Nashville Scene Letter

Two weeks ago, the Nashville Scene ran a compelling article Outlawing_the_Poor, about homeless people downtown and the city's attempt to outlaw their poverty. I responded with a letter to the editor, which ran in the paper this week.

For your convenience I've posted it here:

Major Kudos to Jeff Woods for so accurately describing the current state of affairs on Nashville’s downtown streets (“Outlawing the Poor,” Feb. 21). The homeless have always been in downtown, mostly because they have nowhere else to go. For them, it is the end of the trail. Besides the fact that there are no services for the homeless in the ’burbs, the homeless are even less welcome out there. And though there are always non-homeless people in the ’burbs, downtown Nashville is often abandoned after working hours, even with today’s downtown loft dwellers. These residents spend almost no more time on downtown streets than when they lived in the ’burbs and only worked downtown.

The real issue, as always, is money. These non-homeless people living downtown are expecting to make money off the downtown mystique. They bought property downtown, hoping only to resell it in a short time. Others have opened businesses, hoping to make a huge profit on the inflated costs of downtown living. All of which wouldn’t be such a problem except for one thing—greed.

These people, who call themselves pioneers, are actually just profiteers. And they don’t just want to make a living, they want to make a killing. They want to maximize their profits and are willing to do anything to anyone to make it happen. To them, all profit is good profit—regardless of who they hurt in the process.

They wrongly believe that homeless people interfere with their profit-making processes. Sure, they will provide anecdotal evidence, but there is no hard empirical evidence, no scientific study, proving that a panhandler outside a business will hurt that business’s bottom line. An inconvenience? A nuisance? Perhaps. But we cannot outlaw people for being a nuisance—otherwise every human being would be in jail.

Regardless of all the hype, most people feel safe downtown, even with the presence of homeless people. The Nashville Downtown Partnership’s own surveys prove as much.

If interested parties want to see an end to homelessness in Nashville, they could start by reallocating money they spend to hire cops to harass the homeless and put that money into homeless rehabilitation programs that work.

Again, thanks to Jeff Woods for getting the truth out there. Besides knowing the truth of the matter, he writes it very well.