Freedom Farms is one of the cooperatives formed under the umbrella of Cooperation Jackson. The organization’s ultimate goal is to create a federation of worker-owned cooperatives, in addition to a cooperative incubator, a cooperative financial institution, and an eco-village built on a community land trust. Inspired by the black-collectivism and self-deterministic vision of NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Dubois, the survival programs of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, and the Zapatista movement for indigenous rights, Cooperation Jackson’s goal is to form a solidarity economy that values all contributions equally, regardless of race, gender and class.

Cooperation Jackson is only five years old, but the vision behind it is older. The original founders met through another organization focused on Black Liberation, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. They began to strategize to build a community of cooperatives in 2001, while many still lived in disparate parts of the country. Eventually, they chose to launch their participatory democracy project in Jackson, Mississippi. With a population of 165,000, eighty-one percent of which is black, Jackson is the capital city of the blackest and poorest state in the U.S.

Prior to the Civil War, Mississippi was one of the wealthiest states. That wealth was rooted in agriculture and built on slavery. Over the past century and a half, Mississippi has become famous for its musical, literary, and Civil Rights contributions and infamous for its racist politicians, lynchings and poverty.

“Jackson is a place that, with our limited energy and resources, we felt we could have an impact,” says a Cooperation Jackson founder, Kali Akuno. “There’s a rich history of struggle that’s already here and a high level of Black autonomous infrastructure.”

From 2008 to 2013, Cooperation Jackson founders began to concentrate in Jackson from throughout the city, state and around the country and purchase land, which they folded into a community land trust. Cooperation Jackson owns about three hectares, although they expect to receive a donation of 12 more soon — land they hope to plant with industrial hemp and bamboo for building materials.

“The long term plan is to create a series of models that can be used to build deeply affordable housing with locally sourced materials,” says Akuno. “Hemp can be flattened, reinforced, made into bricks.” By mid-2020, they plan to build their first model hemp house, using the 3-D printer in their collectively-owned Center for Community Production. Over the next few years, they want to create an eco-village full of hemp houses, which people can purchase with sweat equity and time-banking. They also plan to build compost toilets, install solar panels, recycle greywater and keep everything as off-grid as possible. The yards of these model homes will be planted with edibles.

Much of the land Cooperation Jackson owns is along a once-residential street, now lined with concrete steps that no longer lead to porches. The houses were so far gone that they’ve been demolished. But the co-op owns three livable houses, housing members, and it is currently renovating two more. One of them will be a guest-house to host representatives from other co-ops and volunteer laborers. The other will be a safe house for LGBTQ community members who have nowhere to go.

Jackson has a 29-percent poverty rate. According to Allison Cox, the Deputy Director of Jackson Housing Authority, which oversees public housing for low-income residents, there are hundreds of people waiting for housing vouchers. The department hasn’t been able to move anyone from its waiting list since 2008. The city currently offers vouchers to about 7,000 residents.

A minimum wage worker logging 40 hours a week earns $290. Median rent in Jackson is $800 a month. This means rent often costs well over half of monthly earnings.

In the U.S., one of the most common incentives for affordable housing is tax breaks, offered to for-profit developers. This model sets rent prices based around the area’s median-income, often charging 20 percent of that income. This means “low-income” housing is still out of reach for the poorest families.

This model is also short-sighted since affordable housing requirements usually expire 15 years after a tax incentive. When they expire, affordable units usually revert to market rates. The tax incentive model is strongly grounded in capitalism. Developers offer affordable units in up-and-coming markets. The new residents help develop the market, driving up market rates, so that when the requirements expire, the developers make a profit.

The community land trust (CLT) model is based on the collective, nonprofit stewardship of the land. Individuals may own structures on the land, but the land itself belongs to the trust. The individual is only allowed to sell these structures pursuant to the terms established by the trust, which keeps the land and structures permanently affordable.

“The CLT model says property prices shouldn’t go up and down. You shouldn’t get a windfall just because you own property,” says Andy Frame, executive director with Revitalize Mississippi, another organization seeking to establish a community land trust in Jackson. “If people come in and buy property at a tax sale, but don’t live in the community and invest in the property, they’re hurting everybody around them.”

Jason Webb, with Grounded Solutions — a national network of community land trusts — believes that eventually even the most blighted communities will gentrify. “Once it starts happening, you have very few tools to slow it down,” he says.

Community land trusts remove land from the speculative market, often while it’s still affordable. Webb helped Cooperation Jackson develop a business plan. “Conditions in West Jackson, where you have a lot of vacant land and abandoned structures, are perfect for a CLT. Probably nowhere else in the US could you buy that much land, with that small amount of money,” Webb says.

But housing is only part of Cooperation Jackson’s mission.