Cheatham County is participating in the outdoor homelessness count for the first time this year, and as I worked with a team to administer it, it occurred to me how many states and cities, including Tennessee and Nashville, still underestimate the impact of rural homelessness on urban centers.
A lack of affordable housing and a lack of income are the main causes for people losing their housing. This fact is true for urban as well as rural communities. Yet, homelessness often is hidden in rural areas where people tend to live in dilapidated housing with a combination of holes in roofs, walls or floors, no running water or no electricity. People also stay in abandoned homes, in campers, in cars or deeply hidden in wooded areas.
If police officers see them and want to help, they usually have two options. One, send folks to the next church, which may be able to put them up in a motel for a couple of nights, or send them over to the next county that has some services. Churches are overwhelmed as congregations are often smaller and poorer than in more populated areas.
We can easily see the impact on urban areas when folks who have lost their housing in rural counties move to seek shelter and services in cities. But we cannot overlook the impact the lack of affordable housing in urban areas has on rural communities. When people can no longer afford to live in urban centers like Nashville, they move out of the county.
While housing may still be a little more affordable in surrounding counties, as more people move out of county, the demand in those rural areas increases and the cost of housing increases along with it. This causes poorer households to move even further away from cities. The dilemma is that as they move to more rural areas, they may no longer have easy access to employment, transportation, and health care — all key things that need to be in place to ensure long-term housing stability. And, as we have already established, if people lack sufficient income, they cannot afford housing no matter how “affordable” it is from the government’s perspective. That’s how they may end up in overcrowded situations or in dilapidated housing — still paying landlords monthly rent for shacks that do not even offer electricity on a regular basis.
Let’s take a closer look at the definition of homelessness and then examine how the federal government defines the term “rural.”
Definition of Homelessness
For one, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provides four categories of the homeless definition, which are:
- Literally Homeless;
- Imminent Risk of Homelessness;
- Homeless Under Other Federal Statutes; and
- Fleeing/Attempting to Flee Domestic Violence.
A breakdown and explanation of each category is available on the HUD Website at: https://www.hudex change.info/homelessness-assistance/coc-esg-virtual-binders/coc-esg-home less-eligibility/four-categories/.
While the federal government provides quite an extensive and detailed definition of homelessness, in reality, the focus of federal, state and urban policies remains largely on literal homelessness, which refers to an “individual or family who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence, meaning:
- Has a primary nighttime residence that is a public or private place not meant for human habitation;
- Is living in a publicly or privately operated shelter designated to provide temporary living arrangements (including congregate shelters, transitional housing, and hotels and motels paid for by charitable organizations or by federal, state and local government programs); or
- Is exiting an institution where (s)he has resided for 90 days or less and who resided in an emergency shelter or place not meant for human habitation immediately before entering that institution.
When annual Point-in-Time counts are conducted, they really count people falling under this literal definition of homelessness. In other words, those counts focus on shelter stayers and people sleeping outdoors (if they can be found on the night of the count). Not many cities have figured out how to enumerate folks sleeping in cars (unless they are staying in designated parking lots like in some California cities, for example), abandoned homes, sheds, storage units or other hidden places.
Therefore, this narrow focus does not include the situations of people facing homelessness in rural areas, considering that they are less frequently found living on the streets or in shelters — if there are even any shelters to begin with. Again, people in rural areas who have lost their housing are more hidden, residing in vehicles, campers, with family members and in overcrowded or inadequate housing.
The reason this matters is that the narrow definition of literal homelessness also prevents rural communities from qualifying for federal funding aimed at addressing homelessness. Some areas, like Cheatham County, are theoretically included in service areas of larger nonprofits and state agencies. But the lack of coordination and quantifiable data make it hard for these agency staff to even know how to identify a target population in rural areas. Combine that with a lack of resources that is insufficient to serve the urban population and rural homelessness is often overlooked.
Even HUD has realized this shortcoming and in recent years has specifically targeted some rural areas for certain funding. Some of those grants focus on either a specific, vulnerable population such as youth and young adults. What is more, to be eligible and competitive for these grants, rural areas need an organizing body called Continuum of Care (CoC) to manage the grant requirements.
