Homelessness Commission Raises Questions about Improving Tent City

Nashville leaders are divided on whether temporary shelters should go up

in the homeless encampment known as Tent City.

A local developer is poised to begin setting up temporary, insulated shelters as a way of getting the thirty or so people who live there through the winter.

That idea has the support of the sheriff’s department. Mental health coordinator Jeff Blum says Sheriff Daron Hall is willing to go so far as to provide inmate labor for constructing and maintaining the shelters.

”It’s a short-term fix for a long-term problem. And it’s something that could be effective for the period, the waiting period of time we need before we get into the spring. It was give us six, seven, eight months to do the kind of planning we need to do, to do something more substantial.”

But at a meeting of the Homelessness Commission’s Tent City committee yesterday, many had their doubts. Questions were raised about whether codes would apply to the buildings. Who would be allowed to occupy them and who would decide?

Commission member Luvenia Butler says the structures would undermine the commission’s stated goal of eventually shutting down Tent City.

“If you make it pretty and you keep adding stuff, then people never want to leave. And it makes it harder. You have people that constantly want to come.”

The encampment lies directly below the Silliman Evans interstate bridge, so the land belongs to the state department of transportation. A representative of TDOT said the agency doesn’t want Tent City to stay in place long-term but is willing to go along with whatever plan the city devises for phasing it out.