Cover Story

Nashville approves new Office of Homeless Services as public camping is criminalized statewide; experts and nonprofits recommend further action

BY JUSTIN WAGNER

Tennessee’s relationship with its unhoused communities is as volatile as ever — and the ideal steps for Nashville to resolve its decade-long chronic homelessness problem are under much debate.

It recently became a felony to camp on public property in Tennessee, making it the first in the United States to implement what has been criticized as a criminalization of homelessness. Nashville’s inordinately high rate of chronic homelessness makes this all the more pressing, as Mayor John Cooper affirmed in a press release sent out May 26.

“I’ve been on the ground in many of the homeless encampments in Nashville, and I’ve seen the suffering and the human toll firsthand,” Cooper said. “The reality is horrific, tragic and unacceptable.”

This release accompanied a HousingNOLA homeless study commissioned by Cooper, which was conducted by national experts Stacy Horn Koch, Greg Shinn, Andreanecia Morris and Sam Tsemberis. The study compared Nashville’s situation to that of cities which excel in homelessness response, such as Milwaukee, and made a number of recommendations.

Of these recommendations, the most prominent was the new Office of Homeless Services, which Metro moved forward with at the end of June. The purpose of the new office is to lead homelessness response in the city — a task currently split between the Homelessness Planning Council, the Metro Homelessness Impact Division, the Metro Development and Housing Agency, the city’s various nonprofits and other Metro Social Services staff.

“It establishes authority and responsibility and accountability,” said Stacy Horn Koch, a co-author of the HoungNOLA study. “Not just to the Homelessness Planning Council, but to the city council and to the Mayor's Office.”

The HousingNOLA report stated that a major obstacle for Nashville’s current homelessness initiatives is how disparate and disorganized they are. Koch noted that without a leading department, it is difficult for any involved party to hold any other party accountable. (It’s important to note that the HousingNOLA study referenced throughout this article made use of an erroneous statistic. Though the study reports that no previous living situation was documented for 15.2 percent of households when recorded by Nashville service workers, an error was made in the calculation of that data. Study co-author Shinn now places the figure closer to 6 percent, and MHID estimates it to be around 11 percent, according to Horn Koch.)

The study also criticized the Homeless Planning Council for a lack of diversity, poorly defined responsibilities, and incomplete documentation of homeless citizens into the city’s outreach database.

The new office aims to ameliorate these issues. It is proposed as a pareddown, independent and more diverse team, with each member having a defined role understood by a leading executive director.

The existing HPC will have a representative within the new office, and the two will collaborate. The new office will spearhead efforts to provide housing to the homeless, track data entry to assess the needs and risk of those being assisted, and liaise directly with the mayor, who will appoint the department’s executive director from a selection of HPC-recommended candidates.

Nashville homelessness advocates — like India Pungarcher, advocacy and outreach specialist at Open Table Nashville — have praised the new office for its improved organization, but criticized its specific implementation, saying the Nashville community and Homelessness Planning Council should have a bigger role in the city’s plans.

"If we're going to design an Office of Homeless Services that's going to be useful, it has to be informed by the experience of the existing service providers — meaning the existing nonprofits, the Housing Authority, the current Coordinated Entry system, and I would strongly add, you know, the inclusion of voices of people with lived experience, who have been homeless or are homeless.”

“A standalone Office of Homeless Services in Nashville is a huge win for our community that has been a long time coming,” said India Pungarcher. “That said, there are still some challenges ahead in restoring community trust and ensuring that the leadership of the Office can operate independently from political pressure in the Mayor’s Office and from others in positions of power.”

Sam Tsemberis, a co-author of the report, echoed Pungarcher’s sentiment that service workers and homeless citizens should be afforded a direct dialog with the city.

“I think it's essential that the city coordinates with its nonprofits,” Tsemberis said. “If we're going to design an Office of Homeless Services that's going to be useful, it has to be informed by the experience of the existing service providers — meaning the existing nonprofits, the Housing Authority, the current Coordinated Entry system, and I would strongly add, you know, the inclusion of voices of people with lived experience, who have been homeless or are homeless.”

Pungarcher noted that one way to do this would be to include the HPC more in the development of the new department, as it is already composed of advocates and people with lived experiences of homelessness.

But while the new office’s approval marks the resolution of a yearslong effort, it is only one recommendation made by the HousingNOLA report — and its creation is ultimately a bureaucratic improvement, not a solution for homelessness unto itself.

The report also calls for a downsized and restructured HPC, a move to better prioritize chronic homelessness, less restrictive supportive housing, and full implementation of Cooper’s $50 million homelessness response plan using American Rescue Plan funds.

Though not prescriptive, these recommendations aim to pare down Nashville’s response into a more efficient methodology — one which prioritizes those who have been homeless the longest or most frequently. The city has measures to this end as it is, but they are not universally praised.

Nashville currently makes use of Coordinated Entry, a program which collects data from unhoused citizens and determines need based on a number of factors, as well as the VI-SPDAT, a survey meant to assess risk and degree of chronic homelessness. However, the number of chronically homeless in Nashville has seen little fluctuation for the last 10 years, as the HousingNOLA report points out. Other studies have also recently criticized the VI-SPDAT as racially biased against Black people.

Another recommendation made in the HousingNOLA report was for Nashville to adopt a “housing first” approach, a social service philosophy wherein case workers try to provide permanent, supportive housing before other, less critical services, such as job searching or addiction recovery.

“This approach has proven effective in ending each person’s homelessness and, ultimately, saves lives,” the study notes.

Beyond these ideas, though, advocates and the study alike identify a need to support these philosophies with something concrete: more accessible, permanent housing.

While housing units are accounted for in Cooper’s $50 million plan, Pungarcher stated that more units are desperately needed immediately, with a sturdier framework for homelessness prevention and fewer barriers to qualifying people for homes.

“We are losing housing units daily, causing too many Nashvillians to re-enter homelessness years after they had successfully found housing,” she said. “It just took 7 months for one of our friends to find housing after they got their Section 8 voucher — and that's not an uncommon length of time. I am terrified the city is growing complacent while those on the grounds are becoming disillusioned by the lack of urgency for and magnitude of our housing crisis.”

While advocates have championed these points for years, any sense of urgency is invigorated by the felony charge now to be associated with public camping — something for which Pungarcher called to immediately end.

“We need the city to lead us in a citywide halt of encampment policing and closures.”

Tsemberis agreed the camping law was a dire obstacle for homelessness response.

“On top of being poor, it’s now illegal to be poor,” said. “That’s awful … it’s gonna scatter people, make them more difficult to find, more difficult to engage with. Where are they gonna go?”

The new Office of Homeless Services represents a meaningful step forward for Nashville, and along with Cooper’s $50 million plan, it is posed to assist a great number of unhoused people. But it is only a fraction of what national experts recommend, and advocates are calling on the city to do much, much more.

“We need to take care of each other and invest in the things we know keep us safe - healthcare, transportation, living-wage jobs, and housing,” said Pungarcher.

“Ultimately, we need those in power to have the same sense of urgency, creativity, and political will to identify creative funding mechanisms for housing in the same regard that they were able to fund a new $2 billion Titans stadium. It can be done.”