Against the outcry of neighborhoods and businesses, cities like Nashville have been desperate to find quick and highly publicized solutions to shut down encampments and reduce homelessness. This allows politicians to look like they are doing something — or at least that has been their theory.
By now, we know that focusing solely on large encampment closures at the cost of actually building an effective system that helps people access permanent housing within 90 to 120 days is not working.
Let me state that Nashville is not the only city jumping on the bandwagon of politicizing the closure of large encampments. The goal is apparent. Making homelessness less visible leads to higher polling rates. But if it is not implemented with the primary focus on actually ending homelessness long-term for the people living in those encampments, we are not achieving the goal of improving the quality of life for everyone in our community.
Too often, these showcasing efforts of encampment closures happen at the cost of a city’s ability to actually serve more people and build sustainable efforts. Consequences are that states and local governments have increased the criminalization of homelessness, essentially making undesirable populations invisible by locking them up.
I commend Nashville, which so far has refrained from pursuing that approach. Plus, Nashville does have an outdoor homelessness strategy in place that it adopted from the Continuum of Care, a group of community stakeholders working together to build a system to prevent and end homelessness. That plan can be viewed online at https://www.nashville.gov/sites/default/files/2025-02/Outdoor-Homelessness-Strategy-December-2024.pdf.
I am not entirely critical of the fact that the city focuses on closing encampments. For one, they are not healthy places, and we need to help people move out of there by housing them.
Second, the vast majority of people who are living outdoors want to access housing, if there is actual housing available. What I mean by that is that some are not willing to move into a shelter location where, for various reasons, they may not feel safe. Others cannot access available shelter beds because they may have a pet or due to a disability.
I am also not an advocate for sanctioned encampments as solutions to homelessness — especially in the current political climate. It scares me to think how sanctioned encampments may be viewed as a solution, especially under the current federal administration, by herding people into a location that is not much (if any) better than the places they already occupy.
And finally, I am not a fan of the other current political fad of utilizing pods as shelters or temporary housing. When you google “pods,” you’ll see that they’re used as storage units. Enough said.
The politicization of encampment closures, as we see it happen currently in Nashville, is aimed at making it appear that we are solving homelessness. In reality, Nashville does not have enough permanent housing lined up before closing encampments to help people move out of temporary housing into permanent housing in a reasonable time frame.
Cities, including Nashville, tout in media releases how their strategies house people. They tend to focus on outputs rather than outcomes. Here is the difference: It does not really matter how many services we provide and how many people we house, if we do not end homelessness for them. So rather than merely adding up numbers, the measures we should focus on in a highly functioning system are housing retention and increases in income.
Instead, Metro tends to list how many people have been housed through their latest encampment closures, and then they wrongfully call it a housing surge, when in fact, they only fill existing empty beds that were already in the system.
A housing surge, in my book, is when we add permanent housing opportunities and house more people.
I worked for Metro government for more than a decade. We first started using the term housing surge when Nashville, through the Metropolitan Development and Housing Agency (MDHA), received $10 million in federal COVID grants through the Emergency Solutions Grant (ESG) program. ESG was given out through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) with a focus on moving the most vulnerable people who were living outdoors to permanent housing — meaning they would hold their own annual lease and control how long they stay.
When we measured this housing surge, we differentiated between the permanent housing placements from the $10-million investment and already existing community resources. Our goal was to house 400 people within one year. In actuality, Nashville housed more than 600 people between October 2020 and December 2021.
When we spoke about a housing surge, it meant finding new permanent housing opportunities for people, which is hugely different from the current approach of placing people in temporary situations, where they remain homeless.
Metro has kept approximately 80 temporary beds open for over a year since spring of 2024 in anticipation of the current encampment closure of Old Tent City, the largest camp in town. The Office of Homeless Services continues to explain that they did not pay for those open beds.
Whether the beds were paid for or not is completely irrelevant. Keeping beds intentionally open when people are forced to live outside is unethical, to say the least, especially when Metro has the financial means to pivot quickly and offer those beds to vulnerable people in need. Instead, Metro kept people outdoors, even during cold winter months, while sitting on beds that were left unoccupied.
What bugs me is that no one is holding Metro accountable for this lack of ethical leadership. The Office of Homelessness is controlled directly by the Mayor’s Office.
I am familiar with the history of why these beds were unoccupied and am able to counteract any excuses that come from the administration. Bottom line is that these beds were open for a year because of a lack of planning, coordination, and administrative failure. In short, it shows a lack of leadership and a gross neglect of putting people’s well-being first.
