Savannah native Ahmad O’Neal has two passions: running and his hometown. When he saw a for-sale sign on an overgrown parcel of land in Lamarville while visiting with a friend, an idea sprouted.
O’Neal partnered with Keith Padgett, another Savannah-native and senior painter, and Colin Deering, Maryland-raised construction project manager, on a proposal to invest in a transformation: a new westside Savannah public park with a playground, multiuse space with pavilion and six-lane running track.
“We all came down here and saw this piece of land, this existing, very small, underserved little park that’s not really having any purpose other than just fulfilling a quota, probably just putting a piece of land here just for the sake of having it,” Deering said. “We saw an opportunity.”
The group came together through Jumpstart Coastal Georgia, a nonprofit helping community members plan, finance and develop neighborhoods and meet residential needs of affordable housing, safe community spaces and economic prosperity.
The Jumpstart concept originated in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Germantown in 2015, when a commercial real estate developer pioneered education and training programs to empower communities to invest in and improve their own neighborhoods.
Since then, the program has expanded to 18 other cities, including Savannah. The local chapter has mentored two cohorts with this year’s including O’Neal, Padgett and Deering as well as 16 other Savannah residents through a nine-week course covering financial literacy and the fundamentals of small-scale residential development.
Laura Lane McKinnon, the head of Jumpstart Coastal Georgia, says the training is for citizens who lack the knowledge, framework or the resources to restore an inherited home for a new generation of relatives or add affordable housing to a neighborhood, or services currently missing for a community.
Among the knowledge that participants gain, she said, is information about programs and grants from Savannah or the state that can help with repairs and down payment assistance, first-time homebuyer resources, and introductions to lenders.
“For far too long, real estate entrepreneurship has been exclusively for captains of industry and people with lots and lots of money,” McKinnon said. “We are trying to democratize that and make it possible for everyone to have a stake in their neighborhood.”
Brianna Paxton, Jumpstart co-facilitator and a developer herself, said that the education focuses on individual Savannahians who see constant development and often feel like it’s something happening to them rather than with them.
“It can bring about such a positive change when you recognize it’s you doing it, it’s your neighbor doing it, and they are bringing forth development that actually benefits the community and that people want to see,” Paxton said.
The parcel O’Neal, Deering and Padgett hope to transform into a park is at the intersection of Liberty City and Summerside, which were important Black communities during the Jim Crow era of redlining, a discriminatory practice to keep Black people from buying homes in certain neighborhoods.
Savannah Black families were able to purchase their own land and build their own homes in Liberty City and Summerside, creating proud and tight-knit neighborhoods. But discrimination still meant that for decades they lacked equal municipal services.
Padgett, whose grandfather built his family home in Summerside and together with his wife raised nine children there, said it was important for him to revive some of that spirit with a regenerative project. “I’m passionate about Savannah. It’s all I know. It’s everything,” he said.
A pillar of the Jumpstart program is collaboration and a philosophy of “doing well by doing good,” according to its training workbook.
McKinnon, a veteran affordable housing expert who has lived in Savannah for nearly 40 years, says she has watched Savannah’s downtown population shift, with working professionals leaving and short-term vacation rentals taking over. It’s an illustration, she said, of speculative developers controlling impact while Chatham’s urgent housing shortage goes unmet.
“What we’re trying to do is build the community we know Savannah can be,” McKinnon said. “We want to provide the information and the education and the opportunity that people who may not have been afforded those options previously can participate and can contribute.”
Jumpstart, she said, hopes to educate people to be developers and investors, not speculators in Savannah.
Some of those going through the nine-week program are focused on housing, rather than municipal spaces like the park project.
Chatham County will need 17,626 more housing units by 2030 — for a total of about 151,800 homes, apartments, condos and other dwellings to accommodate its rising population, according to a study published by Georgia Tech in March 2025.
Within the deficit, the study also notes a critical issue for the county being “inventory, particularly a diverse mix of housing units and rental options” and reducing unit prices.
Half of Chatham County households make $66,000 or less, meaning the rent or mortgage needs to be less than $1,600 a month in order to have enough left over for other basics, according to that same Georgia Tech study, drawing on 2022 income numbers.
Currently, housing that exists is too expensive or too big. Without increasing the diversity of housing units and reducing price points, Chatham County may not be able to match the increasing workforce, according to the study.
This housing availability shortage, according to the study, will tend to cause upward pressure in prices, decrease affordability and adding to cost burden, especially in lower income households.
During the nine-week program, participants learn from expert speakers and previous cohort alumni who share knowledge and networks.
One such person is Liv Garcia, an architect turned small-scale developer in Savannah. She attended the first cohort of Jumpstart, where she was able to learn more about the “missing middle,” a phrase referring to small-scale, multiunit housing that blends into existing neighborhoods to bridge gaps between single-family homes and large apartment complexes.
Garcia has since partnered with the Chatham Land Bank Authority, an intergovernmental entity between the City of Savannah and Chatham County that acquires vacant, abandoned, blighted, tax delinquent properties to return to “productive use,” according to its webpage.
She intends to acquire some of this land to build affordable and workforce housing in East Savannah partially through a $10,000 grant from Air BNB she received through Jumpstart.
Many of the second cohort came by recommendation and word of success from the first cohort.
Another first cohort member Opollo Johnson became a first-time home owner through Jumpstart, purchasing a home from an eastside Savannah family holding out to sell to a non-predatory buyer.
Johnson noted that growing up as a Black man in Savannah with no background in development or acquisition of major properties, the opportunities created by Jumpstart are “priceless.”
As an advocate for affordable housing, Johnson said it’s important to “walk the walk”; he plans to build an accessory dwelling unit, ADU, on the property as an option to house his community one day.
“It feels wonderful,” Johnson said. “It is for me community development. Quintessentially, I’m living my dream right now.”
SCAD professor Lisa Swain, who moved to Savannah from California in 2022, joined Jumpstart to be part of a community of thoughtful development.
She heard about Jumpstart from her involvement in YIMBY Savannah, which stands for “Yes In My Backyard,” a local offshoot of a national affordable housing advocacy group.
Swain’s project is focused on building an ADU to the back of her own home located near Candler Hospital.
Swain said her ideal situation would be to rent to young medical field professionals like traveling nurses. If one day she no longer wants to rent, it can be used as another area of her home to house family members.
“I don’t want to profit by displacing people, especially in Savannah where there’s already been a certain amount of inequity to begin with historically,” Swain said. “So we want to try to correct that, not perpetuate it.”
But first she had to learn about zoning, permitting and financing such an endeavor.
A week after her Jumpstart courses ended, Swain met with a financial advisor to see what costs she would incur for her project.
Back in Liberty City, the friends and would-be developers Padgett, O’Neal and Deering said Jumpstart could give them a pathway to give back to their community.
For now, they have a dream and a development plan for the nearly 8 acres of land in Lamarville.
But they still face a critical roadblock. As of now, the owner of the land for the project said he won’t sell. The team is continuing to watch the listing.
Jumpstart, meanwhile, continues to spread its education. A new cohort is expected for next year and McKinnon said she’s beginning conversations about a second class for those who complete the first 10-weeks.
Applications are open for the next cohort and can be found on the East Savannah United website.
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