1. Celebrating Our Wins with Our Eyes on the Prize! What we Won & What Comes Next
Originally posted June 19, 2025
After six months of organizing, educating, and engaging community members and city leaders, we are proud that the city budget that passed Tuesday, June 17, includes $100,000 to lay the foundation for a permanently affordable, decommodified social housing fund like the one proposed in our Housing and Safety for All Plan! These funds will be used to hire consultants that have helped establish permanently affordable, publicly owned housing programs in Chattanooga, Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, and Montgomery County, Maryland.
Imminent cuts to federal funding for housing and social services are about to make Nashville’s housing and cost-of-living crisis even worse. Bringing our social housing proposal to life will offer a viable path for producing high quality, permanently affordable, community governed, mixed income housing capable of withstanding the funding instability and market volatility on the horizon.
While the budget doesn’t fund our full $540,000 proposal, $100,000 in funds to lay the foundation is a crucial first step toward building Metro’s capacity to construct thousands of units of permanently affordable housing in the years ahead — and shifting the way Nashville does housing in the process. We celebrate this win and will organize, educate, and collaborate to ensure that social housing comes to full fruition in Nashville!
A potential step toward a non-police community safety plan
We also campaigned this year for funding to create an official citywide, community-led, non-police safety plan rooted in prevention and trauma-informed response. Multiple council members and caucuses supported this proposal, which asked for three new hires to be housed in the Metro Human Relations Commission. The budget that passed Tuesday does not include new funds for this proposal, but it does include continued funding for the Metro Public Health Department, which we recently learned is preparing to launch a community-led safety plan process.
While this is not the path we first envisioned, it is still possible — though not yet guaranteed — that this process will result in an outcome similar to what we originally intended when we proposed funding three positions at the Metro Human Relations Commission: a non-police community safety plan rooted in public goods, prevention, and trauma-informed response.
We are willing to support and participate in this process if Metro Public Health guarantees that the process will not involve police, courts, jails, or surveillance at either the planning or implementation stage; that the process will invite impacted community members to play an active role; and that NPBC and other community-based organizations whose work relates to non-police community safety will be invited to play an active role in the plan’s development.
The struggle against endless money for cops continues
While we are celebrating our housing win and are cautiously optimistic about the community safety plan process, we still find it completely unacceptable that our city continues to normalize massive increases in police spending while struggling to “find” funds to make investments that would radically improve a majority of people’s lives. Our “strong mayor” system, with its absence of mechanisms for residents to enjoy meaningful democratic participation in the process of developing the city budget, combined with a devastatingly narrow and detrimental understanding of what makes communities safe, is making it difficult to create a Nashville in which we all thrive, are all genuinely safe, and can “stay.” Adding $24.5 million in new funds to an already outsized police budget that does not deliver the kind of safety we all deserve means taking $24.5 million from the public goods that would, in fact, deliver the kind of safety we all deserve and make for a Nashville in which we all thrive.
Another Nashville is possible and we’ll keep building power to win it!
We celebrate our actual and potential wins all while we keep our eyes on the prize: a Nashville built around housing for all, non-police safety for all, and real democratic decision-making power for all. We will continue to organize, collaborate, and build power to defend and expand upon our wins in the weeks and months and year ahead.
Stay tuned for ways to join the fight to continue building foundations for housing and safety for all!
We started this campaign by asking hundreds of residents across Nashville, “How do you want the city to spend our money?” To the hundreds of residents who answered their doors when we knocked and picked up the phone when we called, who attended our Community Assembly, who opened their church doors to us, and who shared their insights, experiences, and hopes with us — thank you for shaping our platform and helping us lay the groundwork for a Nashville with more housing and safety for all of us.
