NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Metro Nashville leaders will break ground on a new facility Tuesday that’s aimed at helping to tackle the issue of homelessness. The Mayor’s office said this center will offer centralized housing and support services for unhoused Nashvillians.
The facility will include five floors, 90 residential units and several amenities. They include office space for caseworkers, accommodations for an onsite clinic, a mailroom, a place to store bicycles, a computer room and a laundry room on each unit floor. The center, located at 600 2nd Avenue North, will be the first permanent supportive housing unit to be developed by Metro Nashville.
“That’s great, good, but this administration has gotten in the way,” said Paula Foster, executive director of OpenTable Nashville, who said the center should’ve been opened long ago. “I think that we need to figure out a way to get the administration out of the way, get the leadership in place for the homeless impact division and make it its own freestanding department.”
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The groundbreaking comes less than a week since national homelessness experts Stacy Horn Koch, Andreanecia Morris, and Sam Tsemberis presented a report to Metro Council detailing their work to study the homelessness challenges in Nashville.
“There’s nothing in this report that hasn’t been said, for the last five, six years,” Foster said. “I think that it was a colossal waste of $500,000, to tell us exactly what we already knew.”
The report stated that an assessment of the Nashville Continuum of Care showed many with many caring people are devoted to ending the homelessness of those sleeping on the city’s streets and within its shelters. However, consultants said more progress can be made because the number of people experiencing homelessness has barely changed. They also pointed to structural hurdles, including a lack of coordination and a need for clear leadership and performance management.
“Today is a call to action for our entire city to step up and make meaningful progress on helping our unhoused neighbors get back on their feet. I’ve been on the ground in many of the homeless encampments in Nashville, and I’ve seen the suffering and the human toll firsthand. The reality is horrific, tragic, and unacceptable,” Mayor Cooper stated in a press release. “My office initiated today’s report so national experts could help us better understand what is driving the problem here and how we as a city can do a better job addressing it. The results make a number of data-driven recommendations, and I support moving forward with all of them. Last month, I committed Nashville to be a “housing first” city – and made the unprecedented commitment of $50 million from the American Rescue Plan to get it done. Now, we have expert guidance on how to invest those funds in the most effective way possible to tackle chronic homelessness in Nashville. There’s a lot of work to be done by all stakeholders involved, and this won’t be an overnight fix, but this is a huge step forward to end the suffering happening in our streets.”
In the report, consultants stated The Continuum of Care does not prioritize the chronically homeless, which preliminary data showed decreased but still had 500 people in that category.
“I think that we’ve done a really poor job,” said Foster. “And we’re not alone. It’s not just Nashville, we’ve done a really poor job at keeping up with the housing market, and making sure that there’s equitability in that market. We have seen just an astronomical rate of growth in Nashville, yet, we let that growth happen without any consideration whatsoever to the people that were being displaced.”
Consultants found resources are not targeted toward long-term homeless, most short-term homeless people targeted by Nashville would have solved their own homelessness within three months without intervention, and only 26% of the households placed into Permanent Supportive Housing in Nashville over the last five years have met the HUD criteria for chronic homelessness (being homeless for at least one year).
“I think that we’ve done a really poor job,” said Foster. “And we’re not alone. It’s not just Nashville, we’ve done a really poor job at keeping up with the housing market, and making sure that there’s equitability in that market. We have seen just an astronomical rate of growth in Nashville, yet, we let that growth happen without any consideration whatsoever to the people that were being displaced.”
