Housing First: Reimagining Compassion in a City of Cranes

October 14, 2025

Nashville wakes up every morning to new cranes on the skyline—and new tents under the bridges. Our city is booming: music, tech, healthcare, tourism. But for every luxury high-rise that climbs upward, another community is pushed outward. Rents rise, land values soar, and a person sleeping rough on Jefferson Street or under I-40 becomes easy to overlook.

Earlier this year, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published an article titled “We Can End Homelessness in America.” Its central claim is disarmingly simple: “Help people stay housed, and provide housing for those who need it.” That’s the core of the Housing First approach—a model that treats housing not as a reward for recovery, but as the starting point for it.

Research supports that logic. Cities that adopt Housing First strategies have seen higher rates of housing stability and recovery, with many participants remaining housed for years. The model also reduces hospital visits, incarceration, and emergency service costs—making it not just compassionate, but cost-effective. It works because it treats housing as foundational, not conditional.

That sounds like good public health. It also sounds a lot like good theology.

Fences and Foundations

They’ve started putting fences under bridges in Nashville. Maybe it’s for safety. Maybe it’s for show. But we can’t keep pretending that public fencing is the same thing as public safety.

Those fences don’t just block tents; they hide our collective conscience. They make poverty less visible so we can feel more comfortable calling ourselves a “great city.” But when we build barriers to hide brokenness, we build the very walls the Gospel came to tear down.

A recent federal count found 771,000 Americans experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2024—the highest number since tracking began. That includes 32,882 veterans, men and women who once wore a uniform but now carry only a backpack, and more than 150,000 children, many of them attending school each day from cars, motels, or borrowed couches.

Many can’t find a shelter that will take them, especially if they have a pet, a partner, or both. Some studies suggest that up to one in five people experiencing homelessness refuses shelter because it would mean surrendering their companion animal or being separated from family.

We can do better than that.

Lessons from a Deployment

When I was deployed to Zagreb in 1996, we lived in modified shipping container-style barracks—each with one or two beds, a couple wall lockers, a desk, a door, a window, and a wall-mounted HVAC unit. Next to them stood another container that served as a latrine—sinks, toilets, and showers all in one clean, functional space.

It wasn’t luxury, but it was livable. It gave us dignity, order, and rest.

Sometimes I wonder—if we can build small, efficient, climate-controlled villages for soldiers halfway across the world, why can’t we build them for neighbors in our own city?

How many veterans are sleeping on the street tonight because the shelter’s full? How many are turned away because they have a dog that’s their only comfort? How many families are split—mom and kids in one shelter, dad in another—because the system values policy over people?

A village of conex-style units could change that. Families could stay together. Pet owners could have their own section. No one would have to choose between companionship and a roof.

We already have the materials, the knowledge, and the need. What we lack is the imagination—and the will—to see it as sacred work.

The Backyard Gospel — and What Metro’s Fences Are Hiding

Of course, every city says it wants to “end homelessness.” Until someone suggests building housing next to their neighborhood.

In Nashville, the political line between fear and faith has blurred. The Metro Homeless Impact Division has closed encampments like Jefferson Street Bridge, Brookmeade, and Wentworth-Caldwell—while admitting, at times, the numbers relocated may be inflated or unclear. Nonprofit partners have voiced frustration about being excluded from planning, left out of decisions, or accused of disloyalty for speaking up.

The Tennessee Lookout reported that more than $50 million in federal housing funds has become entangled in political turf battles—where accusations of favoritism and lack of transparency overshadow the mission itself. Leadership turnover and campaign pressures have turned “ending homelessness” into a talking point rather than a consistent policy.

It’s the same logic as fencing under bridges—only more polished. We say we want solutions, but we want them far enough away that we don’t have to see them. We want compassion that doesn’t cost us comfort.

That’s not the vision Isaiah saw when he preached unbarred gates and streets rebuilt. It’s not the wisdom of Proverbs, which says the righteous know the needs of the poor. It’s not the kind of city in Acts, where believers shared what they had so “there was not a needy person among them.”

Housing First will never take root in a city where compassion stops at the property line. No village will flourish if it’s fenced off by politics, suspicion, or fear.

Building Belonging

The Hopkins article argues that ending homelessness is possible with “strong, well-coordinated systems” and the will to invest in what works. That will can’t just come from government budgets—it has to come from the moral imagination of communities, congregations, and citizens.

Churches could partner with nonprofits to pilot micro-villages on unused land. Developers could dedicate a fraction of every luxury project to affordable housing. Neighborhoods could swap their fences for community gardens, showing that safety grows out of relationships, not exclusion.

Every tent, every fence, every person sleeping in a car is a mirror held up to our priorities. If our neighborhoods have forgotten how to make room for the hurting, maybe it’s time we remember what it means to be neighbors again.

Gospel Close

Because here’s the gospel imperative: Jesus began His ministry among people who had nowhere else to go. He set the poor in families, healed the broken in body and spirit, and called strangers “neighbor.”

If He walked through Nashville today, He wouldn’t be at the ribbon-cutting of another tower downtown. He’d be under the bridge, behind the fence, asking why we built it.

The Kingdom of God has no gated communities. And if we mean what we preach—if we believe good news is for the outsider—then Housing First isn’t just policy. It’s discipleship.