In a functioning system, having 80 temporary or shelter beds means we could serve up to 240 people in a year. Here is how this works. Temporary housing should provide intensive services that speed up the permanent housing process.
In a coordinated homelessness system, once you work with people on permanent housing, they ought to be able to access it within an average of 90 to 120 days. That means if we have 80 beds, they should turn over to the next person within an average of 120 days. Hence, approximately 240 people should have been served by these beds that Metro could have utilized. I would like to mention here that, according to Metro, there were 125 people in Old Tent City when they were notified of the impending encampment closure.
Metro’s own data shows that the average length from encampments to permanent housing was close to a year in the designated temporary housing facility used to shut down encampments. With a $50-million investment since 2022 and with tripling the Metro budget dedicated solely to the Office of Homeless Services, we should see better outcomes.
Something is clearly not working.
Metro adopted an Outdoor Homelessness Strategy and updated it in December 2024. Prior to the updates, a Continuum of Care committee took three months to seek input from service providers, members of the Office of Homeless Services, people with lived experience, and funders from local private charitable foundations “to help examine the effectiveness and efficiency of the Outdoor Homelessness Plan and contribute to an updated, edited and improved plan.”
A document presented to all committee members in September 2024, named the following strengths of the Outdoor Homelessness Strategy (summarized here):
- A community that cares;
- A standalone Metro department dedicated to homeless services;
- An increase in resources; and
- Outreach.
- The same document listed the following areas as challenges and development opportunities:
- Discord within the community;
- Adequate resources;
- Transparency – around the encampment closure prioritization;
- Communication:
- Between the Office of Homeless Services (OHS) and nonprofit service providers;
- Among service providers;
- Among OHS, nonprofit service providers and encampment residents;
- Between OHS and nonprofit leaders and funders.
- Collaboration:
- Between OHS and nonprofit service providers;
- Among service providers.
- Coordination:
- Between OHS and nonprofit service providers;
- Among service providers;
- Among OHS, nonprofit service providers and encampment residents.
Looking at this evaluation, what stood out to me is a clear lack of communication, collaboration and coordination. That is essentially the main role of the Office of Homeless Services. And the way the Office of Homeless Services has announced the closure of Old Tent City shows that Metro has yet to improve on that front.
For one, the notification of the encampment closure was an orchestrated publicity stunt that was kept a big secret until the day that the notices were handed out to Old Tent City residents. It was such a secret that other Metro departments, including the Metro Nashville Police Department, were not notified. Service providers did not know either.
The fact that Metro departments and service providers, some of whom learned about the closure through media reports, were not notified, shows a clear lack of collaboration and coordination.
Office of Homeless Services leaders had been asked about the closure of Old Tent City in various public meetings since at least July 2024, but refused to provide clear answers. Instead, they claimed that in order to follow a harm-reduction approach, they needed to notify encampment residents first.
However, what Office of Homeless Services leaders clearly do not understand is that they had months in which they had sufficient time to put together a designated collaborative team of Metro and nonprofit outreach specialists and partner with health-care professionals to work with people in Old Tent City on removing barriers to housing and link them with services.
During that time, they should have kept residents and providers informed about the impending closure and let them know what was happening as soon as they had a timeline. Such an approach is recommended by Clutch Consulting, a national group that the Office of Homeless Services says they have worked with.
Instead, being secretive creates chaos and fear among residents. It is the opposite of harm reduction.
Office of Homeless Services leaders like to tout how much Nashville is praised by national leaders for its encampment approach. We all know that these leaders receive their information and talking points from Metro.
My decade of experience at Metro showed me that closing encampments is hard and always controversial, especially when you approach it with a long-term goal in mind. I do not believe that Metro should keep Old Tent City or other encampments open, especially when they have 80 temporary beds that could help move people indoors. The focus should be on building a process that leads to permanent housing — if not directly from an encampment then at least within 90-120 days after leaving an encampment.
I believe with Metro’s $50 million investment, the system that we started building prior to COVID should have been improved enough by now that we could see an actual reduction in overall homelessness in our city.
We all know that under the current federal political climate, things do not look favorable in terms of funding and resources for housing, health care, and homelessness. Consequently, having strong local leadership that understands how to build trust through clear and transparent communication, coordination and collaboration is more important than ever.
Unfortunately, as shown by the example of Old Tent City, we currently don’t have that local leadership in place. In the end, it is up to Mayor Freddie O’Connell to make the changes to strengthen the city’s leadership on homelessness.