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Prioritizing Encampments at the Cost of Reducing Overall Outdoor Homelessness

This year, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued a Special Notice of Funding Opportunity (SNOFO) that called on communities to apply for grants to address outdoor and rural homelessness.

In response, the Mayor’s Office and contractors working for the city have worked with the Metro Homeless Impact Division, the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA), and the Continuum of Care Shelter Committee including people with lived experiences on developing a comprehensive outdoor homelessness strategy.

The document aligns with the Mayor’s current focus on encampments, which Metro backed with the $50-million American Rescue Plan (ARP) investments. All of that is commendable, especially since the SNOFO has the potential to provide $4.8 million in grants to nonprofit providers over the next three years to assist addressing outdoor homelessness in Nashville.

After that, a third of the total award (up to $1.6 million) could be added to Nashville’s annual Continuum of Care funds.

Nashville has learned that to increase federal funding our community has to apply for every additional funding opportunity that comes our way and work with HUD technical assistance providers to include a systems improvement focus and process.

In other words, after years of stagnantly low Continuum of Care funding from HUD, our community was able to increase those federal grant amounts from $3.2 million in 2017 to $7.1 million in 2021, which represents a 120-percent jump. The caveat is that ultimate funding levels are still dependent on congressional appropriations to the federal Continuum of Care program. I applaud that the Nashville-Davidson County Continuum of Care continues to go for every available resource.

However, after all this praise, I would like to take a critical look at how the city is approaching its encampment strategy. To be fair, in the end, the argument can justifiably be that regardless of prioritization and the political discourse around that, people who need housing will be in housing. The counter argument could be, if we do not prioritize our limited resources to the most vulnerable and house people in a sustainable way with the services they need, we will not solve homelessness in the long run.

In other words, strategy matters for sustainable solutions. There are advantages, of course, to either approach.

Let’s start with my top pros for encampment prioritization. This strategy:

• Acknowledges that encampments, especially large ones, are extremely taxing on people’s health and on the environment;

• Sends a clear message that the city does not sanction encampments (something I support);

• Recognizes that encampments can be highly visible and often disruptive to communities in certain neighbor hoods/parks; and

• Shows that politicians are under a lot of pressure when neighborhoods organize and complain. Focusing on encampments first, allows for quick wins, because it is publicly visible when encampments are closed.

And here is my list to support an over all countywide outdoor strategy that does not focus on prioritizing individual encampments, but instead prioritizes people based on their vulnerability to avoid as many deaths as possible:

• All the pros mentioned above could be implemented in an approach that drives down the overall outdoor population across Davidson County. It is even possible to divide the county into regional areas that each receive attention to create a more equitable effort and serve more neighborhoods and council districts.

• A more comprehensive outdoor strategy takes politics largely out of the forefront and shifts to a focus on the needs of people we are actually trying to serve. In other words, this approach does not focus on the loud est voices that get the city’s attention; rather, this strategy includes the quiet voices of people who live outdoors whose needs have been easily over looked, particularly when they are not part of a large encampment that a neighborhood organization fights.

• An overall outdoor strategy feels less rushed and reactionary; and there fore, can ensure that the actual permanent housing is lined up to serve people. This will reduce the potential of displacement of people once an encampment is closed.

• Finally, it avoids pitching one neighborhood against another as they potentially learn to compete by having the loudest complaints in order to remove people they don’t desire in their area.

Metro has heavily modeled its encampment approach on Houston. The problem with that is that Houston has been a prioritized community for HUD support since at least 2012. This has allowed Houston to implement a systems approach for years with critical and significant federal re sources that were funneled to Houston. Houston has learned how to utilize federal funds in disaster responses like Hurricane Harvey, which then benefited that city when it quickly developed a more sustainable housing response based on the temporary COVID funds in 2020.

I have long admired and followed Houston’s progress. Actually, when any one (including this Mayor’s Office) asks what cities are doing it well, I am likely to include Houston in my response.

However, it is not healthy for Nashville to just pick up a draft of another city’s encampment plan and base its own strategy on that without first truly exploring the available permanent housing resources our city has to implement such a strategy. In essence, the best outdoor plan (as well as the best encampment approach) is actually a housing plan.

As far as I can see, Nashville’s current focus is mainly on temporary housing, which is something I support as long as there is a quick overall path to permanent housing that does not negate a direct path from outdoors to permanent housing. Having said that, I am aware that city leaders are pushing, pressing and cajoling to find permanent housing units for 50-plus encampment residents within the next few weeks in order to start dis mantling the meanwhile famed Brookmeade encampment in West Nashville near Wal-Mart and Lowe’s off Charlotte Pike. I also expect officials to quickly move on to an encampment in the South Nashville area. But until some of the $50 million in ARP funds are divided up and contracts in place, staff hired, etc., I predict we’ll see a slowing of any encampment closures.

The city doesn’t seem ready for an encampment prioritization effort and is appearing to struggle right now to create sufficient permanent housing destinations in the short run without a clear transparent long-term plan behind it like Houston seems to have. In addition, the $50-million investment is insufficient to sustain the housing effort that’s been underway and has already been increased with temporary COVID funds since 2020. Thus, the political response in Nashville is hasty and a little backward in comparison to other cities’ responses.

But there is a glimmer of hope, as the Tennessee legislature and governor’s office are interested in investing heavily in homelessness statewide, including in Nashville, over the next couple of years.

Finally, I am convinced that, for any effort to be sustainable, and to avoid get ting slapped on the wrist by the feds, it is essential to include a racial equity lens to how we prioritize whom we serve. I am unsure how Metro is doing that by prioritizing individual encampments at the cost of an overall effort. As local homeless outreach providers would tell you, people in Nashville’s encampments are predominantly white. Yet, our annual Point In Time Count tells us that about 44 percent of people experiencing literal homelessness (sleeping outdoors, in shelters, in cars, and other places not meant for human habitation) identify as Black or African American. That’s hugely dis proportionate to our general population where about 27 percent identify as Black or African American.

Metro has pulled together a team of service providers to help evaluate and prioritize one encampment over another. But from my observation point, that encampment selection process is set up in a way that Brookmeade will be one of the top priorities. That’s where the political focus has been when it comes to encampments. If Metro wants to dismantle certain encampments, it would be more honest to just announce that decision, and then meet with service providers to implement a collaborative effort that leads to housing for every person in that encampment. Metro would have the support from neighborhoods and the general public.

And while advocacy groups and others like me are speaking up against such an approach, we could all at least respect local leadership a little more for being transparent about the decision-making process.

In case I have not been clear, I am against sanctioning encampments. Encampments are unhealthy places and not meant for human habitation. I sympathize with all neighborhoods and have spoken to many of them in the past assuring them that we have ultimately the same goal — let’s get people off the streets. I also recognize that, if done right, both approaches I described here have the potential to help people in a collaborative effort to obtain permanent housing with needed support.

But after careful consideration and talking to experts in other cities and at the national level, I fully support an overall outdoor homelessness strategy that drives down homelessness numbers and leads to encampment closures in a more sustainable way as part of a community-wide housing strategy. Prioritizing one encampment over another at the cost of a comprehensive out reach approach is clearly a political quick fix approach that’s, once again, reactionary rather than sustainable.

For Nashville’s sake, let’s hope I am wrong.