Cover Story
Downtown Nashville is the Galapagos Islands of a Darwinian drama pitting the ambitious young professionals of luxury lofts and condos against the hard-luck denizens of heat grates and dingy back alleys. It’s not hard to predict which species will survive.
Aided by developers, businesses and an anxious-to-please city government, the new downtown residents—or urban pioneers, as they proudly call themselves—are proliferating madly, projected to nearly triple to 8,000 by next year, and they’re now in the process of shoving their less fortunate neighbors out of the last place they can call home.
Police are cooperating by handing out hundreds of $50 citations for trespassing, public drunkenness and basically being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The city calls them “quality of life” violations, but street people say it’s their quality of life—pathetic as it may be—that’s actually violated. The homeless are sometimes rousted from their cardboard-box sleeping places in parking garages, handed citations and shooed away to fend for themselves in the freezing night. If they don’t pay the $50 fines, which they can’t do, they could go to jail next time.
Another triumph for the new urban lifestyle: Begging is now illegal everywhere after dark. During the daytime, it’s illegal at any bus stop, sidewalk cafe or school or within 25 feet of an ATM or bank or within 10 feet of the entrance or exit of any business or anywhere around any place with a “No Solicitation” sign. Got that?
The Metro Council passed that bill by a nearly unanimous voice vote in January, and the self-described “progressive” Mayor Karl Dean allowed it to become law this month without his signature, even though his law department says it probably infringes on the First Amendment and may fail to clear a few other little hurdles in the Bill of Rights.
Even before the law went on the books, downtown honky-tonks, restaurants and other tourist-dependent businesses slapped up “Please Help, Don’t Give” signs, telling tourists not to assist panhandlers because that’s a “lose/lose situation.” Here’s the advice offered on the handy palm-sized cards that the businesses are distributing:
• When you encounter a panhandler, always walk with certainty and confidence.
• Choose to respond politely, “If you dial 2-1-1, they can help you” or simply say, “no” or “sorry.”
The beleaguered panhandler, assuming he doesn’t happen to have his cell phone with him, would have to beg for 50 cents to make a pay phone call to 211. But if he did, he might be disappointed because he’d connect with a United Way referral service, which wouldn’t offer help but would instead suggest that he call somewhere else, which would require another 50 cents.
We also are assured, “...[Y]ou need not feel guilty when you say no to panhandlers.” That’s because “help is available”—a dubious claim that this article will examine in a moment. (I happened to be reading this on the sign on Lower Broad outside Jack’s Bar-B-Que as a mumbling woman with matted hair and obvious mental disorders stumbled by and approached a businessman. Frowning at her outstretched hand, he briskly strode around her. He didn’t look guilty. Maybe he thought she’d dial 211.)
The signs are the brainchild of the Nashville Downtown Partnership, a kind of mini-Chamber of Commerce that seems to have developed an Ahab-like obsession with driving beggars out of downtown. “It’s harassment of individuals walking on the sidewalk,” the organization’s executive director, Tom Turner, says of panhandling. “We’re asking people to redirect their generosity.”
Charles Strobel, who runs the church-supported Room in the Inn shelters for the homeless, laughs at that. “We’ve not received a penny from people saying, ‘I’m giving to you because those signs told me not to give to panhandlers.’ As a city, we’re saying, ‘Don’t give, don’t be generous, don’t be compassionate, don’t be caring.’ What kind of message is that?”
Next on the council’s action agenda is a special favorite of the new pioneers—a citywide ban on selling one beer at a time, an attempt to prevent drunks from buying 40s of malt liquor and littering downtown with bottles. The likely unintended consequence: Homeless alcoholics will buy mouthwash and drink it instead. Scope is already increasingly popular on the street.
The only worry for many council members is that downtown’s homeless will flee to other parts of town, say Donelson or Woodbine, prompting a new wave of constituent complaints.
“It’s going to drive these folks into the suburbs. We’ll have to crack down on them out there then,” says council member Michael Craddock, who helped lead raids on homeless encampments under bridges, along train tracks and behind strip malls in 2006 in his Madison district.
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.
“The police herd up the homeless and chase them out of the parks,” Miles says. “I’ve seen them do it.”
Kay Rowe says, “It’s nothing more than harassment. The way the police are targeting poor people is not right. What about those tailgate parties at the Titans’ games? They drink in public. They don’t get arrested. They leave and drive drunk and they don’t get arrested. But if you’re homeless on the other side of the river drinking in public, you’ll get arrested. They’ll arrest you for just about anything, throwing a cigarette butt on the ground, anything.”
These same issues are discussed at meetings of the Urban Residents Association only a few blocks away in the ballroom of the magnificently renovated Smith House, a grand 19th century home-turned-fancy restaurant. But to these residents, who gather beneath a sparkling chandelier for their monthly discussions, the homeless are the harassing ones—the falling-down drunks are the worst—and most panhandlers are career con artists scamming gullible tourists and besmirching Music City’s reputation.
