JACKSON, Miss.—Housing advocates are pushing for stronger protections for Mississippi renters, arguing state law leaves tenants with limited options when problems with their housing go unresolved.
Tenants generally cannot withhold rent over needed repairs, and state law limits when they can make repairs themselves and recover the costs. For renters who cannot afford to move, advocates say those restrictions can leave few immediate options.
Lily Coleman faced that dilemma when she and other residents at Addison Place Apartments in Jackson went more than a month without running water.
Coleman, who has lived at the complex since 2018, said she continued paying rent because she did not want to risk eviction.
“We’re going to still pay rent, and we are going to pay whatever we got to pay because we are not trying to get evicted,” Coleman said. “We don’t pay for the water over here—they pay for it.”
Coleman said the cost of moving also leaves her with few alternatives.
“We cannot move right now,” Coleman said. “We’re trying to save some money right now to get in a position to move.”
Several major water shutoffs at Jackson apartment complexes with large outstanding utility balances raised concerns about protections for tenants who can lose service because of bills tied to their properties.
Mississippi law strengthened those protections this year through House Bill 1404, which makes it a crime to knowingly, willfully and unlawfully fail to apply utility payments collected from tenants to the bills for which the money was collected.
Ashley Richardson, director of housing law at the Mississippi Center for Justice, said the new utility law is progress but more is needed to protect tenants.
The organization is seeking changes that include more notice before evictions for nonpayment of rent, regulation of rent-to-own housing contracts, changes to the repair-and-deduct law and creation of a state fair housing act.
“In the work that I do with MCJ, I would say that the Mississippi landlord-tenant statute favors landlords more than tenants,” Richardson said.
Mississippi’s Residential Landlord and Tenant Act requires landlords to comply with building and housing codes that materially affect health and safety and maintain rental units and their plumbing, heating and cooling systems in substantially the same condition as when the lease began, excluding reasonable wear and tear.
Those requirements may not apply when a tenant deliberately or negligently causes the damage. State law also allows some maintenance responsibilities to be assigned through a written agreement.
Tenants cannot simply stop paying rent when a landlord fails to make a repair. Instead, state law provides a process for making certain repairs and seeking reimbursement.
To use that process, a tenant must provide written notice of a specific and material defect and give the landlord 30 days to make the repair. If the landlord does not, the tenant can pay for the repair and seek reimbursement.
After receiving receipts, the landlord has 45 days to reimburse the tenant or offset repair costs against future rent.
Richardson said those requirements can make the process difficult when repairs are urgent or tenants cannot afford to pay upfront.
“Depending on the repair, they might need something sooner than 30 days,” Richardson said. “A lot of the people that we service, they don’t have the money to pay for the repairs themselves.”
Richardson said deposits and other upfront expenses can create similar barriers for tenants with limited financial resources.
“We see that a lot of people don’t have the money to just pick up and move somewhere else,” Richardson said.
Beyond the financial barriers, tenants can also struggle to understand what protections are available to them.
Rep. Fabian Nelson, D-Jackson, has twice introduced legislation to loosen restrictions on the repair-and-deduct process.
Nelson introduced bills in 2025 and 2026 that would have eliminated the one-month rent limit on repair costs and allowed tenants to use the remedy more than once in six months. His most recent proposal, House Bill 442, died in committee.
This article first appeared on RHCJC and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
