With public tenting a felony, Tennessee homeless search refuge

COOKEVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Miranda Atnip misplaced her house through the coronavirus pandemic after her boyfriend moved out and she fell behind on payments. Residing in a car, the 34-year-old worries every single day about getting cash for meals, discovering somewhere to bathe, and saving up sufficient cash for an apartment the place her three youngsters can stay along with her again.

Now she has a brand new fear: Tennessee is about to develop into the first U.S. state to make it a felony to camp on local public property similar to parks.

“Truthfully, it’s going to be arduous,” Atnip said of the regulation, which takes impact July 1. “I don’t know where else to go.”

Tennessee already made it a felony in 2020 to camp on most state-owned property. In pushing the growth, Sen. Paul Bailey noted that no one has been convicted beneath that regulation and mentioned he doesn’t expect this one to be enforced much, either. Neither does Luke Eldridge, a man who has labored with homeless people within the city of Cookeville and helps Bailey’s plan — in part as a result of he hopes it should spur people who care about the homeless to work with him on long-term options.

The legislation requires that violators receive not less than 24 hours notice earlier than an arrest. The felony charge is punishable by up to six years in jail and the lack of voting rights.

“It’s going to be as much as prosecutors ... in the event that they want to challenge a felony,” Bailey mentioned. “However it’s solely going to come to that if people really don’t need to move.”

After a number of years of regular decline, homelessness in america started growing in 2017. A survey in January 2020 found for the primary time that the variety of unsheltered homeless folks exceeded these in shelters. The problem was exacerbated by COVID-19, with shelters limiting capacity.

Public strain to do one thing in regards to the increasing variety of extremely seen homeless encampments has pushed even many traditionally liberal cities to clear them. Though tenting has usually been regulated by local vagrancy legal guidelines, Texas passed a statewide ban final 12 months. Municipalities that fail to enforce the ban threat dropping state funding. Several other states have introduced related payments, but Tennessee is the only one to make tenting a felony.

Bailey’s district includes Cookeville, a city of about 35,000 individuals between Nashville and Knoxville, where the local newspaper has chronicled rising concern with the growing number of homeless folks. The Herald-Citizen reported final yr that complaints about panhandlers practically doubled between 2019 and 2020, from 157 to 300. In 2021, town installed indicators encouraging residents to offer to charities as a substitute of panhandlers. And the City Council twice considered panhandling bans.

The Republican lawmaker acknowledges that complaints from Cookeville got his consideration. Metropolis council members have instructed him that Nashville ships its homeless here, Bailey stated. It’s a rumor many in Cookeville have heard and Bailey seems to imagine. When Nashville fenced off a downtown park for renovation not too long ago, the homeless individuals who frequented it disappeared. “Where did they go?” Bailey requested.

Atnip laughed at the thought of individuals shipped in from Nashville. She was living in close by Monterey when she misplaced her house and needed to ship her children to stay along with her parents. She has acquired some government assist, but not enough to get her back on her ft, she mentioned. At one level she received a housing voucher but couldn’t find a landlord who would settle for it. She and her new husband saved enough to finance a used automotive and had been working as delivery drivers till it broke down. Now she’s afraid they'll lose the automotive and have to move to a tent, though she isn’t positive where they will pitch it.

“It looks like once one factor goes wrong, it sort of snowballs,” Atnip stated. “We were earning profits with DoorDash. Our bills were paid. We had been saving. Then the car goes kaput and everything goes bad.”

Eldridge, who has worked with Cookeville’s homeless for a decade, is an surprising advocate of the camping ban. He stated he wants to proceed helping the homeless, but some folks aren’t motivated to enhance their state of affairs. Some are addicted to medicine, he said, and a few are hiding from legislation enforcement. Eldridge estimates there are about 60 folks living outside more or less permanently in Cookeville, and he knows them all.

“Most of them have been here a couple of years, and never as soon as have they requested for housing assist,” he stated.

Eldridge knows his place is unpopular with other advocates.

“The large drawback with this regulation is that it does nothing to solve homelessness. In actual fact, it should make the issue worse,” stated Bobby Watts, CEO of the Nationwide Healthcare for the Homeless Council. “Having a felony in your file makes it arduous to qualify for some varieties of housing, harder to get a job, more durable to qualify for advantages.”

Not everybody desires to be in a crowded shelter with a curfew, but people will transfer off the streets given the right alternatives, Watts stated. Homelessness among U.S. military veterans, for instance, has been cut almost in half over the previous decade by way of a mix of housing subsidies and social services.

“It’s not magic,” he mentioned. “What works for that inhabitants, works for every population.”

Tina Lomax, who runs Seeds of Hope of Tennessee in close by Sparta, was as soon as homeless with her children. Many people are just one paycheck or one tragedy away from being on the streets, she mentioned. Even in her community of 5,000, affordable housing could be very arduous to return by.

“You probably have a felony in your record — holy smokes!” she said.

Eldridge, like Sen. Bailey, said he doesn’t expect many people to be prosecuted for sleeping on public property. “I can promise, they’re not going to be out here rounding up homeless people,” he mentioned of Cookeville law enforcement. But he doesn’t know what would possibly occur in other components of the state.

He hopes the new law will spur some of its opponents to work with him on long-term options for Cookeville’s homeless. If all of them worked collectively it would mean “a number of resources and possible funding sources to help these in need,” he said.

But other advocates don’t assume threatening people with a felony is a good way to help them.

“Criminalizing homelessness simply makes individuals criminals,” Watts said.