Bullets came flying through the walls of teenager Kamia Feazell’s south Jackson apartment shortly after she moved there with her mother.

The ninth-grader was standing in her bedroom in their second-floor unit early one morning when a bullet whizzed past her neck and through a wooden door, sending splinters into her face.  

She screamed and dropped to the floor, thinking she’d been shot. 

At first, she had trouble sleeping after the incident. But Feazell has since adjusted to routine gunfire at Pine Ridge Gardens, better known as Rebelwood – one of the most troubled apartment complexes in Jackson.

“I’m not scared anymore,” said Feazell, who recently graduated high school. “I hear a shot, ‘Oh, they’re shooting in the back.’ That’s it.”

But she does wish management would patch the other bullet holes in their walls: in the kitchen cabinet next to where they keep cereal boxes, a foot away from their living room window, beside the front door. 

These scars represent just a sliver of the grim housing conditions plaguing some of the more than 400 residents of this federally subsidized complex. Mold and mildew. Electrical problems. Broken windows. Rusty appliances. Water leaks. 

These hazards are not a secret. City, state and federal officials who oversee Rebelwood know the complex is plagued. They’ve documented the issues in police reports and physical inspection forms.

But their oversight has so far failed to result in lasting improvements to the perennially troubled complex – a result, experts say, of low inspection standards and weak enforcement. 

The deficiencies persist even as regulators have required Rebelwood’s owners to make repairs. 

In 2023, Rebelwood passed its most recent routine inspection by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development with a score of 78 out of 100. HUD records show the inspection identified life-threatening issues with the complex, but a spokesperson for the agency would not provide information about the violation. 

“Does it look like a 78?” said Bridgett Simmons, an attorney with the National Housing Law Project.

The complex is also overseen by the Mississippi Home Corporation, a state housing finance authority that awarded affordable housing tax credits to a previous owner of the complex. During Rebelwood’s last routine inspection in 2018, the agency gave the complex three tries and six months to correct the issues, such as a burned floor, broken window panes and roaches. 

Based on the authority’s inspection cycle, Rebelwood should have been reinspected by now. But Scott Spivey, the Mississippi Home Corporation president, said work pauses during the COVID-19 pandemic created a backlog. Two days after Mississippi Today submitted a public records request for inspection and audits, Mississippi Home Corporation scheduled an inspection for later this month. 

Even if the inspection finds problems at Rebelwood, Spivey said his agency lacks the ability to take stronger action for older complexes like Rebelwood because the greatest enforcement capability it has is to ban them from seeking future tax credits – something owners may have no intention of pursuing, anyway.

“Our tools for enforcement, our arsenal, is vastly compromised,” Spivey said.

Jackson is far from the only city to struggle with upkeeping its affordable housing stock. But Simmons said that is no excuse when “people, in particular the tenants at this property, are being harmed.” 

Mayor John Horhn created a housing task force in July, soon after he took office. His action was spurred in part by water shutoffs at complexes where landlords had failed to pay their water bills. 

“No landlord should put a family in harm’s way,” Horhn declared during his State of the City address in October. 

Jennifer Welch, a rental property owner who chairs the task force, said the city intends for its rental registry, created by ordinance in 2022, to help ameliorate some of these problems by using it to track landlords throughout Jackson. The city does not have any active code enforcement cases against Rebelwood, according to a public records request. 

But while the city works to get the registry going, conditions at Rebelwood continue to deteriorate. 

Last year, its previous owner, a New Jersey-based affordable housing behemoth called the Michaels Organization, sold the complex along with 10 others in Mississippi to another New Jersey company. The buyer and current owner, Treetop Companies, did not respond to repeated requests for comment. 

“People just talk about it and keep talking about it and nothing has happened,” Tonia Cowart, a housing navigator with Stewpot Community Services, said about the dire problems at apartment complexes in Jackson. “It kills hope. It makes you feel like well, ain’t nothing ever gonna change.” 

Continued violations

Rebelwood is a collection of brick-and-tan buildings tucked off Terry Road, down a hilly, wooded driveway. On the sunny October day that Cowart visited the complex, no security could be seen. The gate was open, plywood covered several unit windows, and a gray door to the front office was locked. Dogs slept under trees, so still they seemed dead.

It felt as if Rebelwood had no landlord at all. 

As Cowart walked to a courtyard near the front of the complex, looking for tenants to talk to, a tall, sinewy man named Calvin Williams emerged from his apartment and insisted on sharing his story. 

A 63-year-old painter and maintenance worker, Williams said he’s been surrounded by squalor since he moved to Rebelwood two and a half years ago. The outlets in his bedroom don’t work, so he’s had to squish his belongings into his living room and use a MacFyvered system of electrical cords to power his heart monitor. 

