Federal, state and local policies aim to make homelessness invisible by pushing people from one place to the next, or worse, lock them up. Solving homelessness has become a secondary goal at best, even though that would be the most efficient way of making homelessness invisible.
No matter whom I talk to in the homelessness field, they all agree with the statement above — with the likely exception of policy makers and government officials who want to hold on to their jobs in the current political climate.
Before I argue my case, I want to acknowledge the good news: homelessness is solvable!
We know that the main contributor to homelessness in the United States is the gap between housing affordability and the lack of income. In a brief published earlier this month, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), a national research and policy institute, explained it this way, “Housing is a basic human need, but stable housing is out of reach or hard to keep for far too many people.
“This is a policy choice, not an economic inevitability,” CBPP authors wrote. “Evidence shows that we can solve homelessness if we address its primary driver: the gap between incomes and rent.”
The authors went on to stress the importance of rental assistance coupled with access to individualized support services for people who need help to find and keep housing. Critical support services include, “navigating the housing market, obtaining health care, and securing sufficient income to afford housing.”
Community Solutions is another prominent national leader and consultant that tells us that homelessness is solvable. They support cities, including Nashville, by helping them establish a system that uses a data-driven, housing-oriented, and person-centered approach.
But if we think that politicians are listening and focusing on long-term investments to actually prevent and solve homelessness by ensuring that all Americans have access to housing, employment, health care, childcare, education and other basic needs — well, then we are dreaming.
In reality, current policies do one thing, and they do that well: attempt to make homelessness invisible.
The federal government has made it clear that solving homelessness is not a priority. The U.S. Supreme Court allows local jurisdictions to remove encampments and displace people with no homes, even when cities do not have enough shelter beds to move people indoors. In other words, we are living in a country where it is OK to treat poor and vulnerable people like dirt — just shove them under the rug somewhere so we don’t have to see them.
There are several great blogs where you can monitor how recent executive orders and cuts will affect homelessness. I recommend a blog penned regularly by Ann Oliva, the CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness: https://endhomelessness.org/blog/the-first-60-days/. You can sign up for her organization’s weekly updates at endhomleessness.org.
In her latest writings, penned on March 18, she outlines what potential harm is being done and what we can do to help advocate. For example, the federal Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has started to release contracts for the FY2024 Continuum of Care (CoC) Program agreements, which were already delayed, but stopped them abruptly again. “It could take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to restart the process of executing grant agreements for FY2024 grantees.
“In addition to delayed 2024 funding,” Oliva wrote, “congress last Friday passed a continuing resolution for the remainder of FY2025 that will effectively cut CoC Program funding for fiscal year 2025 by failing to meet the renewal demand. Compounding this blow are the threats to other federal programs such as Medicaid.”
For more federal updates, you can also sign up to the CBPP’s Executive Action Watch at https://www.cbpp.org/research/federal-budget/executive-action-watch.
At the state level, removal of encampments is the topic du jour. It’s not enough that Tennessee was the first state in 2022 to make camping on public property a Class E felony, punishable by a potential sentence of one to six years in prison and a fine of up to $3,000. No, in addition to that, the State Senate just passed a bill that would require removal of an encampment along interstate highways.
What disturbs me the most is that the bill in its current form could be initiated by any citizen and the state practically guarantees that the encampment would be cleared within 30 days. There is some nice wording that focuses on the intention and goal to provide shelter and housing for people. It also talks about entering MOUs (Memorandums of Understanding) with local jurisdictions, creating plans and collaboration to help people.
Again, all of that is nice language that even I can support — in theory — if it would be implemented that way. Politicians quickly scrapped a fiscal note of $64 million and replaced it by pushing the clean-up cost to local municipalities and counties. By the way, none of these estimated millions would have gone toward housing and support services.
There are not enough shelters across the state to accommodate everyone who is living outdoors. In addition, most shelters will not accept people with certain disabilities, who are forced to live outdoors. The other issue I have is that people like me who get frustrated about such policies are made out to be proponents of encampments. Nothing could be further from the truth in my situation.
