Orange Mound Blight Control: Community members clean up and curb crime [Video]

MEMPHIS, Tenn. (WMC) – A handful of people in Orange Mound are trying to make a change one street at a time.

Orange Mound Blight Patrol started two years ago to decrease the trash and blight in the area.

The task is big. Hundreds of roads across Orange Mound are lined with trash, tires, and boarded-up homes, but that is not stopping Orange Mound Blight Patrol.

“I hate when they say, ‘The hood, we live in the hood.’ We do not live in the hood. We live in a community, a historic community,” said Esther Jones, one of the members of Orange Mound Blight Patrol.

Orange Mound homeowners and the unhoused alike pitched in on Monday to clean up the community they live in.

“Why we can’t have flowers and gardens in our own community? So we formed the Orange Mound blight patrol,” said Jones.

Orange Mound Blight Patrol was …