Why did Nashville's Homeless Services Pay An Apartment Complex $90K While It Evicted 30+ Residents—Including Those It Paid to Be There?
And other questions I need your support in answering.
A lot has unfolded since last Tuesday’s article in the Nashville Scene.
Eli Motycka broke a story entitled “City Records Show ‘Non-Traditional’ Housing Program Expanding Under OHS Director”.
The city’s top homelessness official quietly created a new housing strategy over the past year to operate outside agreed-upon protocols between Metro and other service providers. The program preceded what Office of Homeless Services Director April Calvin termed “Non-Traditional Rapid Rehousing” during the fiscal year 2026 budget process. In June, Mayor Freddie O’Connell approved an additional $2.4 million in his budget to expand this work to include 100 families.
According to interviews with the Scene, the effort involved handpicking at least eight families lured by the promise of Section 8 vouchers who were then shuffled between private landlords for months, living on a verbal rent guarantee from the city. In at least two cases, rent money often came late or not at all, prompting landlords to ask tenants directly for rent money they didn’t have and to even initiate eviction proceedings.
This piece, as the Scene noted, was made possible through “additional reporting and research” by me. And I’m not done. Far from it.
I brought the story to The Scene because I was under the impression that these were some extreme cases that would highlight what could go wrong if process wasn’t followed — some one-off cases where leaders, hopefully just trying to do the right thing in a bad situation, made some promises they couldn’t keep.
I was wrong. It doesn’t seem like these were exceptions that prove the rule. What I’ve realized is that this is, in Freddie O’Connell’s Nashville, what can be expected. This is the new normal.
This is what you can expect if you are poor in today’s Nashville: no coherent process, no coordinated entry, just, if you’re in the right place at the right time, a quick trip in a mini van to a location you don’t choose. You’ll be told to sign a lease you can’t afford, and if you make it out the other side without an eviction on your record (which would essentially bar you from any future permanent housing) you should consider yourself lucky.
The fact is, I no longer can just do this with just a few people chipping in. I am going to have ways where people who need it can get free access to my content, but I am going to put up a modest, project-based paywall in front of this to make this at-all sustainable for me.
To that end, I’ve set up a Patreon for this particular investigation. For a one-time, non-recurring fee of $5, you’ll have access to all of the reporting I do for this story moving forward.
What you need to understand is, what he needs to understand is, no one ever expected Freddie O’Connell to solve the problem of homelessness. But O’Connell, more than anyone in his position ever before, has had many, many opportunities to make progress on homelessness. But he did not choose to enhance what was inefficient, to build relationships where they had frayed, to instill the collectivist values that Nobel Prize winning economists prescribe for complex systems precisely like this.
Instead, Freddie chose to break it. And to build his own thing. A brittle hierarchy accountable only to himself that was intolerant of feedback and immune to learning from its mistakes. He built his own thing, and the thing he built, well frankly, it sucks.
This is a story about the hubris and insecurity of the powerful. It is as old as civilization itself, and so long as its main characters refuse to know themselves and acknowledge their subjective limits, its consequences are as foreseeable as they are tragic. And like all the versions of this eternally returning tragedy, the cost falls on those who can least afford it.
How do I know this? Partly because I have a poetic intuition about these things. But more to the point, I have the receipts.
I know this because of financial data I wrestled out of the hands of OHS and Metro Legal. I know this because of interviews with the (only barely) formerly unhoused, and those who do their best to help them. I know this because of text messages I have seen sent by OHS Director Calvin. I know this because of phone records from the Mayor’s Office — and what I’ve learned is that this is not something they are unaware is happening.
They know what’s going on, and they’re not stopping it. In fact, they’re investing in it. They are attempting to change policies, against decades of norms, against the wishes of experts and those most affected, aiming to entrench their rogue, opaque system that reports only to the Mayor. They’ve seen the results, as disasterous as they are for those they're meant to help, and said, “yeah, let’s do more of that.”
Why??
We can’t get ahead of ourselves. There is a lot we don’t yet understand.
For example: Why did OHS pay nearly $100k to an affordable housing provider over one year (appearing to place dozens of people in housing using their legitimate “landlord engagement funds”) — but did nothing to stop this developer from filing court documents of eviction of 33 people (accounting for 25% of their total units) over that same period?
Much of this is very fresh information. I am not certain yet how many of these evicted people had some funding and relationship with OHS. I know for certain several of them did come with “support” from Metro, and yet were brought to court with evictions now on their records — forever marring their ability to get permanently housed.
What happened? Were these people placed there without any legitimate path towards paying their rent? Were they made promises about getting vouchers that never materialized? Did they just forget about them?
