I was appointed, along with Councilman Ludye Wallace, to co-chair a special committee on homelessness. We held hearings and made fact-finding visits to the various agencies that assisted the homeless. I learned a lot and developed a deep admiration for those who work in the field of addressing the issue and serving Nashville's homeless.
The committee made a set of recommendations, but quite frankly, I do not recall what most of them were. One of the recommendations was to create a local agency to serve the homeless, which the city did. The mission of the agency was to connect the homeless with the services that could serve them.
Some other findings of our committee were that enforcement of zoning ordinances prohibiting the subdividing of large homes into multiple small living units, and the closing of "flop houses" that rented rooms by the night in areas where such rentals were not permitted, may have been a contributing factor to growing homelessness. I am not sure we had any recommendation on this, but it was a finding, I believe.
Another finding was that there were no shortages of places where a homeless person could get a meal. In fact, there was a lot of duplication in feeding the homeless, but there was a shortage of housing and other services. Another observation was that the Nashville Rescue Mission was the largest provider of shelter for the homeless, but that even when beds were available, many of the homeless would not avail themselves of the services of that agency because of safety concerns and some of the rules of the organization, which some of the homeless did not want to follow. We also found there was a shortage of places for families or women, and almost no place that would accept a homeless person who had a dog, which some homeless people did.
At the time of our investigation, I believe the homeless population was 1500, counted as those in shelters or on the street. Of course, this does not count those who are temporarily living with families or couch surfing. Now the population of the homeless is 2180. While that is a significant increase, if you compare the size of Nashville then to now, that is not that much of an increase.
During this period of investigation, I volunteered for a couple of nights with the Room in the Inn program and met and talked to the homeless. One thing I learned is that the reasons for homelessness and how one becomes homeless vary considerably. As one might expect, mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse are contributing factors to homelessness, but not all homeless people fit those categories.
Another thing I learned from involvement in the work of the committee was that the homeless are often not the same group of people from one time to the next time. Some people will fall into homelessness and then their fortunes will change, or they will get their act together and stop being homeless, but then, after a while of being housed, may fall into homelessness again. Another observation is that some of the homeless move around a lot. They may have been homeless in some other city before moving to Nashville. So, the 2200 or so people on the streets in Nashville this year are not all of the same people who were homeless last year.
After my service in the Council, I became the Director of Housing Services for a non-profit organization here in Nashville. In that position, I did not work directly with the community serving the homeless but often interacted with people in that field and would attend meetings where homelessness was part of the conversation. I remained informed of what was happening in the field of homeless services.
Along about 1990's and continuing up until the present, more and more homeless advocates promote a concept called "Housing First." This is the idea that, instead of requiring people to qualify for assistance, such as getting off drugs or enrolling in a treatment program, that permanent supportive housing be provided regardless of the person's circumstances.
I was always skeptical of the concept. If one is given housing with no conditions, it seems to me that that would create more homelessness. In the article below from The Independent Institute, the record of the policy of Housing First is examined and deemed a failure.
Housing First is an Evidence-Based Failure
By Christopher J. Calton, The Independent Institute, December 5, 2025- “Housing First is an evidence-based solution to homelessness!”
This refrain is repeated ad nauseum in homelessness circles. The pronouncement has begun to resemble a religious creed—a ritualistic profession of devotion to prevailing homelessness policy, and true believers will not have their faith shaken by empirical observation to the contrary.
Those who are more agnostic toward homelessness policy, however, might reasonably express disbelief at the claim that Housing First is an evidence-based solution. Before Housing First became federal policy in 2013, homelessness was steadily declining, even during the Great Recession, and continued to fall modestly until in 2016. Since then, however, homelessness has ballooned by 42 percent, even as homelessness spending has skyrocketed.
What, then, explains the unwavering belief among Housing First evangelicals that their solution to homelessness is “evidence-based”?
The alleged success of Housing First does not come from aggregated homelessness data, but from case studies of different homelessness programs. The Clinton-era strategy for addressing homelessness was a treatment-oriented approach known as “Housing Readiness,” which used housing as an incentive for clients to participate in services, such as substance-abuse treatment and work training programs, with the goal of helping them achieve self-sufficiency.
Housing First took a different approach, making services optional and offering people permanently subsidized housing, with the more modest goal of “housing stability.” The original experiments focused on chronically homeless individuals who suffered from a severe mental illness—people for whom self-sufficiency would likely be impossible.
By redefining the measure of success from “self-sufficiency” to “housing stability,” the engineers of Housing First were able to claim resounding victories over the older approach. Their earth-shattering discovery was that housing stability is greater when housing is subsidized than when it is not subsidized. But, crucially, these successes are confined to the people who are accepted into the program, not the homeless population overall.
Under Housing Readiness programs, roughly one-third of participants remained stably housed, but they also lived independently. This means that when they exited the program, the resources they benefited from could be directed to others.
The primary focus of Housing First, by contrast, is “permanent-supportive housing,” which essentially makes people lifelong wards of the state. The subsidies that sustain them continue to draw from homelessness budgets, leaving fewer resources available for people who are still on the streets.
In other words, Housing First may achieve greater housing stability for the lucky few who get accepted, but Housing Readiness programs were able to serve a much larger population at significantly lower cost.
The problem is exacerbated by Housing First’s emphasis on the chronically homeless. One pillar of Housing First is the mandate that service providers prioritize the most severe cases, which sounds great in theory but works horribly in practice. Because of the scarcity of permanent-supportive housing, outreach workers administer “vulnerability assessment tests” to see who should qualify for placement. Those who have recently fallen into homelessness and, with temporary support, have the greatest chance of achieving self-sufficiency are typically deemed insufficiently vulnerable. Unworthy of assistance, they are often neglected until their condition deteriorates and their homelessness becomes chronic.
The ironic result is that chronic homelessness has grown at an even faster pace than overall homelessness, having doubled since 2016. As economists David Lucas and Christopher Boudreaux explain, “the raw data make clear that chronic homelessness proved not to be the ‘golden goose’ of the evidence-based policy as had been anticipated, but rather the ‘canary in the coal mine’—indicative of a profound disconnect between the intentions and outcomes of this state-led mission.”
Housing First is designed to keep people in the system, rather than shepherding them out of it. This has created the mechanism by which both homelessness and homelessness spending continuously grow—a handful of beneficiaries monopolize available resources while the bulk of the homeless population is left wanting.
After more than a decade of Housing First as federal policy, it is time to admit that this so-called “evidence-based solution” has been an unambiguous disaster.
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