Erica Reed could feel herself tearing up as she walked into work at Jackson Medical Mall on a Monday in April.
It was the first time she had seen the lights out at the now relocated Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center’s adult medicine clinic – a harbinger of changes to come at the former shopping mall turned medical center.
The transfigured shopping mall finds itself on the cusp of change as the University of Mississippi Medical Center, long one of the medical mall’s key stakeholders and largest lessee of space in the facility, readies itself to move many of its clinical services and reduce its square footage at the mall by about 75% in the next year.
And with UMMC goes Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center, a federally qualified health center and one of the largest providers of primary health care services to poor and uninsured people in central Mississippi. The center has subleased space at the mall from UMMC for over a decade and is one of the last providers to offer primary health care services at the mall.
“It was just very overwhelming when I walked in the clinic,” said Reed, who began working at the medical mall as a housekeeper in 2010 and rose through the ranks to become chief operating officer of the Jackson Medical Mall Foundation. “I had never seen the lights out. And so to see the lights out, you know, it was kind of a day like, ‘this is real.’”
UMMC declined to answer any of Mississippi Today’s questions about its decision to leave the mall, future involvement at the mall or the impact that the changes will have on patients.
Since the late 1990s, the medical mall has stood as an access point to health care and an economic anchor in a majority-Black neighborhood in Jackson with a high concentration of people living in poverty. People from across Jackson and Mississippi have also come to the mall to receive care.
Jackson lawmakers argue that the loss of health care services will negatively affect patients who rely on the mall for health services and on the neighborhood as a whole.
A medical worker walks past UMMC’s Training Center at the Jackson Medical Mall in Jackson, Mississippi, on Monday, March 3, 2025. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi Today“The impact is going to be very severe on that area,” Rep. Chris Bell, D-Jackson, told Mississippi Today. “Not only just in the face of the residents who need medical services, but in the whole aspect of an empty medical mall with no cars, or very few vehicles in there, which shows no life, which adds opportunities for crime.”
As Reed walked through the medical mall, she greeted each person she saw: patients, shop owners and fellow staff members. She picked crumpled receipts off the floor and threw them in the waste bin. The mall has grown into a home for her, she said.
She has watched the mall adapt before, but the loss of primary care, pediatrics and other clinical services at the medical mall is one of the most significant adjustments the medical mall has yet faced.
“We will persevere,” she said. “… One closed door is an opportunity for another open door.”
A long history
When Jackson Mall opened its doors in 1970, it was the first shopping mall in Mississippi, drawing customers from across the state. But it didn’t take long for business to falter with the opening of Metrocenter Mall in 1978 and Northpark Mall in Ridgeland in 1984.
By the 1990s, the mall was largely vacant, with only a few tenants left.
“The mall was but a skeleton of its onetime glory, surrounded by a decaying neighborhood,” wrote journalist Bill Minor in a 1998 column for the Clarion-Ledger. “For more than a decade it stood as a sort of elephant’s graveyard, a gargantuan relic of urban blight and a breeding ground for crime.”
Legislators and local leaders considered a range of failed proposals to revitalize the property in the late 1980s and 1990s. Plans proffered included a public arts school, an office building for state agencies, a federal Department of Defense accounting center, a latex glove plant and a temporary jail to ease prison crowding.
Primus Wheeler, executive director of Jackson Medical Mall, spoke Thursday, April 17, 2025, about medical services leaving the facility in Jackson, Mississippi. The University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) is in the process of relocating some of its services from the mall, citing challenges with building infrastructure and city services. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi TodayBut the idea for Jackson Medical Mall, Executive Director Primus Wheeler recounted, was devised in an unexpected manner: drafted on a Piccadilly cafeteria napkin during a lunch meeting of Dr. Aaron Shirley, the first Black UMMC resident and then director of Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center, and Ruben Anderson, the first African American Supreme Court Justice in Mississippi.
Anderson said it didn’t exactly happen that way, and he doesn’t remember the napkin. But a lunch at Picadilly’s – which has remained a tenant at the mall since 1970 – did launch the vision: a multi-institution medical and commercial facility that would bring together UMMC, Jackson State University and Tougaloo College. Shirley passed away in 2014.
Jackson Medical Mall Foundation – a collaborative nonprofit helmed by board members from each academic institution – purchased the crumbling mall property for $2.7 million and its first health clinic opened its doors to patients in 1997.
Members from each academic institution remain on the foundation’s board today. The property is now worth $77 million, said Wheeler.
The mall addressed UMMC’s urgent need at the time for additional space to expand its outpatient clinics, and gave it room to open additional services, including a diabetes center, an adult day care center and a prevention and wellness program. When UMMC clinics opened at the mall, it was the hospital’s largest presence away from its main campus on North State Street.
UMMC has invested a total of $200 million in the medical mall over the years, according to the medical center.
The medical mall foundation has also redeveloped the area surrounding the mall by creating affordable housing, bringing a grocery store to the area and selling an old pawn shop to a local bank aiming to help low-income people access banking services.
The mall has served as a model for similar facilities across the country. In 2013, researchers estimated that there were 28 such facilities in the U.S.
