The Metro Homelessness Commission reports providing 34 people with housing and case management in 2011. (image courtesy The Key Alliance)

Homeless activists in Nashville are calling for the Metro Homelessness Commission to be disbanded or at least overhauled. The panel was set up in 2005 and originally tasked with ending chronic homelessness in Nashville by 2015.

 

Anyone can speak at the end of commission meetings, which now occur just six times a year because of poor attendance by the panel’s own commissioners. It’s not unusual for homeless people to sound off on downtown police or conditions at a shelter. But on Friday, several expressed hopelessness.

“We’re so off course and off plan that it’s almost shameful.”

Steve Reiter is formerly homeless and says the commission should be dissolved. In seven years, the panel has been responsible for housing 92 people, according to its own figures. The goal morphed from ending chronic homelessness to reducing overall homelessness.

Chairman Eric Cole has been part of the commission since its establishment by Mayor Bill Purcell.

“I feel like everybody else, that there’s a lot more progress that needs to be made. But I also think we’ve had some significant accomplishments.”

Finding housing and services for 15 veterans and organizing a new 5K benefit run were on the commission’s list of successes for 2011.

When the original timeline expires in 2015, Cole says it would make sense to review the need for a commission, which has an annual budget of $1.3 million. Even then, Cole says he’d be “shocked and very disappointed” if the panel went away.

Here’s a look back at the original “Strategic Plan to End Homelessness in Nashville.”