JULY 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.
Nashville People's Budget Coalition 