The Contributor: July 7, 2021

Where can sex offenders live in Nashville?

BY HANNAH HERNER

For the next two years, all of the men, women and children who go to Nashville Rescue Mission for shelter will be staying in the same building on Lafayette Street. The 40 men in the recovery program will be moved to the basement and the women and children will be taking their place on the second floor while their old home, the women’s campus on Rosa L. Parks Blvd. is demolished and rebuilt to the tune of $20 million total construction and operating costs.

“Basically, we’re out of space. We’ve been out of space for a long time,” says Nashville Rescue Mission spokesperson Cheryl Chunn. Communications manager Michelle Sanders Brinson added that the current women’s campus cannot accommodate the increasing need they’re seeing, and the new building will up the number of women and families they can serve.

According to the organization’s count, least 20 people will have to leave — those on the sex offender registry. A search of Nashville in the state’s sex offender registry finds a total of 1,468 living in the city. The Contributor counted

256 listed as homeless. The question is: Where can they go?

“It's a toughie, though, because this has been their home, many of them,” Chunn says. “Because they can’t either afford to find a place or people are unwilling to allow them to rent their places. So it's a tough population.”

This challenge of finding a place to stay is nothing new for people on the registry. But with Nashville Rescue Mission closing its doors to them for the next two years, one of the few options — and the only non-treatment-based and free one — will be crossed out.

Cory, whose name was changed for this story, is one person affected.

“All I was trying to do was ride it out until I could save up a little money and get a place, you know? And that was taken away from me, right as the pandemic broke,” he says.

Cory was staying at Nashville Rescue Mission to save for a security deposit on an apartment. Over the nine years since he was added to the registry, The Mission served as a safety net, when he couldn’t afford to rent a hotel room. A few hundred dollars a month goes

toward probationary fees (weekly classes, twice yearly polygraph tests, and registration fees) regardless. And now, having to pay for a room by the week for a total of to $1,400 a month, he can’t save much for a down payment for an apartment, if he can find an apartment to rent to him at all.

Because of laws that prevent people on the registry from being within 1,000 feet of schools, daycares, parks, playgrounds, public swimming pools, arcades and amusement parks, the Tennessee Department of Corrections’ map of the city of Nashville is heavily shaded by “red zones,” or places where people on the registry are not allowed to live or work.

Cory reached out to the Open Table Nashville resource line, who gave him a list of places to look to stay. He says the same list was given to him by Nashville Rescue Mission when he met with them to discuss housing options.

“There really were none. Especially when it comes to The Mission, they were like ‘well, you guys are hard to place.’ I’m like ‘tell me something I don’t know,’” he said.

This exhaustive list is short, with a few extended stay hotels, efficiency apartments (some on waitlists), a couple of names and numbers of boarding house owners to call, and a handful of halfway houses and hotels. People on the sex offender registry are not allowed to live in public housing, or utilize most other federally funded housing assistance, like a Section 8 voucher.

“It's just the housing situation, not just in Nashville, but across the country, it's usually very landlord favored and they get to make a call on who they're renting to, whether that looks like, what their criminal charges may look like or their income, or what type of income even,” says India Pungarcher with Open Table Nashville.

Nashville Rescue Mission said organizations they worked with to help place people on the registry in housing often wish to remain unnamed. Room In the Inn is one organization that allows people on the registry to live in its onsite apartments, which opened in 2010, though they’re not solely occupied by those on the registry. Executive Director Rachel Hester says consequences are already in place for people on the registry, and the organization seeks to offer a fresh start.

“I think it's important that we are open to serving everyone,” Hester says. “We're a 501(c)(3) religious not for profit, just like a church. I don't know who sits next to me at church. But I know that we're coming for the same thing, and that's a belonging, you know? And it's out of our spirituality that we serve.”

Once people get into one of the just 38 apartments there, they tend to stick around, so openings are rare, Hester says. A few people who had to leave the Nashville Rescue Mission opted to come to Room In The Inn's transitional housing and recuperative care programs, and others opted not to stay. Plus, a few of the people who have to leave the Mission have high needs, physically or mentally, that RITI is not equipped to serve, Hester says.

Public defender Jessica Dragonetti says placement on the registry has less to do with how a trial or plea deal went, and more to do with the nature of the crime. The registry includes people who are convicted of a variety of crimes related to sexual conduct,

which can include indecent exposure and possession of porn with a minor in it, as well as physical crimes including kidnapping with the intent to harm and rape. The nature of the crime and how many crimes committed separates people into two categories, sexual offender and violent sexual offender. The former has to register yearly and the latter has to register quarterly with the police department. People who are homeless have to register monthly, and pay $15 per month for an ankle monitor.

Being on the registry itself is one of the hardest parts of the sentence, Dragonetti says.

“Even if somebody can successfully serve out a jail sentence or do well on probation, it's really challenging for the at least 10-year period that they're looking at to kind of dot all the i's and cross all the t's because there are so many ways you can mess up,” she says.

In June, area housing navigators created a work group that meets bi-weekly to try and find housing solutions for people on the registry. The plan is to divide up and call some of the landlords at the addresses listed by people on the registry and see if they have openings, or look for the patches of space on the TDOC map where people on the registry are allowed.

“It's one of those populations that, in terms of housing, it's a little under the radar. You know, you're not going to find any landlords who are advertising the fact that ‘we rent to people who are on the sex offender registry.’ And so that's, I think, part of what makes it so difficult to identify those resources,” says Jeremy Gartland, manager of housing partnerships for Park Center and member of the work group. Park Center cannot house people on the registry onsite because it is located in a red zone.

Gartland says he’s glad to see collaboration across organizations, as they were all “hitting a brick wall” when it came to housing this population.

“I think people are afraid to have that conversation with people on the registry, because it's such a taboo and stigmatized thing but it's like ultimately, if we want to end homelessness in Nashville that includes for people who are on the registry,” he says.

Cory is on the ball — he hasn’t missed any of his payments or checkins with his probation officer since he was convicted and added to the registry as part of his sentence. He did miss a couple of the weekly classes he’s had to take due to work, but said the judge threw it out. His goal is to get a house and a car next. With a steady job, he’s in a better position than others on the registry.

“They know I'm gonna be there every day. I do a good job. They know my situation. Which, that's the hardest part is explaining to somebody you know? You have to bite the bullet and say, ‘listen, eventually, you're gonna find out so I might as well tell you.’ I work for some people that say, ‘well, we don't care what's in your past,’” he says.

For those less savvy or making less money than Cory, additional misdemeanors, and even felonies, plus jail time, pile up when they fail to pay the fees. Their options become even more limited when the city’s only daily shelter can’t host them anymore.

“Man, we get punished every day of our life. Just under the circumstances we have to live in,” Cory says.