But rural areas are often underfunded and ill-equipped to have the capacity to successfully apply for these grants. For example, the Central Tennessee CoC encompasses an area including 19 counties in Middle Tennessee. Among those 19 counties is Cheatham County — the county I live in and helped organize the first outdoor Point-in-Time count. And now you will understand why this is the first ever outdoor homeless count in Cheatham County. There simply was no one with the capacity to organize a count and align fully with the local CoC.
But in 2022, thanks to the leadership of The Family Collective of the United Way of Greater Nashville, which also includes Cheatham County, we established the Cheatham County Homeless Coalition. This now is a networking effort that holds quarterly meetings with organizations serving Cheatham County residents in need and on the verge of homelessness. The Coalition already has an email list of about 100 stakeholders representing more than 50 agencies.
With the state Department of Human Services pulling out of funding The Family Collective, the Cheatham County Homeless Coalition is now fully volunteer-based. But our awareness campaigns and networking efforts have garnered the attention of larger nonprofits, state agencies, local government leaders, law enforcement, and churches. Thus, we decided to participate in the local homelessness count to draw attention to the plight of a rural county like Cheatham that is nestled between Davidson, Williamson, Dickson, Montgomery and Robertson counties, yet often gets overlooked in terms of housing needs of poor people who live here.
Definition of Rural
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “rural encompasses all population, housing, and territory not included within an urban area.”
In comparison, the U.S. Census determined that for the 2020 Census, an urban area comprised “a densely settled core of census blocks that meet minimum housing unit density and/or population density requirements. This includes adjacent territory containing non-residential urban land uses. To qualify as an urban area, the territory identified according to criteria must encompass at least 2,000 housing units or have a population of at least 5,000.”
HUD, in a 2022 special call for funding opportunities for outdoor and rural homelessness included a list of counties that they considered rural. Of the 19 counties in the Central Tennessee CoC, 13 were classified as being rural (Bedford, Cheatham, Coffee, Giles, Hickman, Lawrence, Lewis, Lincoln, Marshall, Moore, Perry, Trousdale and Wayne). Robertson County was left off the list because it simply had too big of a population in Springfield.
Yet, I venture to say that most Tennesseans would consider Robertson County to be a rural, rather than an urban, area. Robertson County exhibits the same barriers to services that are typical for rural areas: a lack of access to shelters, limited available services, inadequate resource allocations to serve the needs of people struggling with extreme poverty and housing insecurity, and — as is also typical for rural communities — it does not have a great data system in place that helps provide information about homelessness and housing needs.
Thus, even those counties that the federal government does not consider being “rural” struggle addressing the needs of low-income households that are exacerbated by the lack of affordable housing.
The fact that counties such as Cheatham and Robertson are located close to Nashville drives up their housing costs. As housing affordability becomes unattainable in the city for the lower middle class, they move out of the county and commute to work. It takes me 35 minutes to get from my house at the Dickson County line in Cheatham County to the Downtown Nashville courthouse.
This move of the middle class out to rural areas tightens the rental market and increases the cost of housing for poor people in those communities who then have to move even further out, which makes it harder to get to work or find new employment.
And again, once people lose housing, they often have no option to survive but to move closer to or into urban areas like Davidson County to seek shelter and/or access services.
To address this, government and local politicians must invest in affordable housing not only in urban settings but also in rural communities.
The state should lead efforts to bring together city and county leaders and develop strategies to stabilize housing for poor people in rural areas, thereby, preventing homelessness including in urban areas.
The state could fund a co-leadership structure with philanthropic leaders, such as the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee, for cross-county collaboration. The funding could include resources for capacity building to create local networking entities such as the Cheatham County Homeless Coalition that are not bound by federal requirements.
Coordination with local leaders could lead to a regional vision. It would also be imperative to hire talented people who understand cross-sector collaboration and systems building. The best leaders know how to start small and build up from there. To do so, a regional public-private partnership would need to develop key data metrics to be able to make informed decisions and measure outcomes.
Establishing such a regional effort takes vision and leadership. But avoiding addressing the housing needs of rural counties will be short-sighted in the long run.
A specific starting point could be for the Middle Tennessee Mayor’s Council (which includes up to 70 city and county mayors) to discuss this issue and lobby for state partnerships to support addressing rural homelessness. Simply put, without a coordinated cross-county, regional strategy, urban mayors, like Freddie O’Connell in Nashville, will continue to struggle with the implementation of a prevention strategy that is needed to finally end chronic homelessness in their cities.