The city’s top homelessness official quietly created a new housing strategy over the past year to operate outside agreed-upon protocols between Metro and other service providers. The program preceded what Office of Homeless Services Director April Calvin termed “Non-Traditional Rapid Rehousing” during the fiscal year 2026 budget process. In June, Mayor Freddie O’Connell approved an additional $2.4 million in his budget to expand this work to include 100 families.
Exploring the work of Metro's Office of Homeless Services and rapid rehousing nonprofit Safe Haven
According to interviews with the Scene, theeffort involved handpicking at least eight families lured by the promise of Section 8 vouchers who were then shuffled between private landlords for months, living on a verbal rent guarantee from the city. In at least two cases, rent money often came late or not at all, prompting landlords to ask tenants directly for rent money they didn’t have and to even initiate eviction proceedings.
Financial records show Calvin assembled funding — totaling at least $100,000 for at least eight families — from the COVID-era American Rescue Plan Act. OHS spokesperson Demetris Chaney says the city acted quickly at the request of the Nashville Rescue Mission and relied on unspecified “bridge funding” to pay families’ rent. In a recent email sent to multiple city officials and reviewed by the Scene, Calvin discouraged public discussion of the program.
The Scene pieced together a rough outline of the program via texts, financial records and interviews with individuals recruited out of the Nashville Rescue Mission who say they experienced months of confusion, poor communication with OHS and subpar living conditions. Nashville’s citywide strategy for addressing homelessness relies on cooperation between the city and nonprofit providers like The Contributor, Room In The Inn, the Salvation Army and Open Table Nashville.
These entities collaborate via the 25-member Homelessness Planning Council, a guiding board for the city’s multilayered Continuum of Care — a chartered network that plans and administers homelessness resources throughout the city. This delicate coalition has frayed recently under Calvin, whose history of unilateral decision-making has put providers at odds with the city. The city is also responsible for leading Nashville’s coordinated entry system; coordinated entry is meant to function as a centralized effort between all providers and individuals experiencing homelessness to match needs with services. In September, city officials approved Metro Councilmember Ginny Welsch’s request to audit OHS.
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Text messages from Calvin to OHS employees in August 2024 indicate that OHS sought to identify eight unhoused families to move from the Nashville Rescue Mission to two different “hotel conversions.” This circumvented the normal coordinated entry process and raised red flags for professionals brought in to help these families. One individual involved in the process, who requested anonymity, compared the strategy to picking people directly off the street and paying their rent.
Misty Hill was staying at the Rescue Mission with her son last summer when she was called in for a meeting with an OHS caseworker. The employee offered to cover a full year of rent at an apartment complex chosen by OHS. After that year, based on her conversation with OHS, Hill believed she would receive a Section 8 housing voucher. The move would also reunite her with her partner, who was living separately in the Rescue Mission’s men’s dormitory.
“ She said, ‘I have an opportunity for you and your family,’” Hill tells the Scene. “They were supposed to pay rent for a year while we lived in transitional housing and waited for our Section 8 voucher to come in.”
The family moved into The Avenue, a small apartment complex on Clarksville Pike, with several other people relocated from the mission. Based on a verbal rent guarantee from OHS, Hill was able to sign a yearlong lease for $1,400 a month. The living arrangement soon turned into chaos. According to Hill, the apartment was plagued by break-ins, and someone began living in the shared kitchen. Her ceiling caved in, damaging the family’s belongings.
“OHS would go months at a time without paying anything,” Hill recalls. “Then, all of a sudden, they’re like, ‘We never intended to pay your rent for an entire year.’ We started getting threatening messages from the property manager that we would be kicked out.”
Metro financial records include dozens of invoices paid to house individuals in three locations: The Avenue, Hillside Crossing Apartments and Extended Stay America. Kirsney Cunningham describes a similar path moving from the mission to The Avenue in August 2024. There, she says, apartment conditions soon became unlivable for herself and her young daughter.
“The pipes started to get clogged,” Cunningham tells the Scene. “We were limited on food. They would bring us toilet paper and mouthwash for us to divide among ourselves. The things that OHS began to tell us that they were going to do, they stopped coming.”
In September, Cunningham and her daughter moved from The Avenue to Hillside Crossing, where, Cunningham says, OHS again verbally guaranteed a year’s rent followed by a Section 8 voucher and a housekeeping job at the complex. But Hillside did not hire her, and by January, she was told by property managers that OHS would soon stop paying her rent. Neither Hill nor Cunningham received a Section 8 voucher. Instead they found their own cheaper apartments, putting down deposits and prorated rent with help from OHS and another nonprofit, ending a year’s housing saga in mixed success.
Additional reporting and research for this article was provided by Mike Lacy. Read more of Lacy’s work at his Substack, {Rich Text}.