What’s stranger is, why does it appear that OHS was paying rent for some period, but then stopped? Why does it seem like none of this was written down in any form of contract with the tenants? Why did OHS not just set up master lease agreements for the number of units it could afford? But actually, how was this paid for at all if there was no allocation set aside for rent payments from OHS?
Why did OHS make a single payment to this developer totaling $14,046.47 on June 5, 2025? Why did Metro Finance allow such a large payment without any contract on file?
Why, when I asked Dir. Calvin via email to explain similar circumstances, did she tell me, with mayor and Council leadership copied:
Utilizing a dynamic process to offer urgent relief through rental assistance (bridge funding or local rapid response) from local government should not be posted publicly.
What does that mean? I’ve actually asked experts in the field to parse the first part, and they have no idea what she’s talking about. These are just words that are vaguely related to this work, it doesn’t explain what’s actually happening.
But the second part of her statement—that this information “should not be posted publicly”—raises a more fundamental question: Who is not supposed to post about how taxpayer money is used? Is she claiming she has no accountability to the public for how she, and by extension her direct supervisor the mayor, spends our money? Is she telling me I’m not supposed to tell anyone what she’s doing with public funds? Does she know me?
But to get to the heart of it: what is the point of placing people from abject poverty into apartments they cannot afford without providing them a realistic path toward paying those rents? Call it urgent relief or bridge funding or local rapid response—the way they’re actually doing it is just setting people up for failure. And people have been flagging this with them for months and months, and the sole person who has oversight on this does not seem to care.
It is extremely hard for me to square things like that with claims about all this being trauma-informed or following best practices. It looks a lot more like problem solving for everyone but the unhoused. It looks a lot like using money, unaccountably, to move people from where they’re undesired into facilities where ownership might have incentives to demonstrate short-term occupancy to their financiers, but not necessarily the desire to house these people long term.
It makes me ask: why does it seem like the housing developers, already flush with investments from the city, are getting the best side of the deal in situations like this?
If this is not what it looks like to do whatever you want because of what is politically convenient, then what, pray tell, would that look like?
And if people like Mayor O’Connell think it is right to have absolute autonomy on moving around the least powerful in our city, and are seemingly indifferent to what actually happens to them once they are out of the way, why should we have faith that they would not agree (under duress from forces greater than them) to put them on, say, trains to places like Utah’s new involuntary camp for the unhoused?
I first asked that question as hyperbole. But now I mean it deadly seriously. What, if not the checks and balances of a complex system precisely like what the Continuum of Care is designed to be, keeps a few, “well-intentioned” men from realizing they have “no choice” but to do something unfathomably cruel for what they perceive is the greater good?
What, in the history of the world, has ever been the cause of great suffering except for this very thing? “Good men” doing bad things because they thought they had no choice, blissfully ignorant to all the choices they made that got themselves into that very position where they had “no other choice.”
I have more questions than answers right now. But there’s more we need to understand here, and I very much get the sense that the administration is very uninterested in us getting those answers. I don’t think they want us to look into situations like what happened at 97 Wallace, and at Extended Stay America, and at Hillside Crossing, and at The Avenue.
I don’t know about you, but when I am told that the actions of my “local government should not be posted publicly,” my reaction is not to look away. Quite, quite the opposite.
What I’m finding is that more information leads to more information. So I’m putting it out there — do you know anything about these things? I need your help in understanding what’s going on. I also need, after so many unpaid working hours spent doing this, some help paying my rent myself (and I don’t think OHS is coming to my rescue).
What’s next and how you can help
Last week, Eli and The Scene did a fantastic job giving the highlights of what we knew so far, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. I’m convinced that this is a big enough deal, and that this will (and has already) taken up so much of my time, that I need to fundraise in some kind of way to continue this work.
The fact is, I no longer can just do this with just a few people chipping in. I am always going to have ways where people who need it can get free-access to my content, but I am going to put up a modest, project-based paywall in front of this to make this at-all sustainable for me.
To that end, I’ve set up a Patreon for this particular investigation. For a one-time, non-recurring fee of $5, you’ll have access to all of the reporting I do for this story moving forward.
If you want, you can also sign up for recurring donations if you really want to support this type of independent journalism. And if you already subscribe here on Substack, you’ll get all those investigation updates for free.
I know very well that even $5 is too much to ask for some, especially those most affected by what I’ve been reporting on. With that in mind, I’ve set up a “MunciPal Access Pass” for anyone that needs it. There are 200 free slots available now, but I can make more as needed.
Choose whichever option works best for you at patreon.intelechia.com.
Together, I hope we can build what we’re entitled to: a city that serves us. Rather than the one I’m starting to see we have now: a cruel, indifferent system, run by people unshakable in the certainty that they know whats best for us, ignorant to our life’s specifics and dead set on carving us made-to-order, dropped off in city-owned minivans like human DoorDash, served up to the lowest bidder.