Why Tennessee’s homelessness laws reveal more about us than about those we punish
As a street outreach worker, I visited a woman regularly who spent most of her daylight hours sleeping on an uncomfortable downtown bench. People questioned her motivation and said she was lazy. She wasn’t lazy at all. She was exhausted. She told me she had to stay awake at night to protect herself from men, men with homes, who preyed on her while she slept outside. They tried to assault her in the dark.
To survive, she flipped her days and nights.
When she tried to sleep during the day, various people rousted her: downtown ambassadors, police, downtown business owners and tourists. “People call me terrible things, the ‘N word’ even,” she said. She would try to keep her eyes open by feeding the pigeons or walking in circles. Soon, business interests labeled her a public health hazard. They requested that she be hospitalized against her will, not due to illness, but because the bread she fed to pigeons might attract rats. In effect, they were saying that she was at risk of harming herself and others because she was creating an unsafe environment by giving bread to birds.
This is the kind of contortion we go through when we would rather blame the person than face the world we have built. Instead of asking what kind of society forces a woman to live like this, we scold her for napping, for feeding the birds and for existing in a world that has seemingly gone mad.
Here in Tennessee, the cruelty has gone further. In 2022, our state became the first in the nation to make it a felony to camp or sleep on most public land, punishable by up to six years in prison and a $3,000 fine. We have criminalized exhaustion itself.
We do this constantly with homelessness. We spin theories about personal failure (poor choices, laziness, dependence, addiction, etc.) because it is easier than facing the policies and priorities that created our reality. Our policies and priorities have created wages that don’t match rent, healthcare you can’t afford, safety nets with so many large holes, and a housing market built for investors, not neighbors.
But compassion calls us to see the woman on the bench differently and ourselves differently when we judge her. Compassion is taught across traditions. Jesus says he is found in “the least of these.” The prophets remind us that God sides with the poor, the stranger, the enslaved, the exiled and the oppressed. Buddhists practice tonglen, breathing in the suffering of others and breathing out relief. Even the woman on the bench turned the tables on me. She once looked me in the eye and said, “You are the goat, and I am the grass. You need me here on this bench to survive. Your paycheck depends on me being here.” It was her way of showing me that we are bound together in ways we don’t want to admit.
If Jesus walked the streets of Nashville today, would we recognize him? Or would we call him lazy for sleeping on a bench, a criminal for putting up a tent, or a hazard for feeding the birds? Jesus was unhoused, oppressed, poor and likely illiterate. He would not be welcomed into our boardrooms or legislatures. He would be demonized, rousted, ticketed and jailed. I see Jesus in that woman on the bench.
Being unhoused is not a moral flaw. Being unhoused is the predictable result of choices we have made collectively about housing, healthcare, wages, policing and whom we consider worthy of dignity.
So often you hear it asked why can’t they get it together? Why can’t they get a job?
The question is: Why do we allow systems that make survival itself a crime?
Compassion requires courage to confront unjust systems, demand policies that build homes instead of prisons and recognize our neighbors as fully human no matter their circumstance. When we shift from blame to compassion, we move closer to the kind of community envisioned by many faiths and philosophies: a place where the hungry are fed, the oppressed are lifted up, and the poor are not despised but honored as bearers of wisdom and dignity.
People without housing don’t need our suspicion, our tidy and self-serving theories, or our punishment. They need what we all need: safety, rest, companionship and a place to be and belong.
Nashville prides itself on hospitality. The real question is whether we will extend that hospitality to everyone.