Cover Story

Housing on the Hill

A housing coalition hopes to build strength statewide

BY AMANDA HAGGARD

Tennessee has almost 100 counties. The Tennessee Solidarity Network for Housing & Homelessness is trying to engage with them all to understand the full story of housing needs and access in the state.

The network was first was created in March of 2022 as a response to the state’s anti-camping law that passed last year. The law, which as been in affect about half a year, makes camping on public property across the state a class E felony, punishable by up to six years in jail, a $3,000 fine and the loss of voting rights. The group hopes to connect Tennesseans who are passionate about ending housing disparities and the criminalization of homelessness in the state so that they can better combat bills that affect people in poverty across the state.

“The short term goal of this network is to keep people across the state connected and informed when it comes to promoting legislation that creates and preserves affordable housing and moves toward the decriminalization of homelessness and poverty,” the organization says. “The ultimate goal is to build the infrastructure for a statewide coalition that has a wide representation of rural and urban members and can mobilize quickly on issues of housing and homelessness.”

As this group comes together during the new legislative session, Republicans in the Tennessee General Assembly have filed new legislation that advocates for Housing First strategies say threatens to worsen the environment for people living on the streets.

The bill (SB1334/SB1192), sponsored by Sen. Paul Bailey, R-Sparta, would create government-sanctioned encampments, restrict funding for organizations working toward permanent housing solutions and would allow for people experiencing mental health struggles to be involuntarily committed by a third party. The Tennessee Solidarity Network says that while encampments can serve a purpose and an important space for people during a crisis of affordable housing, the bill itself is geared more toward removing people from their communities and concentrating them into, “controlled environments and [increasing] the policing of non-sanctioned sites and dwellings.”

The portion of the bill that restricts certain funds from being used to create permanent supportive housing also pushes funds to instead be used in government-sanctioned encampments.

“In other words, instead of investing more resources in affordable housing and mental health services for Tennesseans, this bill siphons funds off to the government-sanctioned camps, further strips people of their rights, overburdens the already burdened mental health system, and furthers the policing of people in poverty and with mental health challenges,” says nonprofit housing advocacy organization Open Table Nashville. “Creating more affordable housing and supportive services (Housing First) in Tennessee is the way to end homelessness; not government-sanctioned camps, forced hospitalization, and more policing.”

On Feb. 21, the Tennessee Solidarity Network for Housing & Homelessness and other partners invested in housing are planning the first Day on the Hill for Housing & Homelessness. In advance of the day advocating for housing rights and access, community members and partners joined a Zoom call to hear from Jerry Jones from the National Alliance to End Homelessness, a nonpartisan organization committed to preventing and ending homelessness in the United States. Jones spoke to the nature of anti-housing first bills and the recent uptick in legislation targeting vulnerable people.

“I think it's uncomfortable, but true, that we have to just recognize homelessness has now morphed into the larger partisanship debate and that for decades our sector and the people we serve kind of escaped the harshness of the partisan debates,” Jones said.

He says this shift can be traced to two triggers: One is that in recent years since Donald Trump’s presidency, the GOP has recognized that homelessness and issues surrounding it allowed them to attack places like Los Angeles during election seasons and critique blue cities. And another is that the pandemic and affordable housing crisis made homelessness even more visible.

“Unfortunately, it’s popular politics to say that folks need to be somewhere other than camping in public space,” Jones said. “So there's been very harsh rhetoric and policies to match. I point all of that out to say we're in a new phase of the debate on homelessness.”

In majority Republican states like Tennessee, anti-housing legislation (as well as other legislation targeting minority groups and more) like this gets more traction than in blue states for pretty obvious reasons — issues that are part of the national debate tend to grab attention.

“Part of the challenge is how do we sort of pivot the argument back to principles that work — of best practices like housing first and away from punitive ways not to just get people out of sight, but rather investing in the programs that can actually solve homelessness,” Jones said.

The Tennessee Solidarity Network’s work is building relationships on the hill. Right now nearly half of the state is represented in the organization, and the group is made up of various community members who are concerned about housing rights as well as organizations working in housing.

Lindsey Krinks with Open Table Nashville said the idea is to build enough community power through those working in their communities already “on homelessness housing criminalization, so that again, not only can we combat harmful to the state bills, but that we can also work toward proactive and good bills in the future.”

Community members across the state are invited to participate in the Day on the Hill for Housing & Homelessness. Sign ups and more information on the day on the hill are here: http:// opentablenashville.org/tn-solidarity-network-for-housing-homelessness.