The wins we celebrate today and that we will organize to build upon tomorrow were made possible through the extensive labor of our members and community supporters alongside indispensable support from Kay Bowers, Andy Zhu, Mike Lacy, Davie Tucker, Mark Eatherly, Open Table Nashville, Southeast Center for Cooperative Development, Budget & Finance Chair Delishia Porterfield, Co-Chair Kyontze Toombs, Council Members Zulfat Suara, Erin Evans, and Burkley Allen, along with other council members who championed our efforts. Thank you.
2. Housing & Safety for All Plan: Summary
3. Housing & Safety for All Plan: Details
Built from the direct input of more than 500 Nashville residents living in all Metro Council districts, we present the Housing & Safety for All Investment Plan, a modest $1 million investment to fund two critically important projects:
1. The Nashville Community Housing Fund
A financially self-renewing housing fund that will enable the city to begin building a significant amount of high-quality, permanently affordable, publicly-owned, community-governed housing for low- and middle-income residents. Annual Cost: $540,684*
*This is the cost to operate the Fund. The sale of between $50-100 million in bonds will finance the Fund, with Metro making annual debt service payments, once established, at a rate of approximately $4-8 million annually.
2. Nashville Community Safety Plan
Funding for three positions to assess existing services and engage communities to develop a comprehensive plan for community safety centered around the provision of public goods, prevention, and trauma-informed, situationally appropriate response to social problems that arise in our communities. One-Time Cost: $503,305
TOTAL COST: $1,043,989
This investment would constitute approximately 0.02% of the entire Metro Operating Budget but would yield benefits far greater than the sum of the initial investment.
More detailed information about this plan coming soon!
Public Goods for All
In addition to permanently affordable housing and community safety, residents told us that fully funding a range of PUBLIC GOODS would improve their lives substantially. As a supplement to our Housing & Safety for All Plan, we call for a budget that increases funding for:
1. Transit
2. Public healthcare
3. Public education
4. Dignified homeless services
5. Affordable child and/or adult care
6. Greenways, bike lanes, non-vehicle infrastructure
7. Parks & community centers
8. Accessible sidewalks
9. Libraries
10. Food resources
11. Well-paved roads
12. Rent relief
13. Restorative justice
14. Equitably funded arts
15. Property tax relief
16. The Office of Youth Safety
17. Street lights
18. Accessible accommodations for Metro facilities
19. Improved & expanded recycling & solid waste management and compost services
20. Participatory budgeting
21. Free third spaces for people to enjoy community
22. Community & resident-led housing stability services
23. Funding for neighborhoods
Listed in order based on frequency of mention.
4. community outreach: How we built our platform
the city budget is the people’s money — but the people don’t get a say in how it’s spent!
That’s why we spent January-April 2025 going directly to the people of Nashville to ask them: “How should the city spend our money?” And: “What public goods, if fully funded and accessible, would most improve your overall well-being and the well-being of your community?”
From January to April, we received 400 survey responses, held 100 front-porch conversations, welcomed 40 participants at our Community Assembly, distributed 1,500 flyers in neighborhoods and churches, and made hundreds of calls and texts. All told, we directly engaged more than 500 residents living in every council district, with a special focus on people living in multiracial and working class neighborhoods most impacted by housing instability and a lack of community safety.
WHAT PEOPLE WANT: SOCIAL HOUSING
The number one issue for the vast majority of the residents we engaged is the dire need for more genuinely and permanently affordable housing. People are beyond tired of the city prioritizing tourists, developers, and corporations before residents struggling to stay in their homes. Nashvillians are ready for solutions!
Nine out of 10 people we engaged said they want Metro Nashville government to dedicate significant funding in its annual budget to create high-quality permanently affordable housing (also called “social housing”).
WHAT PEOPLE WANT: NON-POLICE COMMUNITY SAFETY
Another top concern we heard from a majority of the residents we engaged was the need for programs and practices that increase community safety without relying on police.
A majority of the residents we engaged want to see investment in prevention and community-based alternatives to traditional “public safety” institutions.
Nashville People's Budget Coalition 