The city of Nashville is fighting to keep local homelessness programs intact and Nashvillians housed.
A recently submitted Metro Council resolution calls for the Office of Homeless Services (OHS) to work with the Homelessness Planning Council and submit a contingency plan by March to support local programs that face federal funding cuts and help keep Nashvillians in housing.
The non-binding resolution is in response to looming federal policy changes that threaten to cut funding from local homelessness programs. If adopted, Metro Council urges OHS to utilize money from $4.4 million in Metro funds the department received in the current fiscal year that started in July 2025 to ensure Nashvillians served by these programs do not lose their permanent housing.
As widely reported in other media, the city of Nashville also joined a national lawsuit challenging the federal government’s decision to stop a two-year grant funding process and replace it at the last minute, which would jeopardize local programs and likely result in the loss of housing for hundreds of individuals and families.
National Alliance to End Homelessness, et al. v. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development & Scott Turner and was filed on Dec. 1, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Rhode Island. A first hearing was held on Monday, Dec. 8.
Immediately prior to the hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Mary S. McElroy, HUD withdrew the FY2025 NOFO and claimed the lawsuit was moot. McElroy, a Trump appointee, was not pleased and did not grant HUD’s request to dismiss the court case. She scheduled a follow-up hearing for Dec. 19 and requested a response and explanation about why HUD withdrew the FY2025 NOFO.
“I understand changing policies,” McElroy said. “That’s not the issue. You can change the policy all you want, but there’s a mechanism for doing so, and it’s not doing things an hour before court.”
The withdrawal of the FY2025 NOFO resulted in even more chaos among provider agencies because HUD reserved the right to reissue the FY2025 NOFO at any time. This means that communities like Nashville had to pause the current local CoC competition, a cumbersome and work-intensive process, to wait and see what HUD is doing next.
Nashville alongside national nonprofits and other cities requests that HUD abandon the current FY2025 NOFO and continue funding programs under the previous two-year FY2024-25 NOFO. This would allow local communities to prepare for anticipated policy changes, which will significantly change rules and cut permanent housing (read about the potential loss of permanent supportive housing in Nashville in our issue publish on Dec. 3).
April Calvin, director of the Office of Homeless Services, Drew Freeman, CEO of Safe Haven Family Shelter, and Mary Katherine Rand, executive director of the Mary Parrish Center, have each filed a sworn affidavit for the plaintiff in which they describe how the new HUD NOFO would negatively impact Nashvillians.
“For the Nashville CoC, this means that the maximum amount it can apply for in Permanent Housing projects is approximately $3,414,184, or approximately $8.4 million less than it received for FY 2024,” Calvin stated in her affidavit. “Should the Nashville CoC be limited to a 30 percent renewal for Permanent Housing funds, it is inevitable that a large number of clients currently in Permanent Housing will lose years long safe, stable housing.”
While Calvin’s numbers are not completely accurate, Nashville still stands to lose approximately $6.9 million in permanent housing dollars under the FY 2025 NOFO – if it were to be reissued with the same 30-percant cap on permanent housing.
If funding under the old, two-year NOFO is discontinued – a possibility that still looms large as of this writing – some permanent housing programs may end as early as January.
Freeman states in his affidavit that “Safe Haven has a CoC grant from HUD of $361,375 for Rapid Re-Housing (“RRH Grant”) that expires on January 31, 2026.
“Without that funding being renewed, approximately 45 families comprised of 151 children and adults will lose the housing we found for them,” Freeman writes. “We now have approximately two months, over the holiday season, to find replacement funding. In a competitive fundraising environment, with such short notice, we cannot expect to find replacement funding without renewal of the RRH Grant.”
Even with the current temporary withdrawal of the new NOFO, Safe Haven and other organizations face an abrupt funding cut – unless the court requires that the funding continues as originally planned.
The lawsuit also claims that the timing of the FY2025 NOFO was illegal, coming months after a statutory deadline passed in June 2025.
Besides limiting the funding of permanent housing programs to 30 percent, other significant changes included in the now withdrawn FY2025 NOFO included that programs are not permitted to participate in harm reduction, offer racial preferences, or collect data on and gender besides male/female designations. HUD also clearly stated that they reserved the right to deny applicants with a history of supporting diversity and harm reduction – even though that’s exactly why the federal government promoted in this program over the past decade.
Furthermore, programs receive extra points if they closely work with local law enforcement, and communities become more competitive when they implement criminalization measures such as making it illegal to camp in public.
In her affidavit, Rand, a domestic violence provider, points out that the FY2025 NOFO requested forced treatment for transitional housing programs, which is in direct contradiction to other federal law such as the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and the Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA).
Under both those acts, “it is illegal for a provider to require beneficiaries to participate in support services as a condition of receiving housing assistance; those services must be voluntary,” Rand writes.
Yet, HUD gives extra points in applications that mandate treatment.
“As a result of this scoring disadvantage, my organization does not have a fair or meaningful opportunity to compete for CoC funding,” Rand states. “My organization receives both VAWA and FVPSA funding, and in our community, we are the only CoC-funded entity that exclusively provides victim services.
“If we are not awarded CoC funding, these housing programs will close,” Rand continues. “As a result, our community will no longer have any longer-term housing options designed specifically for survivors. There are no comparable programs in this community that could absorb these survivors if our programs close.”
The Mary Parrish Center served 246 individuals through their CoC-funded housing programs in 2024. In addition, the Mary Parrish Center operates the federally required coordinated entry (CE) process for survivors of domestic violence, which by law has to be separate from the CE process for the general homelessness population.
Rand stated that currently about 334 households are on the domestic violence CE By Name List, “representing 684 adult survivors and their children in need of safe housing.”
OHS is currently engaging local providers around contingency planning and encourages community members interested in receiving updates regarding the local competition to complete an online form to subscribe to the Continuum of Care listserv.