Outlawing the Poor

What outrages homeless advocates isn’t only that the city is getting tough but that Metro government has never shown much willingness to take more than a Band-Aid approach to helping the poor. Nashville has always relied largely on church-based charities to shoulder the burden of sheltering and feeding the homeless. Some need for shelter goes unmet in the winter, according to Strobel, who says he turns away a couple dozen people most nights. “It’s a myth” that there’s an abundance of help available for the homeless in Nashville, he says.

Metro itself spends a relative pittance—roughly $2 million a year in local tax money—on services for the homeless, mostly to fund a free health clinic and to pay caseworkers in a pilot program helping 35 people find jobs and housing. There are an estimated 2,200 homeless people in Nashville.

At the same time, the city has given $15 million in tax incentives since 2002 to developers building pricey downtown condos. And it would have been more except that Tony Giarratana, who ignited the downtown residential market by building the Viridian in 2006, actually walked away from a $12 million city financing package for his latest project—the 65-story Signature Towers, a posh condo/hotel skyscraper that would rise higher than any building in the Southeast. By rejecting the city’s money, he was relieved of any responsibility to include a few affordable apartments.

At the end of 2004, then Mayor Bill Purcell tried to push Nashville to do more to help the homeless. He wanted the city to begin trying to solve the problem. But his much-vaunted plan to build 1,800 apartments for homeless people by 2015 may be fizzling.

Popular in cities across the country, “housing first” programs offer free or subsidized efficiency apartments to the homeless until they can stabilize and find jobs. The homeless must follow the program’s rules. That means cooperating with caseworkers, whose close monitoring is the key to any success. Denver saw an 11 percent decline in homelessness in the first year of its program, which boasts 400 apartments and 17 outreach workers who walk the streets to refer homeless people to the services. It’s not cheap, but the theory is that it’s much more expensive to let the chronically homeless remain on the streets, where they rack up enormous costs to the health care and criminal justice systems.

Not a single home was constructed in 2007 in the first year of Nashville’s plan. Metro says it’s about to start building 32 apartments—far short of the 200-a-year goal—and it will spend $150,000 to pay caseworkers. After that, what will happen? The city’s homelessness commission is trying to raise funds privately to expand the program, but it’s unclear how much city money may be available. In a meeting with homeless advocates this month, Mayor Dean, who has supported the program in comments to the media, was noncommittal about funding in a tight budget year.

“We met with the mayor at 3:15, and we were done at 3:30, so that tells you a lot,” says Clemmie Greenlee, a volunteer with the Homeless Power Project—the gritty group of street people that lobbies, unsuccessfully more often than not, for the impoverished in Nashville. “He kept talking about the budget and how he was going to have to squeeze this and that out of it.”

“Sounds like he gave us the brush off,” sighs Kay Rowe, another worker.

They are discussing their sad state of affairs during a Monday morning meeting at the Power Project’s rundown offices in the Arcade, where at least it’s relatively warm. The room is like a scene out of Les Misérables with homeless people in various states of decrepitude—including a one-legged man leaning glumly on his crutch and others with raw, wind-burned faces—huddled together on the shabby furniture in their winter finery.

Josh Gallogly, a scruffy young drifter who says he makes ends meet by selling his blood plasma twice a week, is offering his own psychoanalysis of the yuppies who are unwilling to coexist downtown with the homeless.

“They don’t want to see poor people,” he says. “They want the ability to walk down the street without feeling guilt when they see that disparity. They realize how good they’re living while somebody else is suffering on the street. They just want to pretend it doesn’t exist. Because if you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist, then you start to ask yourself too many questions, and you start having an existential crisis. ‘How am I going to ride around in my BMW or my Hummer without feeling guilty?’ It’s hard for them. Nobody wants to suffer an existential crisis.”

William Miles is upset because he says the homeless can no longer loiter unmolested in downtown public parks. The city went so far as to bulldoze the Church Street pocket park and redo it with an open lawn and a few spindly trees. Metro parks director Roy Wilson says the poop from too many starlings prompted the denuding. But downtown residents were complaining about nettlesome bums lurking in the park, doing drugs and acting scary.