JACKSON, Miss. (WJTV) – People living in Jackson’s Virden addition are demanding answers from city leaders about growing blight and safety concerns in the area.

“It’s a disaster. You just walk down the neighborhood, and it seems like a dump,” said one neighbor.

Burned down homes and piles of garbage have become an eye sore in the area.

“It just bothers me to see it like this all of the burned out, abandoned houses. Every street you go down, there’s three, four, five houses,” said Ernest Smith, president of the neighborhood association.

The city began cleaning up hundreds of tires that had been dumped at a burned-out home on Hume and Bailey Street, but Councilman Kenneth Stokes said they barely scratched the surface.

“We thank them for the attempt, but on a scale from an A to an F, you have to give them a D,” said Stokes.

He’s accusing Jackson leaders of neglecting poor neighborhoods.

“They look at people in this neighborhood as a bunch of nobodies. They’re going to treat them like a bunch of nobodies,” he said.

Neighbors said they’ve reached out to city leaders multiple times, but little was done.

“They say they’re going to come get it, then they come get a piece of it and leave the rest of it. It just makes me feel like our city officials are not doing their job properly,” said Smith.

The City of Jackson launched an online portal to report blight in November, but Stokes said he’s seen no improvement.

“It’s a bunch of talk. As people are saying in the neighborhood, it’s just a bunch of bull. People don’t believe it,” he said.

With little faith in leaders, the neighborhood association is focusing their efforts on community clean-ups.

“It’s us the people who have to make the neighborhood change for ourselves,” said neighbor Joshua Phillips.

City leaders have not responded to a request for comment on their plans to combat blight in the neighborhood.