FCS Property Services Is proud to be a part of the ongoing Blight Removal project in Mobile and surrounding areas.
Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, Jeff Carter was used to seeing the decaying properties that dotted the city. The ’60s hit the town hard, and between the closing of the Brookley Air Force Base in 1969 and the white flight that dominated the era, large swaths of the city were left vacant or fell into disrepair. “Mobile has a history of its most valuable export being its children,” Carter tells me. “I’m the only guy who’s never left.”
Carter started working as an EMT when he was 19, and always saw the makeup of the city as a story of haves vs. have-nots, an intractable problem that everyone learned to live with. He had been one of the only white students in a large all-black magnet school (“When I tell people where I went to high school they think I’m joking,” he tells me) which he says gave him a different perspective on life in Mobile. Carter mentions this as a footnote, but when I arrived in Mobile for Carter to take me on a tour of the city’s most blighted neighborhoods, I began to understand that this was an integral part of Mobile’s story. The city was the beating heart of the segregated south, and though time has passed, the markers of segregation are everywhere. The most stark example: The city hosts two Mardi Gras celebrations, one for black Mobilians and one for white Mobilians.
Until recently Carter ran the city’s innovation team–a group of not-your-usual government employees including a landscape architect, a dreadlocked anthropologist, and an industrial designer with a man bun. (“They call us The Breakfast Club,” Carter says. “I’m the Basket Case.”) The innovation team, funded by a Bloomberg grant, was established with the primary purpose of working on Mobile’s blighted neighborhoods. The story I’d heard, the one that brought me to Mobile, was that the team had not only dramatically reduced the number of blighted properties in the city, but had also managed to alter a state law, allowing the city to take ownership of properties, repair and sell them. Innovation teams are known for rolling out new ways for cities to function, for building apps or designing websites, but a small team changing the constitution is unheard of. I wanted to meet the people who did this, and I wanted to see the blight.
The next morning I stood in the middle of a cracked and weedy street with Carter and Mattie Lofton, one of the city’s code enforcers, as they chatted with Tony Burke about the state of his house. We were standing in The Bottom, one of the neighborhoods where the blight is inescapable, looking at a wooden shotgun house resting on cinder blocks, with patched over holes dotting the outside. This was not one of the blighted houses. It was occupied by someone who, when he could scrape together money for repairs, fixed up what he could. Burke also took care of the vacant lots next to the house. Lots that used to be houses, but that were now scraggly fields.
