Metro Nashville’s Fiscal Year 2027 budget funds the city’s first director of social housing and support staff, and increases funding for the REACH non-police mental health crisis response program — two key components of our 2026 Housing & Safety for All budget platform!
Come on out to our Campaign Win Party on June 25 to learn all about our wins, how we secured them, and how you can get involved to help defend and build upon them!
A Major Win for Housing Justice!
We began advocating for the city to fund permanently affordable, publicly owned, community controlled social housing in 2024. In 2025, we campaigned for the city to fund staff positions to begin establishing social housing. In lieu of staff, the city allocated $100,000 for a “study” to assess how Nashville might pursue the social housing model.
Now, after years of canvassing, assemblies, and extensive education and advocacy in coalition with other organizations including Stand Up Nashville, the city is finally delivering on our demand to use public dollars to hire expert staff to bring permanently affordable, publicly owned, community controlled housing to Nashville!
Our full housing ask was for $10 million: $500,000 for staff, and $9.5 million for a revolving loan fund to pay debt service on bonds used to finance social housing. We have secured $400,000 for social housing staff: $300,000 in new funds for a director and support staff and $100,000 previously allocated for a study, now to be used for consulting services. The plan is for these staff to be hired and placed within a new independent housing subsidiary, derived from the city’s existing housing authority, that will house the city’s work on social housing and other housing innovations.
The FY27 budget also includes $7 million for a revolving loan fund that officials describe as a stepping stone toward issuing bonds to finance affordable housing. This loan fund is not yet what we are asking for — millions for a revolving loan fund to help finance bonds for permanently affordable, publicly-owned, community-controlled housing — but we hope to help evolve it into this over time. Learn more about the loan fund that the city is funding here.
Winning funding for social housing staff is a huge win! But we’re not done yet. The real work — people-powered co-governance in pursuit of community-controlled housing for all Nashvillians — still lies ahead. We believe that decommodified social housing can help initiate a paradigm shift in how Nashville does housing, and we are proud to help put that shift into motion, and thereby to improve people’s lives in the years and decades ahead.
We are eager to assemble renters, advocates, and other working class residents to continue building power to turn our shared vision of high-quality, permanently affordable housing for all Nashvillians into reality.
A Win for Non-Police Community Safety!
In addition to social housing, our platform this year called for $13 million for the Metro Public Health Department’s Community Safety Fund, to be allocated through a participatory process, and $2 million for REACH, Metro Nashville’s non-police mental health crisis response program.
We are proud that we were able to help secure more than $400,000 in additional dollars to bring funding for REACH to nearly $1.8 million, allowing it to add additional daytime and overnight units to provide more non-police mental health services to more Nashville residents.
Unfortunately, the FY27 budget funds the Community Safety Fund at only $1 million, which severely limits the number of community-based safety projects that will receive funding this year. Part of the explanation officials provided for not increasing funding this year is that the mayor’s Community Safety Task Force — which we wrote about here — has not yet drafted its final recommendations.
While the task force has been deeply problematic from the start, we have continued to apply pressure on the process from the outside alongside task force members participating in the process from within. As a result, the task force’s final report will likely include some recommendations that align with our own, and we are already developing plans for building a participatory, co-governance structure for better resourcing non-police community safety in the city. We are confident we will be able to win greater investments in non-police community safety in the year ahead.
We also know that the city will never be able to fully fund community-based safety solutions without seriously reckoning with and shifting away from its obsession with police-based reactions to community problems — an obsession that severely limits our ability to produce the safety we all deserve. We will continue to call upon the people of Nashville to join us in this work of building genuine safety beyond police, courts, and jails.
attend our june 25 Campaign Win Party!
We invite all people who want to learn more about our vision for housing and safety for all — and to join our efforts to make them real — to join us June 25 for a Campaign Win Party! We will break down our victories and how we secured them, outline what comes next, and share ways to get involved in moving our work forward, including by becoming a member!
As a member-based organization with room for people with different capacities for involvement, we need all of us to keep building a Nashville for all of us, by all of us. Join us June 25 to learn more!
Stay tuned!
Stay tuned as we share more about the work that got us to this win, what we heard during our extensive community outreach, and specific ways you can join or support our work in the months ahead!
Learn more about our 2026 Housing & Safety for All Plan budget platform here:
Nashville People's Budget Coalition 