A few Saturdays ago, as I was crossing Rep. John Lewis Way on my way to The Contributor office located in the Downtown Presbyterian Church, I observed a Metro police officer giving a citation to a person who clearly was experiencing homelessness. The man had been sitting on the steps of the church.
Staff from The Contributor went outside to try to mitigate but were unable to help him avoid the citation for trespassing. The staff explained to me that if it had been a different officer he may have received a simple warning. Or if he had been standing 50 yards further down, he would not have been trespassing. As was the case, the man got upset and exchanged some choice words with the officer, which added to the charge.
I don’t know whether in the end the charges were dismissed, but talking to people who have experienced similar encounters, this is a common scenario for people experiencing homelessness.
A 2021-study by Brie Diamond et al. on “Criminalizing Homelessness” found that criminal trespassing, a misdemeanor that is often used “to maintain control over contested spaces,” is disproportionately used against people experiencing homelessness. And over the past few months I have seen several locations cleared out in Downtown Nashville by moving people experiencing homelessness out of sight utilizing enforcement measures.
The National Coalition for the Homeless defines criminalization of homelessness as “measures that prohibit life-sustaining activities such as sleeping/camping, eating, sitting, and/or asking for money/resources in public spaces.” These types of arrests do not come cheap to local taxpayers. In fact, in Davidson County it costs about $25 more per day to lock a person up than to pay for permanent housing with support services.
It costs $116.34 to house an inmate per day in a Nashville jail, according to a statement made by the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office’s Finance Director before Chancery Court in July. In comparison, the average cost per day to pay for rent coupled with intensive wraparound support services for the same population costs an estimated $91.34.
Earlier this year, I asked the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office for data that showed how many people identified as experiencing homelessness had two or more arrests in the calendar year of 2025. This is what I found:
- 465 people experiencing homelessness were arrested two or more times in Davidson County in 2025, resulting in 1,282 bookings for a total of 34,116 jail days.
- At a cost of $116.34 per inmate per day, taxpayers spent $3.97 million on the days these 465 people spent in jail.
I had asked the Sheriff’s Department for people with multiple arrests to determine how the city and community could prioritize people for supportive housing. Together with Steve Venick, Operations and Data Manager at TWKUMC Disaster Recovery, we analyzed the 2025 data set and looked for non-violent offenses where no other person was harmed. We developed several categories and focused on two that we felt represented people who would likely not have been arrested if they had not been experiencing homelessness:
- Category A: Trespass (including aggravated); public intoxication; obstruct passageway or sidewalk; obstruct passageway or refuse to disperse; pedestrian not on roadway if sidewalk; littering; indecent exposure; public indecency; panhandling; prostitution; and
- Category B: Failure to appear; fail to be booked (state citation); non arrested incarceration; probation violations; community supervision violation (misdemeanor or non-criminal); contempt of court; contempt, conditional bond release violation; the three ICE lines (biometric confirmation, final order of removal, national-security risk); sex-offender registration violations.
Metro spent more than $1.1 million jailing people in categories A ($292,246) and B ($809,959). Again, this represents the minimum spent on criminalizing homelessness. Keep in mind, these numbers do not include people who were arrested only once in 2025.
For this money, about 33 people could receive rent assistance plus wraparound support services in a permanent supportive housing program for one year, at an estimated cost of $33,340 per year per person.
I want it to be clear that I do not intend to target police departments who often run out of options when multiple complaints from neighbors and businesses occur. However, I believe in additional training opportunities for those officers who use their discretion to arrest people in a discriminatory way.
But, as a community, we should focus on how to provide alternatives to arrests. Each arrest means an additional barrier to housing is imposed on a person experiencing homelessness, making it that much harder for them to obtain permanent housing.
Policy Decisions Matter
When I recently scanned the Good News section in the newsletter of the National Homelessness Law Center, I read the following briefs:
- City council members rejected an ordinance that would have fined people every time they were caught sleeping outside. As one council member said, “We know that services and housing [are] needed, not handcuffs.” — Worcester, Mass.
- Advocates halted an effort from a local business organization to encourage businesses to stop giving out water to homeless people, protecting people’s ability to access their basic human needs. — St. Louis, Mo.
- Instead of amending their camping ban to make it even harsher on people experiencing homelessness and the organizations that serve them, commissioners voted to start the process of opening an accessible shelter in the community. — Bismarck, N.D.
Since when have we become a society that measures its successes by avoiding fines, arrests, and denying water supply to people who have lost everything and find themselves unhoused on the streets?
In recent months, I spoke with several Metro Council members and encouraged them to consider developing and investing in a local rent assistance program to support more permanent supportive housing. A cross-sector collaborative effort focused on diverting people experiencing homelessness from multiple arrests would not only save the local government but also improve the quality of life for everyone.
Let’s look at a different calculation. In a recent Channel 2 news story, Jaxie Pidgeon reported that “unhoused people make up an average of nine percent of admissions to Davidson County’s jails.” Pidgeon specifically said that as of Oct. 21, 335 people were identified as unhoused in Metro’s jail.
