Last Thursday, the Selma City Council met for a work session to discuss several items that they are seeking to approve within the next city council meeting.

After that meeting, the Selma City Council President Warren Billy Young spoke to Selma Times-Journal about the thinking process behind the various buildings that are considered dilapidated in the city. 

Since June, a building on Broad Street has been actively under the demolition process that contains three connecting storefronts. One of the storefronts is located near the railroad track on the U.S. 80 used to be known as the “Velberta Broad Street Classic Style Center.”

Now, the building is only a shell that has been gutted from the inside, and the style center is no longer there. 

“If you notice all over the city, a lot of old, bad dwellings are coming down, especially those in ‘tornado-hit’ areas,” Young said. “The main thing that we have here and this is in every ward in Selma is to try to eliminate blight. We have so many different properties in Selma that have gone neglected for years. A lot of these particular buildings and old homes are no longer inhabitable. Nobody can stay there and some of them are falling over and some of them are health hazards.”

Young said even when the tornado hit Selma in 2023, some areas hit were already in decline.  

“They were already blighted properties. So, through the tornado funding into those various grants, we were able to secure funding to get a good number of properties demolished,” Young said. “So, that was one of the good things that came out of something bad. Even before then, the council had started approving documents in every ward to get some of these dwellings demolished.

Young said unfortunately, the government is not very fast and said that the process of seeing change takes a lot of time within the city of Selma. But, he reassures that what citizens are seeing is whole areas, whole blocks within the city getting demolished to hit two goals: building new homes and creating more economic development. 

“We have a housing crisis in Selma,” said Young. So, we have to get new homes built and when we are building homes, we are also improving our local economy.”

Young said during his first three years being on the council, he has seen major change from a visual standpoint since the council first started voting to get properties within the city demolished.

“Just by visually looking at the progress within the city, about a third of those dwellings that needed to be demolished have been worked on, but we still have a long way to go,” Young said.