Some believe that Knoxville is attracting the indigent
by Joe Tarr
The flyer advertises something of Shangri-la for the poor: "Need A New Start? Knoxville, TN is the answer!"
The benefits listed include bus access, "TenCare" (sic), "KnoxArea Rescue Ministries offers clean sleeping area," Volunteer Ministries medical services and daytime TV, vagrancy laws not enforced, day labor jobs and a moderate climate.
It's hard to imagine who would bother to advertise the city as such and even harder to believe where Bill Pittman says he found the poster—a Dallas bus station.
Pittman says he'd heard a rumor about the sign and then had a work associate swing by to see if it was real and photograph it. Pittman, who lives in the Fourth and Gill neighborhood, admits that he can't actually prove the poster was hanging there. "I've heard there's one in Miami," he says.
There have been stories about Knoxville's allure for the homeless for decades. Some Knoxvillians believe the city's homeless services are so generous the city is actually attracting homeless from around the country. As the Volunteer Ministry Center prepares to move from downtown to Broadway Avenue, they're wondering whether the city shouldn't adopt a different tactic in caring for the homeless.
"Knoxville is a hub for East Tennessee, and it should be. And I don't have a problem with that. If we can help people in our general area, we should," says Pittman, who lives in Fourth and Gill.
But Pittman believes Knoxville is drawing indigents from all over the country, not just East Tennessee. He points to the study University of Tennessee professor Roger Nooe does every other year to study homeless in Knoxville. The most recent one, done in 2002, identified homeless people coming from 35 states other than Knoxville and three foreign countries.
To some that's alarming."The missions say they need space. My question is, how many of these people are from East Tennessee?" says Patti Smith, who owns P. Smith Signs & Displays off of Broadway and lives on the 100 block of Gay Street. Her shop is around the corner from where the Volunteer Ministry Center is moving, but Smith says she's not trying to stop the move—as she points out it's moving off of her home block to where she's working.
"I've lived [downtown] for 8-1/2 years, and I've worked here for 16 years. I knew there were homeless people when I moved here, so I'm not telling people to leave," she says. "It's my responsibility to take care of people, whether they're drug addicts or alcoholics or mentally ill or whatever. But why don't we take care of the people in East Tennessee? But they're trying to serve more than half the nation."
In July, Smith wrote the pastors of all of Knoxville's mega-churches, asking them to help out the homeless by taking in a few families, giving food, shelter, clothing and education. The letter was a not-so-subtle attempt to shame the church leaders into taking on some of the burden of caring for the homeless. "If the larger churches in our area would take on the responsibility, it would lessen the burden on everybody," Smith wrote. "Also, families would be in a neighborhood and children would be in neighborhood schools and churches. This would be far more beneficial, as Gay Street and Broadway cannot be considered a reasonable place for children."
None of the churches replied to her letter, she says.
The idea that Knoxville is a Mecca to the homeless is absurd to homeless advocates.
"It comes up all the time," says Roger Nooe. "In a way, there's some validity to it, in a way, it's an urban legend. I suspect if you were living out here in some rural county and got sick or had a problem, you probably would come here looking for help. You're not going to find a substance abuse center in some little rural community."
But that is characteristic of all cities, he says. "Even the Bible talked about people going to the lawless cities—they've always had that problem."
You can certainly find homeless people who have migrated to Knoxville for a specific reason, Nooe says. He remembers interviewing a homeless man who traveled from Florida just to be with Monroe Free, a Florida native who is the former executive director of the Knox Area Rescue Ministries. "I wouldn't be surprised if there are people sitting around a camp saying Knoxville is the place to be. But I think those reports are blown way out of proportion," he says.
Nooe says the number of homeless coming from out of state has remained relatively stable since he started doing his study in 1986 at right around 50 percent. Nooe adds that the state-of-origin figures in his study might be misleading—they don't measure how long the person has been in Knoxville. The person might have lived here for years before becoming homeless. The study shows that 70 percent of all respondents consider Knoxville home.
"About 40 percent of those from outside said they came here seeking employment. I think you'd find this in other cities," Nooe says.
Pittman says that Knoxville's homeless services, while having good intentions, operate like big business. He points out KARM's annual budget is $9 million; while Monroe Free's salary was more than $100,000. "It's not exactly the Mother Theresa-esque group you see in the ads around Thanksgiving," he says. "For an industry to continue to exist, it has to grow."
Pittman compares a study similar to Nooe's done in Memphis and says it shows that the Memphis has a much lower per capita homeless rate than Knoxville. You do get a higher percentage—.22 percent for Memphis, .32 percent of Knoxville—but the studies aren't really comparable. Nooe's study measures homelessness for the entire month of February 2002; the Memphis study is an estimate of the number of homeless on any given night. The Memphis study also found that throughout 2001, more than 7,000 people were homeless for some period of time.
In fact, estimating the number of homeless people is difficult to do. National estimates range from 200,000 to more than 3 million, according to Nooe's study. Censuses are difficult to make because the population stays largely hidden (with many staying with family or friends) and because most people don't stay homeless for long.
Between a Knoxville survey of 775 homeless in July 1987 and of 761 the following January found only 92 people were the same, Nooe reports.
In some ways, the services in Knoxville are relatively good. There are plenty of free meals in Knoxville. The Salvation Army, Knox Area Rescue Mission, Love's Kitchen and Volunteer Ministry Center all serve free meals every day, some of them breakfast, lunch and dinner. A few church groups also serve food during the week.
Ginny Weatherstone, executive director of the VMC, talks about "raising the discomfort level" for the homeless who aren't mentally ill.
The VMC has a dual approach of tough love, separating its day shelter into two sections. Folks who are enrolled in VMC programs, committed to dealing with their problems, are allowed into the basement area where there's a TV, library, shower room, and lockers. Those who haven't committed to a program are only allowed upstairs, where they can get out of the heat or cold but only have chairs to sit on. "If you're homeless with no interest in changing, you can come in here, but you won't be as comfortable," Weatherstone says.
But in other ways, Knoxville's services for the homeless are seriously lacking. There's a huge demand for shelters for women with children, especially since the Volunteers of America shelter in Parkridge closed. There's also a huge demand for mental health services, Weatherstone says. If someone has severe mental illness, the state will take them for only three days, before releasing them. If they don't have family they're usually released to a homeless shelter. But it takes weeks to stabilize someone who is mentally ill and find a regiment of drugs that suits them, and homeless shelters are ill-equipped to deal with problems of the mentally ill.
The National Coalition for the Homeless recently found that the country in general is becoming meaner toward homeless people, criminalizing activities they need to survive. The coalition surveyed homeless advocates in 147 cities, but Knoxville wasn't included. (Nashville, however, ranked as the 18th meanest; Las Vegas, San Francisco and New York ranked as the top three meanest.)
Donald Whitehead, a spokesman for the group, says there aren't any cities that are big magnets for homeless.
"When studies have looked at this issue, they've found that the idea that people migrate to different communities because of services is an absurd notion. For the most part, people are homeless in the place they grow up in," Whitehead says. "We don't see this mass migration. That idea stems from homeless people after the Civil War.... The very fact that they're homeless would prohibit them from the ability to travel."
The criminalization of homelessness seems to be on the rise everywhere, he says.
"What happens is that because communities don't see changes happening, they see the numbers growing, the attitude of benevolence goes away," Whitehead says. "Cities don't understand it's not the same population. Once people get into services, there's 10 more [homeless people] to replace them."
September 18, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 38
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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