This article is from a two-part cover story on homeless outreach in Nashville. Read the rest here.
In May, April Calvin sat in the Metro Council chambers for an annual budget hearing. Her presentation — on behalf of Metro’s Office of Homeless Services, which Calvin has led since 2023 — successfully secured more than $5 million in additional funding for the department, nearly doubling its budget for 2026. At the same time, the department has spent three years stewarding $50 million in American Rescue Plan dollars, struggling to allocate and spend chunks of the money dedicated to addressing homelessness by former Mayor John Cooper in 2022. Another $35 million has provided 90 permanent supportive housing units at Strobel House, a city-owned downtown residential center that just celebrated a year of operation.
Residents plan for next steps as police and social workers manage a 60-day countdown at large downtown encampment
Judged by its financial commitments, Nashville has made a serious effort in recent years to address homelessness. Mayor Freddie O’Connell himself sponsored the legislation to create the stand-alone Office of Homeless Services in 2022 as a downtown councilmember, expanding on OHS’ predecessor, the now-defunct Metro Homeless Impact Division. Former encampments at Brookmeade Park, Old Tent City and Nissan Stadium made headlines as the city cleared out residents and fortified the sites against resettlement. Many councilmembers say it’s the number one issue they hear about from constituents, who bring up visible homelessness in cities like Los Angeles and Portland, Ore., as cautionary tales about Nashville’s future.Â
But the city has not clearly returned results commensurate with all its effort, money and attention. Calls to replace Calvin and overhaul the Office of Homeless Services have grown louder, echoed by councilmembers like District 16’s Ginny Welsch.
“Metro has an obligation to provide for all of our citizens, and these people are our citizens,” Welsch tells the Scene. “We dedicated a massive amount of money for this, and OHS has shown again and again they are not up to this task. It is very obvious that the management at OHS is incompetent, and April Calvin has destroyed and undermined trust in the community.”
Relationships between Metro and the vast network of nonprofits and volunteers addressing homelessness in Nashville have deteriorated sharply over the past year. Scrutiny about OHS has even produced a citizen effort to publicly audit the city’s decision-making around homeless services, led by former Metro employee Mike Lacy, with background help from some of the same service providers meant to work with OHS. The scant discussion forum on the “OHS Community Audit” webpage even drew a comment from Lisa Avrit — director of finance at Open Table, the nonprofit most at odds with Calvin.Â
Public records requests, some fulfilled after persistent correspondence with city attorneys, have given Lacy a window into OHS’ hectic year. Lacy worked for the city’s former Office of Community Safety — a Cooper-era initiative — until November 2023, when it was shuffled to the Metro Department of Health. (Lacy says it was “eliminated” under O’Connell.)
“When it was announced that Old Tent City would be closed, people sent out a letter that this was against best practices for closing encampments,” says Lacy of the downtown-area encampment, which the city ultimately cleared in early June. Federal guidelines emphasize shared decision-making, thorough engagement and varied resources to address the needs of unhoused people before camp closures, a process that Metro attempted over 60 days between April and June.
Lacy published his analysis related to the impending closing in an acerbic Substack post on May 18.Â
“That began the most serious research I’ve ever done — probably a lot more work than my college thesis. OHS is working quite well, but its job is not what people think it is. From what I can tell, it’s achieving its goal of removing visible homelessness by any means necessary. They just want to get people out of places as quickly as possible so they can’t be seen.”
Lacy’s research particularly scrutinizes Calvin for what he characterizes as mismanagement of the Strobel House operating contract, resulting in retroactive service payments that went $500,000 over budget. In a July 11 email to councilmembers, Calvin explained that OHS was still in the process of finalizing a Strobel House contract but did not deny the overrun.Â
The extent of homelessness in Nashville is difficult to quantify but easy to see. Visible homelessness is the human cost of Nashville’s housing shortage and rising cost of living. “Housing first” refrains aim to remind anyone paying attention that creating more affordable places to live will be the city’s only route out of worsening homelessness. People on street corners asking for help, transporting belongings or selling Contributor newspapers is the extent of most housed residents’ daily contact with unhoused Nashvillians — an impression that has not noticeably been alleviated in recent years.
The city’s annual point-in-time count aims to capture the number of any unhoused people living sheltered or unsheltered on a given night in January. It’s an imprecise statistic for a complex problem (and doesn’t touch on its complex causes), but it serves as the basis for national statistics, which continue to show an increase in homelessness since 2020. Nashville’s 2025 PIT count, conducted on Jan. 23, showed 2,180 people experiencing homelessness. This is up from 2,094 last year and 2,129 in 2023.
Calvin opened the city’s first annual State of Homelessness Symposium with a generous round of thank-yous and acknowledgments before cryptically praising her colleagues for drowning out “the news and fake news” and “holding tension” from the city’s “fiery, passionate service providers.” She expertly navigates the Metro lexicon familiar to anyone who has spent time with city bureaucrats, filling her addresses with milestones and benchmarks, reporting countable metrics, recapping committees and subcommittees, accepting accolades and acknowledging historic firsts on behalf of her office.
With thousands of people currently facing dire conditions living outside in Nashville, providers tell the Scene that Calvin’s rosiness is its own kind of tone-deaf denial.Â
“Knowing that for every one person that’s housed, our data shows that three people are entering homelessness,” Calvin stated at the June symposium. “Having a point-in-time count that’s trending around the same, and not drastically increasing, I believe is a win. I do want to move on to offer hope, because the data is hopeful for me. The funding is even more hopeful.”
City, nonprofit providers and unhoused people navigate distrust as Metro fences off downtown encampment
After several days of the Scene attempting to schedule a time to speak directly with OHS, the department’s public information officer, Demetris Chaney, told the Scene that she and Calvin were unable to do an interview. They instead offered a written statement.Â
“Over the past year, the Nashville Office of Homeless Services (OHS), in partnership with Metro Government and more than 47 community agencies, has made meaningful progress in addressing homelessness through coordinated housing efforts, outreach, and supportive services,” reads the statement, which goes on to tout the opening of the Strobel House and the city’s encampment strategy. “OHS remains committed to advocating for our unhoused Nashville neighbors and supporting the vital work of our community partners in building long-term, sustainable solutions to homelessness in Nashville.”
Mayor O’Connell closed the June symposium with a Q&A alongside Chaney. O’Connell helped draft the city’s original homelessness strategy and was a fixture in the city’s homelessness effort for years, including a stint chairing the Homelessness Planning Council, the 25-member governing board that oversees coordination between the city and providers. O’Connell has so far not heeded detractors’ cries to clear house at OHS, reaffirming his confidence in Calvin’s leadership to the Scene this summer. In June, he too drew the room’s focus to a city struggling for progress.
“This has to be an uncomfortable conversation and series of conversations, because we’re not at that point as a city and community,” O’Connell told the room. “Despite everything April said — all of which is true — it doesn’t make this work easier, the solutions easier, the landscape of state and federal interaction with the ability to solve these problems easier. We’re all challenged as we sit here today.”
Exploring the work of Metro's Office of Homeless Services and rapid rehousing nonprofit Safe Haven
