A developer is asking Jacksonville planners to approve 234 apartments on the site of the closed Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary School, a northwest Jacksonville property with a buried history as a city dump for toxic incinerator ash. The proposal from Jabez Apartments and Homes LLC calls for 234 apartments at 4330 Pearce St.
According to the Jacksonville Daily Record, the 14.36-acre property is owned by Jabez Apartments and Homes LLC, which state corporation records show is managed by Marco Turner and Paulette Turner of Jacksonville. Two ordinances before the city would change the land-use designation from public buildings and facilities to medium density residential and rezone the property from public buildings and facilities–1 to planned unit development, a designation that allows uses, regulations and standards tailored specifically to the site. Together, the changes would permit up to 20 dwelling units per acre.
A School Built on Buried Ash
The Duval County School Board built Mary McLeod Bethune Elementary in the 1950s on a former city landfill, according to The Trace. From the late 1940s until the mid-1950s, Jacksonville operated a landfill on the site, heaping ash from nearby municipal incinerators that can contain lead, arsenic and other contaminants. In 1999, the federal government and the state of Florida said the soil at the site, known as Brown's Dump, posed a potential public-health hazard, and the school closed in 2001.
Officials did not begin cleaning up the contamination until 2009, eight years after the school's closure.
Lead, Segregation and a Broader Health Reckoning
Generations of Black children lived, learned and played on the polluted land around Brown's Dump, according to the Miami Herald. A news investigation headlined “Jacksonville's gun violence is rooted in redlining and homes built on toxic waste” — reported jointly by the Miami Herald, Action News Jax, KFF Health News and The Trace — examined the connection between pollution-related harm and Jacksonville's gun-violence crisis.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found that lead exposure in the first six years of life was positively associated with an increased risk of firearm violence in early adulthood, and that people living in historically segregated neighborhoods face elevated risk of gun violence. The Trace reports that at least 375 children under 18 in Jacksonville have been hospitalized for firearm injuries since 2018, including at least 150 from ZIP codes 32206, 32208 and 32209 — the area where Brown's Dump is located. Jacksonville has three of the 10 Florida ZIP codes with the highest child firearm-injury rates, per an analysis by KFF Health News and The Trace.
Echoes of a Rejected Project Nearby
This is not the first time a Jacksonville developer has tried to build housing on a former landfill in the city's northwest. In October 2025, the Jacksonville City Council voted to deny a proposal for an 84-unit apartment complex planned along McMillan Avenue near Ribault High School, also sited on a former landfill, as reported by News4Jax.
What Happens Next
The property's name nods to Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator and civil rights activist. Whether commissioners weigh the site's landfill history as heavily as they did in last year's McMillan Avenue decision is likely to shape the outcome.
