and in particular the Capitol Police, have been a game changer for downtown. Downtown in particular is one of the safer areas in the city as far as crime that happens, in part because it's still mostly a day community and people leave at night except for the residents who are living down there. But it's a safe area, and the CCID has been a great benefit.
Where we live in Fondren, we have it too, so I see its impact all over the city. Now downtown, we want more of that share. We really want the CCID to be focused on that capital district, but it's good for the whole city and it's been really helpful. With our new mayor, we're also very optimistic about the future of Jackson Police and all of our city functions. It's going to take some time to rebuild decades of neglect, but we're in a good place, and I feel like the right team is working on that.
Wyatt: Bill, you're a retired professor of finance. Is this possible from a financial standpoint?
Bill: Well, it's a big job. But the residential being almost 100% occupied is an opportunity for an investor to come in and create residential space. It could pay off because the demand is higher than the supply. Yes, it's possible. There are too many models around of other cities that have done it. We can do it.
There are a lot of good things about downtown Jackson. The museums are excellent—both the History Museum and the Civil Rights Museum, and the Art Museum. Great museums. Live entertainment all over the place. Duling Hall is one of the best music venues I've ever seen. It's unbelievable. It's just the right size, with great bands coming in.
Wyatt: I really could have lived anywhere in the United States. I lived in New York City for a while, Los Angeles. I hate traffic, I hate smog, I hate fighting for a parking spot, and I hate the anonymity. I was looking for the perfect-size city that wasn't too big—I didn't want it big enough to have traffic—but big enough to have what I wanted: movie theaters, great restaurants.
Jackson has some of the best independent fine-dining restaurants in the world, maybe. The golf pros who come for the tournament say one of their big draws is they are amazed at how many great independent, non-chain fine-dining establishments we have. That was a big draw to come to the Sanderson Classic.
River Hills is one of the finest tennis facilities in the world. We have incredible churches, vibrant churches, and golf courses. Annandale, Reunion, what Randy Watkins has done with his courses is phenomenal. Jackson Country Club—it's just the right size. There's just one thing we're missing: we need a vibrant, viable downtown. And we need one good walking street.
If you go to places like Greenville, South Carolina, it was in the dumps and now it's amazing. On a Friday night the stores are open, people are out walking around. It's beautiful. Charlottesville and all these places have high-rises; they have residential high-rises. That's what they have, because that creates the people on the street and the clientele for the restaurants and everything.
I think we need one good street, and Capitol Street is the obvious one.
Liz: I was going to say Capitol Street. Not fair, you beat me to it.
Wyatt: Nothing against Farish Street, but Farish is way on the edge. Capitol Street is the obvious choice. We need to do whatever we need to do to bring in the venues, the coffee shops, the restaurants. We may have to subsidize them. It's okay. It's not going to be a lot of money. You create a vibrant walking street where people are hanging out, and you turn everything around.
Liz: Recently, the Folk Festival was in downtown Jackson. Great event. I loved it. You got a feel for what Capitol Street could be. Walking up and down, we needed more stores and more of everything there, but you could feel that this would work. This could be a vibrant downtown. That was a good thing.
Wyatt: And I think that's what Kumar is picking up on—the potential to transition from office to residential. That redesign is really complex. Who is he using? Is he using local architects at all? How do you know who's involved in the design of that stuff?
Liz: I do. He's working on the old Deposit Guaranty building with Dale Partners.
Wyatt: Oh, great. So he is using local people.
Liz: Yes. Like I said, he's so open to feedback and ideas. He's always asking, "What do you think about this? Should I do this?"
Wyatt: We need to get him on this podcast.
Liz: You would love him. He's delightful. We're all really encouraged that he is making this investment in our city. We want others to come along, but we're really excited that he's doing it. He's been a good actor. He is putting a lot of money back in these buildings, and he's helping recruit some good tenants.
Wyatt: We've got to get to 2,000. I think that's about an hour's worth. That's a long podcast.
Is there anything that I haven't asked that you want to say?
Bill: I want to go back to the perception of Jackson by people in communities outside of Jackson. I hear people say all the time, "I never come to downtown Jackson. It's dangerous." It's not. I encourage everybody who might hear this to give it a try. Come to downtown Jackson, come to our restaurants, come enjoy our entertainment businesses. Give Jackson a look when you're looking for office space. The perception of danger or the water or this, that, and the other—it's not there anymore. It's a perception that is inaccurate. I encourage everybody outside of Jackson: give us a chance. You'll be pleasantly surprised, I think.
Wyatt: It just takes so long to change perception.
Liz: It does. But you've got to start, and it's so important. I think the most important thing is that the rest of the state realizes that if the core is rotten, that affects the whole state. You're just not going to get off the ground. Industrial recruiters are going to fly into Jackson, and they're going to want to go, "Let's take a look at downtown Jackson." They're going to drive through downtown and check it out. If it looks vibrant and healthy, they're going to be much more likely to locate here.
This holier-than-thou, finger-pointing, "Let it go down in flames" attitude is just shooting yourself in the foot. It is not helpful to anything or anybody, and it's not Christian either.
Wyatt: No, it's definitely not. It's not Christian.
Liz: I had an economic developer tell me recently that these deals are razor thin sometimes, what they come down to. Yes, our state has done a good job—I’ve got to give credit where credit is due—in recruiting some of these deals. But what about all the deals we didn't get? What about all the ones that we lost? Sometimes they were lost over what you just described. People don't want to move here, they go to downtown Jackson and don't see the vibrancy. Or they come to Jackson first before they go to these other places, and some impression kills the deal.
We need to put our best foot forward. I think that's the story: let's all work to put our best foot forward for this city, the capital city of our state, Mississippi's only real downtown. That will help close these deals all over the state, bringing prosperity to everybody.
Wyatt: To everyone. I go back to the football analogy. It's like spending all this money on NIL deals to recruit people, and then you show them a dilapidated stadium and a stinky locker room. They're going to say, "I'm not going there." One reason Brian Kelly went to LSU is Tiger Stadium. We didn't have Tiger Stadium.
Infrastructure matters when you're recruiting, and we are recruiting bright young people. If we can't recruit bright young people and retain them, it's going to be a much greater struggle to develop economically. As you pointed out, brain drain is everything. But if you recruit them at a young age and they get some roots in Jackson—or maybe they're from Jackson and you keep them here—it helps the suburbs because eventually they're going to want to get married and have children, and the urban environment is going to be less appealing. They're going to go to Madison, Ridgeland, or Rankin County, and it's going to help those areas. Everybody benefits.
Anything else?
Liz: That's a good closing line.
Wyatt: Okay, we're going to close. Liz and Bill, I really thank you for being here. It's been a great and interesting, informative conversation. Thank you to Bigger Pie for footing the bill for this. We're going to post it on the Emmerich News websites all over the state. If you want to find out more about Downtown Partners and the long list of things they're doing, go to their website—you can't believe all the cool stuff they're doing.
