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A Few Questions With Councilmember Freddie O’Connell, District 19

BY JUDITH TACKETT

District-19 Councilmember Freddie O’Connell is known for his sharp intellect and his passion for his community. And recently, he declared a run for mayor. In our conversation, O’Connell focused on his work in Metro Council over the past seven years.

The Contributor talked with O’Connell as part of a series called ‘A Few Questions’ where we interview council members about their district’s most pressing issues.

District 19 largely covers Downtown west of Cumberland River, but also reaches into North Nashville, Germantown and South along Murfreesboro Road. What distinguishes your district from other areas of town?

It is really the urban core district. We recently went through a redistricting process, so the next District 19 becomes even more urban including the East Bank where River North, the Titans footprint, and PSC Metals are, and it will have slightly fewer neighborhoods.

District 19 is in the crossroads of three of Nashville’s most important streets — big portions of Music Row, Broadway, and Jefferson Street. Nashville’s identity as Music City has so much of its basis on Music Row. Our entertainment district, for both good and bad, is anchored around lower Broadway. And Jefferson Street is a key corridor for North Nashville with a rich history in live music venues. It also reflects the difficult cultural history of our African American community including the way in which it was decimated by I-40 slicing Jefferson Street in half.

All three of those things have informed and influenced my representation of District 19.

What are the main concerns you hear from your constituents?

The disruption from our tourism economy has been a pretty constant theme, and that can be everything from obnoxious short-term rental guests to scooters as toys for tourists to, more recently, party buses, tractors and those transportainment vehicles. It’s noise and behavior.

Affordable housing has been a growing concern over the last seven years. When I first took office, I knew that we had a lot of concentrated poverty in District 19. The District 19 I represent has the largest share of public housing of any Metro Council district. That will change in the future because of redistricting.

But affordable housing has been a top concern and then that is connected to homelessness where it feels like we have taken some key steps forward in those seven years, but then also frustratingly taken some steps backward. And on the concerns of homelessness, people with lived experience certainly share their concerns about lack of access to affordable housing and sometimes lack of access to services. Then there are people who I think are very compassionate for people who are unhoused. But I also get concerns from people who see encampments in greenways or in other usually out-of-the-way public spaces or in parks.

Then there is concern about crime. Even if we saw property crime to drop a little bit over COVID, we have seen an uptick in gun violence. A lot of that gun violence has frustratingly taken place in District 19. We’ve seen changes in state

law that probably contributed to that. I think some of the pent up frustration and aggression from COVID and maybe surfing back into a life that brings you back into contact with other people may be partly responsible for that. But it’s a challenging situation to say across the board there is one easy solution to gun violence.

Where would you judge Nashville is compared to peer cities, and what would be a good starting point for you to improve overall public transit in Nashville?

We’re among the last of the top 25 cities that lack a dedicated funding source for our transit system. That means in a budget year, just like this, when you have competing priorities whether it’s schools and community safety or staffing levels across a variety of Metro departments, transit is very frequently a target.

Sadly, even with gas prices continuing to increase, we chose to cut $1 million from our transit budget. That’s a pretty extraordinary move in a city that is already far behind our peers on transit. We used to say that we wanted to be less like Atlanta and more like Charlotte and Austin or Denver, and all three of those cities have made significant investments in transit-related infrastructure. And frankly, even Atlanta now is doing more, and our peers in Tennessee – Memphis, Chattanooga – have both made advancements in both transit and bicycle friendliness than Nashville. I think it’s primarily a lack of leadership and political will. And so we are sadly lagging behind our peers in almost every metric in pedestrian safety, cyclist safety and access, transit ridership and routes and levels of service. We’ve got a lot of work left to do.

You are very actively engaged in addressing homelessness in Nashville by serving on the Homelessness Planning Council (HPC), and last month the Metro Council passed a bill that you introduced to create an Office of Homeless Services. For our readers, this new standalone office would move the staff of the Homeless Impact Division from Metro Social Services and task a new director to implement a comprehensive approach to homelessness in Nashville as well as staff the Homelessness Planning Council. Can you describe the benefits of having this new standalone office to address homelessness in Nashville and how independent will it be from the Mayor’s Office?

With two of our largest shelter communities, Room In The Inn and the Nashville Rescue Mission in District 19, I knew when I ran for office that we had perhaps the largest concentration of unhoused Nashvillians in this district. And so I wanted to invest pretty deeply in this work and asked Vice Mayor Briley to appoint me to the Metro Homelessness Commission seven years ago.

We knew from the moment we got there the Metro Homelessness Commission* was not serving its constituents or really Metro effectively. Your predecessor** left us a report from Focus Strategies that was collaborative and highlighted the lack of alignment between our Continuum of Care.*** It was a strange set up already because the Metro Homelessness Commission was a sort of commission under a commission within Metro Social Services. That department puts in its own budget request. And so any budget proposal was a subsidiary request to the Metro Social Services request.

In 2018, we were successful in creating the alignment within the Continuum of Care and established a joint Homelessness Planning Council, which I think became a more effective governing process. We created the first real strategic plan that was focused on developing a Housing Crisis Resolution System. We made the most progress in the three years of that plan on data quality improvements. One of the key steps we took was transitioning our Homeless Management Information System from MDHA to Metro. We had a very active, engaged oversight committee for that process that led to the most participation we have seen in that system maybe since its inception in Nashville. We were making headway on other fronts as well. But it was frustrating to see a kind of prototype Permanent Supportive Housing project get delayed by 2.5 years as a part of the change of administrations.

But the thing that really revealed the challenges of having an innovative division embedded in a department that wasn’t solely focused on homelessness, [was] that when COVID came and we had to develop a response that included the needs of our unhoused neighbors, there was not a single point of authority or accountability. The Mayor’s Office, OEM, Metro Social Services, the Metro Homeless Impact Division, were all involved but the Metro Homeless Impact Division was not leading the discussion. The Homelessness Planning Council was not leading the planning for a COVID response. They were both, as entities, putting ideas on the table, but it felt quite a bit, from the staff and the Planning Council perspective, we were shouting into the wind, even with the availability of HUD Technical Assistance who were offering best practices that the city was choosing to refuse to follow.

So again, we regrouped and we said, we know we’re not delivering our best effort. I’m a little bit sad that we did not make enough progress quickly enough to retain some incredible talented, knowledgeable and passionate staff, but with some collaboration across Metro Council, the Mayor’s Office, Metro Social Services, and the Homeless Impact Division we established a standalone Office of Homeless Services for this fiscal year.

And I think this will mean a little bit more streamlined accountability. It should mean less questions about decision-making, strategy and priority. Over the long-term it should mean that on everything from sheltering to data to service delivery, we can offer a better standard of care for people that are experiencing homelessness. It’s not like we have completed that work. We still know from both HMIS and our annual Point in Time count that there are literally thousands of people in Nashville who lack access to housing of any kind. And with weather like this where we’ve got a straight week of heat advisories and winters like we’ve seen before with unusually high numbers of extreme cold weather days, it’s an ongoing challenge. There are communities in the United States that have effectively eliminated chronic homelessness, and we’re a long way from joining the ranks of those communities.

*The staff of the former Metro Homelessness Commission was renamed as the Metro Homeless Impact Division with the creation of the Homelessness Planning Council that unified the Metro Homelessness Commission and Continuum of Care board.

**Judith Tackett served as director of the Metro Homelessness Commission, then the Metro Homeless Impact Division from 2017-2021.

***The Continuum of Care (CoC) is a federally designated area in which all stakeholders from a community work together to build a system to prevent and end homelessness. CoC’s receive competitive federal funds for their systems work.