“It is something that wasn’t supposed to happen, wasn’t supposed to be successful, but with all the partners working together, it became a great success story,” said Wheeler.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center (UMMC) is in the process of relocating some of its services from Jackson Medical Mall, and Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center will be leaving the medical mall entirely. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi TodayHealth clinics’ departure
When Joey Goodsell began receiving cancer treatment at Jackson Medical Mall in 2023, he was impressed by the convenience of having all of his medical appointments housed at a single location. He was also struck by a palpable sense of community at the medical mall.
“It just felt like a neighborhood,” he said.
But he has begun to notice changes. There are fewer cars in the parking lot, he said, and he recently received a notice that he will now have to go to UMMC’s main campus for certain health services.
UMMC has leased about half of the mall’s approximately 900,000 square feet of space since 2010. After May 2026, the medical center will maintain just 100,000 square feet of space at the mall, which will include renal and dialysis, dental, infectious disease, pharmacy, addiction and HIV services.
UMMC has shared little information publicly about their decision to leave the medical mall, but a February memo distributed to legislators outlined its plans to exit the mall in phases.
UMMC will vacate unused, storage, administrative, education and subleased spaces in the mall by the end of this year, including clinic space subleased by Jackson-Hinds Comprehensive Health Center. The comprehensive health center has already removed adult medicine, cardiology, podiatry and social services from the mall. Its pediatrics clinic will leave in June and women’s health services by October.
UMMC will relocate the cancer center, OB-GYN and pain management services to its main campus by May 2026.
In the memo shared with legislators, UMMC said that ongoing building infrastructure challenges at the mall have resulted in disruptions to UMMC business practices, and that the medical center has experienced challenges with city services including water, crime and aging roads and bridges in the surrounding area.
Wheeler refuted these claims, saying that the building is in “great condition” because it was gutted in the late 1990s when the medical mall was created and has undergone constant renovations since then. The facility pumps in water delivered by tanker trucks when needed and crime is “basically nonexistent.” The mall has its own full-time security staff.
“The place is just as solid and new as when it was first built in 1970,” he said.
Mississippi Today spoke to patients from across the state who received health care services at Jackson Medical Mall. Many said they appreciated the convenience of the medical mall’s location and parking, clean facilities and the feeling of safety at the mall. But they also said some clinical services were crammed in areas that were too small, slowing patient visits, and that the roads around the facility are in disrepair.
Goodsell said beyond a loss of convenience, he worries that the mall’s community will be lost once health services leave.
“There’s this community that’s built up there, and people that have invested in putting a restaurant there,” he said. “And if all these people, if all the places move out of there, their livelihood is just evaporated.”
A ‘troubling trend’
At the same time that UMMC is scaling back services at Jackson Medical Mall, it is expanding outpatient clinical services in Ridgeland – a move that reflects a trend of UMMC outpatient clinics moving to wealthier, whiter areas in the Jackson suburbs.
UMMC opened its Grant’s Ferry clinic in Flowood, which offers primary and specialty care, in 2010.
The University of Mississippi Medical Center’s Colony Park South facility is seen Monday, May 5, 2025, in Ridgeland, Miss. Credit: Eric Shelton/Mississippi TodayEarlier this year, UMMC opened Colony Park South, another clinic offering primary and specialty care services, in Ridgeland. The movement of services to the new location allowed medical mall clinics to move to UMMC’s main campus, said LouAnn Woodward in an email to UMMC faculty staff and students in April. UMMC plans to open another clinic in Ridgeland next year.
Census tract data shows that the area Jackson Medical Mall is located in has a median household income of $22,500 and that 93% of residents are Black. By comparison, Grant’s Ferry and Colony Park South have median household incomes of $92,665 and $169,844, respectively, and over 70% of residents are white.
The movement of health care services out of Jackson and into the city’s suburbs is a “very troubling trend” and will make it more difficult for Jackson residents to access health services, said Sen. John Horhn, D-Jackson, who won the city’s Democratic primary race for mayor last month.
“We’re seeing a hollowing out of health care providers … being available in Jackson, and patients are feeling the brunt of that hardship upon them,” said Horhn.
UMMC provides a free shuttle every 30 minutes to Colony Park clinic locations from its main campus in Jackson, and many outpatient clinical services are offered at UMMC’s main campus in Jackson.
The Legislature sought to limit UMMC’s expansion outside of Jackson this year by restricting the medical center’s exemption from requiring state approval to open new educational medical facilities. The bill would limit this exemption to areas around its main campus and the Jackson Medical Mall. Gov. Tate Reeves vetoed the legislation, saying he opposed another unrelated provision in the bill.
Bringing primary health care to the mall is a priority, said Wheeler, who envisions new health services opening in the mall, the space being transformed into senior or dormitory housing and the Jackson Medical Mall Foundation implementing more of its own programs. The foundation will soon open a 500-seat auditorium in the space that formerly housed UMMC’s conference center.
Horhn said he hopes to see the medical mall house a workforce training facility.
The future of the medical mall remains uncertain, but whatever comes next, the foundation’s goal is to remain an anchor in the community, said Reed, the foundation’s COO.
“We don’t want to let Dr. Shirley’s vision die,” she said.
But it is clear the medical mall will look different than it has for the past 25 years.
“It will not be a medical mall,” Wheeler said.
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( Storied Jackson Medical Mall faces an uncertain future as UMMC clinics, health center depart )
Also on site :