Ward 4 residents voiced their opposition on Saturday over a low-income housing development set for construction this year.
The Concerned Home Owners (CHO) group asked City Councilman Charles McCoy and Mayor Sheriel Perkins to attend the discussion of the planned tax credit housing project, Parkway Place.
About 30 members of the group attended. Also present were State Sen. David Jordan, who is president of the City Council, and grant writer Tommy Gregory of Gregory and Associates Inc., which specializes in urban planning.
Perkins was not present due to an out-of-town engagement, McCoy said.
Group vice president Bill Clay said the purpose of the gathering was not to have discord but to find solutions. However, he said they did not want Greenwood to be known as a city of projects.
Group president Wilbur Boone said he was "grieved and appalled" that citizens in the Mississippi Avenue area had not been notified of the plans.
Parkway Place is to have 65 single-family homes, each consisting of three bedrooms and two baths.
Boone said CHO members had seen too many low-income housing developments begin with elderly tenants needing assistance and then end with young people "who can work better than you and me."
Residents are concerned about crime and depreciation of property values.
Clay said their foremost concern was protocol and representation.
"We should have seen this when it first hit the table," Clay said. McCoy as Ward 4 representative should have told them, he said.
McCoy told the group that the development never came before City Council for approval.
"I don't have answers," he said.
Gregory said people in other Mississippi communities also were upset about the process of the placement of similar housing developments. "There have been complaints statewide about how this process works," he said.
The Mississippi Home Corporation is the agent responsible for tax credit housing developments in the state, Gregory said. He has written applications for projects in other places that also bypassed city councils.
Jordan said it was "not right" for the decision to bypass a city council. "You wouldn't dare do that in north Greenwood without somebody knowing about it," he said.
McCoy said he has scheduled a Feb. 6 meeting with the City Council to discuss the matter further. "We should've been informed of what was going on in Ward 4," he said.
Clay was particularly frustrated that Perkins did not inform the group that she would not be able to attend. He said her absence sent a negative message.
"We are thoroughly disappointed with the mayor not attending our meeting although she verbally agreed she would," Clay said.
"She should have told us she had a prior appointment," he said. "If the project is so good, why wasn't she there to sell it to the taxpayers, the homeowners, the working-class people and the registered voters?"
Group member Catherine Johnson said she thought the discussion was cordial. "I think it was handled very well," she said. "Nobody was put at fault."
Eddie Reed has lived on lower Mississippi Avenue since 1993. He said he has seen similar housing projects go bad and particularly worries about the elderly.
"A lot of elderly people are struggling to make it. They feel like it's going to be more violence in the neighborhood," Reed said. "Hopefully after today we'll get some answers."
"We're going to take it as far as the Capitol if we have to. We'll get buses … Greenwood has more to offer than projects," said Boone.