“They say we’re a bunch of spoiled rich people and we’re criminalizing the homeless,” says Skip Courtney, the group’s president. “That’s the battle cry of those who want society to give the homeless a free ride.”
“We’re not here to solve the problem of homelessness,” agrees the vice president, Ben Bahil, a young marketing agent who lives in the Benny Dillon lofts. “We’re here to represent our neighborhood and make it a better place to live.”
“I am unapologetic for trying to revitalize downtown Nashville,” Bahil adds. “We’re pioneers. We’re trying to make downtown Nashville the way Nashvillians want it to be, and every time we try to take steps to clean it up we get demonized in the press. And I’m unapologetic. I sacrifice a lot to live down here. I pay a premium for a place to live with what would otherwise be disposable income. We have one car. We scrape by sometimes month-to-month, but we love living down here. My wife and I both walk to work. We have a low carbon footprint. I feel like I’m doing something good by living down here.”
Police officers say they’re caught in the crossfire of downtown’s new class war—public servants trying to do their duty, not the jackbooted thugs of the street people’s caricature.
“We’re not out here to harass homeless people,” says Officer Kevin Caperton, who speaks with the reassuring voice of a trusted family doctor as he drives his squad car around downtown in search of “quality-of-life” violators. In the six months of the periodic sweeps, police have made nearly 400 arrests and issued as many citations.
We drive by a couple sleeping in their blankets on a heat grate in Riverfront Park. “I could probably find something to write them up for,” says the beefy Caperton, a 16-year veteran of the force. “But this isn’t about enforcing every little law. It’s about finding the people who are being a public nuisance.
“You wouldn’t want to go out the front door of your house if you lived in Brentwood and find a drunk guy passed out on your front stoop. Same thing here. Right now in downtown, we have all these high-rise condominium places going up,” he says, gesturing at the skyscrapers. “These are people’s homes. But you also have a large community of homeless and all their services are concentrated downtown, and it’s hard to equalize the rights of both parties. But both parties have the right to use the public space.
“What’s the solution? I don’t know. I wish I did. There is no real solution as long as you have the two groups with varying interests. They’re going to come at each other, and the best we can do is enforce the laws toward both parties.”
To illustrate his point, Caperton tells a story about a tourist staying at the Hermitage Hotel who went jogging in Riverfront Park. “He came up to me and said, ‘Can you run off those homeless people?’ And I said, ‘What exactly are they doing?’ And he says, ‘They aren’t doing anything. They’re just making me uncomfortable and nervous. I don’t think this is something you want in your park.’ And I looked at him and said, ‘Sir, they have every right to use the park just like you do. It’s not their fault they can’t afford to stay at the Hermitage.’ ”
Under pressure from downtown residents and businesses, even progressive members of the Metro Council have resigned themselves to going along with get-tough measures against the homeless.
Council member Erik Cole, who serves on the homelessness commission, voted for the anti-panhandling ordinance but acknowledges it’s essentially pointless. “It’s easy to say, ‘This panhandler’s blocking the front of my property, lock them up and take them away.’ But the reality is that person can be back on the street in front of that property in 24 hours. That’s not accomplishing anything. How do you break out of that? Some of us are going to have to have the political courage to get up and say” that the city needs to spend more on homeless services.
The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty urged the Metro Council not to outlaw panhandling, pointing out “more productive ways to approach issues around homelessness and poverty” in other cities. Madison, Wis., for instance, contracted with two social service agencies to create a downtown outreach program. “Instead of arresting or citing those asking for money on the streets,” the law center observed in a letter to the council, “the police work with the outreach team to help connect people with appropriate services.” Police in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., significantly decreased the number of arrests of its street people by creating an outreach team that includes a formerly homeless worker.
Those programs may work, says council member Mike Jameson, but no one is willing to consider spending more public money until unruly and chronically drunk homeless people are controlled to the satisfaction of downtown residents and businesses.
“There’s a general impression that charity requires some degree of accountability,” says Jameson, who represents much of downtown. And besides, “We’re not in an era where we can throw money at a problem. The Metro budgets are going through department reductions right now. It’s far easier to pass a law that doesn’t require any funding than it is to pass a law that requires funding. For better or worse, we’re in a state of mind where nobody’s going to listen to any of those more creative solutions until we’ve tried the less expensive approach.”
At-large council member Jerry Maynard, a preacher who was elected last year, was the only opposition to the panhandling bill and the only public official speaking openly against it.
“We’ve never had a comprehensive plan for solving the problem of homelessness,” Maynard says. “We’re leaving it to nonprofit, faith-based organizations to deal with the homeless as best they can. This is our comprehensive plan—criminalize the poor and then fine the poor. We’re actually going to fine people for begging for money. I’m hoping that the Athens of the South will decide that we are tired of being 20 years behind other cities in dealing with the homeless. We are so shortsighted. This isn’t a simple problem, and neither is the solution.”