In recent weeks, he’s been distracted by a more pressing issue: hot water falling from the light in his kitchen ceiling. 

“It’s hot as hell because it dropped on my shoulder and burned it,” Williams told Cowart. 

Cowart has helped tenants secure units at Rebelwood and hears about problems like this regularly. But her ability to take action as a navigator is often limited to what she can see: Before she places a client in an apartment complex, she will undertake her own inspection to ensure the unit is up to code. 

Rebelwood’s regulators are supposed to catch a fuller picture. 

During Mississippi Home Corporation’s 2018 routine inspection, records show the agency examined 22 out of 160 units, flagging issues at 15. In the unit that would eventually become Williams’, the inspection found that a smoke alarm was “chirping.” 

Mississippi Home Corporation deemed the complex out of compliance, Spivey said. It would take three more inspections before the agency recorded that Michaels had made all the repairs.

Each time the housing agency followed up at Rebelwood and found it noncompliant, though, invoices show they levied a fine against Michaels.

That fine – the agency’s standard fee for noncompliance – was $110. The maximum fine for failing to file annual paperwork on time? $3,000.

By mid-2022, Michaels had racked up $3,330 in fines and begun trying to sell Rebelwood.

That same year, HUD flagged the company for defaulting on the terms of the contract that allows it to draw down federal funding for Rebelwood, according to a lawsuit filed in Hinds County last year. 

“Default means something serious is happening and now you are subject to the enforcement mechanisms,” Simmons said. 

HUD did not answer questions from Mississippi Today about why the company defaulted. But the plaintiff, another out-of-state investment company that was seeking to buy Rebelwood from Michaels, alleged the complex suffered from widespread issues, including fire damage to multiple units, a lack of carbon monoxide detectors and “major housekeeping and infestation problems.”

Within six months, HUD had deemed the property back in compliance, the lawsuit says. The complex would pass its HUD inspection the following year. 

But its new owner, Treetop, is repeating some mistakes of past owners. While Rebelwood is currently in good standing with Mississippi Home Corporation over its physical condition, it is out of compliance after failing to submit its 2025 annual report on time.

Paralyzed by distrust 

Williams has tried his best to make his apartment home, decorating it with posters and a Dallas Cowboys-themed pendant light. But he can’t hide the smell: His unit reeked of mold and bleach, and his kitchen floor was slick with water. Cowart asked if she could get closer to take a video of the ceiling leak.

“It just ain’t no light up in there,” he said. 

When regulators can’t improve a property, Cowart said tenants need to stand up for themselves. It’s a lesson she learned from her mom when they lived at Rebelwood in the 1990s, their first apartment in Jackson. 

“We had to go hard,” she said. “It’s like, you’re being bullied and you finally have to say, ‘OK, what you gonna do?’” 

But the violence at Rebelwood makes it hard for people to trust each other, let alone work together. News articles regularly feature the complex for shootings and killings. A social media creator dedicated an entire Facebook page to videos of fights there.

Williams says he trusts his dog, Peanut Butter, more than any human at the complex. Earlier this year, he said he was sitting on his bed when a man walked past his window, a bag of meat in hand, calling out to see if anyone would help him cook it. Williams said he looked at his red charcoal grill and decided to help. 

“By the time I got the cornbread out, I heard the gunshots,” he said. The man with the meat had been gunned down.

Mississippi Today interviewed the homicide victim’s mother, Henrietta Cooper-Middleton, who said the complex should be shut down.

“I had told him that he needed to be careful about going over there, because I had heard it was dangerous and people were getting killed,” she said. 

Multiple tenants told Mississippi Today that they are withholding rent because the landlord has not made repairs to their units. But this step, a common tool for tenants, lacks force so long as Rebelwood continues to draw down federal funds. The average rent a tenant pays at Rebelwood is just $145, while HUD pays $1,010 per filled unit, according to data from the agency. 

Residents also may not know who to complain to: While some residents across the state take initiative to identify that Mississippi Home Corporation has some oversight and submit complaints, the agency hasn’t recorded any recent complaints from Rebelwood. 

When it feels no one is looking out for them, Cowart said some residents find their time is better spent trying to leave. 

Feazell’s brother, 20-year-old Keymone Feazell, says he goes to work at a steel fabricator and comes home and tries not to talk to anyone. The family, which is from Jackson, moved to Rebelwood after a stint in Texas, they said, because it was the only affordable unit they could find.

“We don’t belong out here,” he said. 

Often perplexed by what they witness at the complex, the siblings are biding their time until work or school takes them elsewhere. Their mom, Latisha Feazell, is on a waiting list for another affordable housing complex, but it’s in Vicksburg, and she doesn’t want to move there. 

Keymone plans to become a truck driver. He wants to get paid to see the country – and to get as far away from Rebelwood as he can.