If we calculate a cost of $116.34 per day for 335 people, and if we consider this to be an average number of people on any given time, then Metro would spend more than $14 million per year on locking people away who are unhoused. Let’s say, Metro were to focus on reducing the unhoused population in jail from 9 to 6 percent, we could potentially save $4.7 million per year. That money could pay for rental assistance plus intensive support services for about 140 people per year.
Now, this is an unsophisticated and under-analyzed calculation based on assumptions. But it demonstrates that it is well worth looking into who we arrest based on what’s considered criminalizing homelessness, why we do that, and how much we spend on locking people up rather than housing them while providing needed support services.
It also shows that if we want to make a change and start to reduce homelessness in Nashville, we ought to analyze our available data and respond in a collaborative and targeted manner with the resources that we have.
Criminalization of Homelessness Under the Trump Administration
Criminalization of homelessness has intensified under the Trump Administration.
The National Homelessness Law Center summed up Trump’s executive order on homelessness, which the President signed in July 2025, the following way:
“… instead of using their power to bring down rent, fund vital healthcare services, and help people make ends meet, the Trump administration is attacking homeless people and undermining real solutions to homelessness like housing and support. This makes homelessness worse.”
Attacks cited in the article include, among others:
- Directing the VA and the Department of Justice to pursue institutionalization and guardianships for people experiencing homelessness, including Veterans;
- Instructing the Department of Health and Human Services to move away from life-saving mental health and substance use measures;
- Pushing states to implement anti-homelessness policies, “including a proposed detention camp in Utah and a law that includes forced labor for homeless people in Louisiana;” and
- Rewriting the guidelines for about $4 billion in homelessness funding under the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to move away from proven solutions around permanent housing.
On the latter point, the funding shift initially threatened the housing of 170,000 people nationwide. Nashville was one of a few cities that, under the leadership of former Metro Legal Director Wally Dietz (Pg. 8), joined in a federal lawsuit against the Trump Administration for illegally changing federal policy on this homelessness funding.
Trump’s order, according to the National Homelessness Law Center, “has become this administration’s blueprint for destroying federal homelessness policy.”
People behind the move away from coupling permanent housing with wraparound support services use a well-oiled marketing machine that essentially forces people into institutions that lock them out of sight or else threaten to arrest them.
The Austin-based Cicero Institute, bankrolled by billionaire and Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, lobbied states for years to criminalize homelessness. Their lobbyists successfully managed for the Tennessee legislature to pass one of the most draconian criminalization laws in the country. Consequently, since July 2022, unauthorized camping on any public property in Tennessee, including bedding down on the ground, has become a Class E felony.
The Metro Police Department arrested two people under that law in June with the result that one of them plead guilty for a misdemeanor and ended up in the same park where he was arrested — now with an additional barrier to housing on his record.
Local Solutions
While Nashville has already shown that it is willing to fight back at the federal level, it is now high time that we become more focused and serious at the local level to avoid qualify of life arrests (see categories A and B above). As a quick reminder, Metro’s investments to fight homelessness in Nashville have increased by millions in the past five years. But with a 20-percent increase in homelessness since 2022, Nashville’s leaders have yet to prove that they know how to use those funds effectively.
With Super Bowl LXIV announced to come to Nissan Stadium in February 2030, we have a renewed opportunity to take a focused approach to implement collaborative, cross-sector solutions and avoid future arrests in the Downtown area in preparation for this huge event. Nashville could show other cities how to avoid unnecessary arrests and displacements of people experiencing homelessness in preparation for a big sporting event.
Solutions, in my opinion, should start now and include a focus on reducing the homeless population in our local jail. I believe with further data analysis by experts, and a focus on housing people with offenses outlined in categories A and B, we will not only save costs but also be able to significantly reduce the Downtown and outdoor homeless population.
To be successful, Nashville ought to invest in a local rental assistance program that could build on the relationships the city, according to the Office of Homeless Services (OHS), has already developed with local landlords. Exploring the creation of a master lease program could speed up the housing process.
OHS holds the largest homelessness budget in the city, which gives it enough clout to bring together a collaborative effort that ensures support services are provided to go alongside the rental assistance and keep people housed. In addition, Metro would do well to lead a community effort that focuses on a homelessness prevention and diversion program to go alongside any housing-focused initiatives.
Finally, the business and tourism sectors could be tapped into investments to leverage some of the city and nonprofit funding in preparation for the Super Bowl.
In short, what we need is political will, and the right people in leadership positions to make ending homelessness a real priority.
The alternative is to continue doing what we’ve been doing so far, which is moving people out of sight, especially through unnecessary costly arrests and writing citations for people who are sitting in front of a Downtown church. The result has been spending more money on homelessness just to see it increase by 20 percent in the past five years.
Judith Tackett is a longtime homelessness expert and advocate for housing-focused, person-centered solutions. Opinions in this column are her own.
Steve Venick, Operations and Data Manager at TWKUMC Disaster Recovery and a member of NOAH (Nashville Organized for Action and Hope), contributed to the data analysis in this column.