Encampments are not healthy. They are not a place where any human should be forced to live. But making up random timelines to accommodate the visual effect of homelessness does not help. Rather, let’s invest the resources needed to truly move people off the streets and into permanent housing with individualized support.
As of this writing, the bill has not passed in the Tennessee House of Representatives yet.
So, what do we need to do?
In an interview I had last year with Oliva, she listed the three components to successfully reducing and ending homelessness: solid leadership, good policies and resources.
I wholeheartedly agree with her. Needing more resources may speak for itself, but without solid leadership and good policies, we may not utilize additional resources in the best possible way, no matter how well intentioned we are.
We have seen this locally with the $50 million investment of the federal American Rescue Plan to address homelessness in Nashville over the past two years. Our city government invested $25 million in the actual building of permanent supportive housing units (182 units), and $25 million in support services, temporary housing and landlord incentives.
Of those $25 million, $11.5 million went to temporary housing. And nearly $5 million of those $11.5 million was used to serve 142 people between November 2022 and January 31, 2025, according to a data report by the Office of Homeless Services (OHS). This comes to a per person cost of about $34,700, money that I argue may have been better invested into permanent supportive housing programs.
A large portion of these $5 million were allocated to pay for the rent of the motel rooms and security, rather than the intensive services the population placed in that facility needed. In addition, up to 80 beds remained open for an estimated eight to nine months in 2024 when the city made a contracting error (may I point out that Metro Council members asked questions about those contracts and city leadership had enough time to review them prior to final approval). Consequently, we did not use beds that could have served people who were wanting to move indoors.
In the meantime, Metro added another $3.7 million toward temporary housing this year — only $2.5 million of that additional funding stemmed from the initial $50-million investment.
With all this said, keep in mind what I mentioned throughout this column, we actually know how to end homelessness. With the right leadership in place at the local, state and federal government, implementing real solutions is an achievable goal.
We need to realize that we cannot arrest our way out of homelessness. On the contrary, arrests increase barriers to housing, which perpetuates homelessness.
We also cannot build enough shelter beds to make homelessness invisible. And, you may argue, building permanent units takes time. That’s why we need to start now and offer a combination of things.
My simplistic policy recommendation is that for every additional shelter bed/temporary housing bed we create, we must invest in four exits to permanent housing per year for as long as that shelter bed is in use. This way, we create a flow where people are not living in shelters but truly use them temporarily — and only if needed — to access permanent housing. We also need to create paths for people to move from outdoors directly to permanent situations.
And let’s not forget the importance of support services along the way. These supports all must be oriented to solving, rather than managing, homelessness. Support services cannot end once people access housing. Some folks need assistance after they move into their new home.
By the way, this country has already proven that we can turn things around. The national government invested in housing and support services to drive down Veteran homelessness. They adjusted their policies and put their resources toward long-term solutions, and since 2010 Veteran homelessness nationwide has decreased by 55 percent.
One thing we need to remember is that essentially, we all share the same goal. We want people to be able to move off the streets and into housing.
Current leadership at the national, state and local levels are not in total disagreement with my arguments. Just listen to their public messages, which largely reflect what I am saying here. The problem is the way they implement policies does not match up with what they publicly preach.
So, ultimately, it is up to citizens to elect politicians (and support those already in office) who ensure our tax dollars are invested in actual solutions rather than measures that create further barriers to people who already have nothing.
So here is what we can do right now:
- Work with local politicians, especially those who are educating themselves about true solutions.
- Help them understand that we need a multitude of different housing options to prevent and end homelessness. We also need to have clear conversations about the fact that the homelessness sector alone cannot prevent homelessness. It is other sectors including healthcare, criminal justice systems, mental health, youth services, education and workforce development that need to improve to prevent homelessness to begin with.
- Assist them in examining what funding mechanisms could work. I specifically recommend exploring the establishment of local rental subsidies and investments in intensive case management services — including medical and psychiatric services — to support people with substance disorders and/or mental illness as they transition to permanent supportive housing.
Some of these steps may seem extremely costly right now, but if we partner with a university to evaluate long-term impact, we will find that we are merely reinvesting dollars in a way that will make homelessness more and more invisible — by actually solving it and helping people move off the streets of Nashville permanently.