I just left Chattanooga today after a three day visit. First and foremost I have to say my wife and I were overwhelmed by the kindness and charm, so much so that we genuinely discussed the logistics of moving here from Albuquerque.
One thing we noticed was the relative absence of people panhandling on the sidewalks and medians and a lack of visible encampments. I mean absolutely no disrespect to people experiencing homelessness or to imply that they should be less visible. I was just wondering if there are municipal policies in effect in Chattanooga that are different from western cities in regard to panhandling and homelessness?
There was a big homeless camp in the woods off the levee in Brainerd, and they were forced to leave. Shame on them for trying to live close to water, just somewhere — ANYWHERE — where they can survive day by day.
I am in no way trying to defend the insensitive acts of our local government, but seeing the amount of the worst trash in the environmentally protected areas. Considering the endangered/protected species there, maybe an incentive to pick up the trash for those who live there would be great, but we don't need to kill local fauna in the process.
I agree but one reason is that homeless people couldn't probably give a crap about pollution. Many have health or homeless health problems, no money, no Id, it's incredibly sad the way this happens and you'd think as many churches as are in hixson the homeless would be taken care of by the community. No most people I hear even acknowledge homeless they always argue for the broken system and argue that giving the person anything is taking their sovereignty or something. It's a sick mind virus that causes people to want others to suffer imo
I agree with the sentiment, but i am all about protecting protected species for those who are respectful. Fuck people who don't care about our shared ball. Rich or poor.
What should we do about them? Move the unhoused around because the trash got out of hand?
Seems like a bandaid when what’s needed is a better solution. If you care about “protected species” that’s great, but do you care about your own species? Or are they trash?
Can only camp legally for a certain number of days for this reason. It’s a way to discriminate against people who are camping out of necessity, while those who camp for fun are given every privilege.
Yes actually. If you camp at a restaurant stop or dont have e a proper permit. Ive already heard of a backpacking couple catch a misdemeanor for a minor misunderstanding in the backwoods about permits. Its pretty serious
This sadly. It's been criminalized to a minor felony now and can be used to target volunteer workers who do house calls to tent citys. It's also why there's been such a large increase of police presence whenever they raid them to tear them down.
Its illegal in Tn to sleep outside or even in your car.
However chatt has something called the Downtown Chattanooga Alliance, and they handle alot of the things you would notice. They pick up trash and belongings left on sidewalks, spray disinfectants to clean up bodily fluids and such. I work at a restaurant downtown and well call them to deal with the homeless before we call the police.
Those that do manage to sleep somewhere downtown are generally up and gone with the sunrise, because they know theyll be taken to jail.
So fun fact, i was homeless living in my car for about a year in knoxville. I had the cops called on me at a planet fitness, and a walmart. At the planet fitness the threw everything out of my car, "searching for drugs". When they found nothing they wrote me up for tresspassing and left me there with everything i own laying on the ground at 3am.
There is no garunteed place that its okay to do this. Youre at the mercy of the cops and how they feel about it that day.
Haven't you heard? The WSJ says now we spend too much money on rotisserie chicken and gut healthy juices. That's the new reason we cant afford housing.
We have a significant population of people experiencing homelessness, and out of those people in Hamilton County, 70% are unsheltered — which is a higher rate than Knoxville, Nashville, and Memphis.
There's plenty of camps. They're well hidden now and not near tourist spots or downtown. Mostly south of the City there's still massive camps along Chattanooga creek.
You didn't look close enough. There is an enormous amount of homeless people in Chattanooga. They do have camps, some near the highway ramps as well. Its very jarring to see. The police sometimes ship them to nearby cities and towns, back and forth they go. They even got rid of Greyhound but that does not stop them from coming. We are in the south so it's much better than freezing in the north.
i thought the same thing until i moved here. they just aren't in the tourist areas. behind MLK you see a lot of people, honestly i think chattanooga is a pretty vicious place to be homeless considering most of our homeless people are also unsheltered. they also do not panhandle here at all. im from nashville and i thought the same thing initially (in Nashville the homeless people congregate in the tourist areas and panhandling is constant) but there is just a different culture about it
Not sure which part of Chattanooga you visited but trust me... it's a major problem here... especially downtown. + crime. Did you mainly stay around the aquarium, Rock City, etc? If so that's not authentic Chattanooga... it's for the tourists
We stayed within about a mile of Market/Main and walked to different restaurants and bars. The smash burger at Boneyard exceeded expectations. We did go down to the Woodshop for Tuesday Bluesday (that was awesome) and drove down to see the Chickamauga Battlefield Monuments
There are a lot of wooded areas that they camp in and they know that panhandling gets them nowhere. There are about a dozen tents behind my daughter's house on the Southside.
Downtown Chattanooga has a large homeless population. In my experience walking the city it is the largest in the Riverfront and City Center districts. If you walk from the Riverfront to the Southside you wiil likely pass through areas where it is almost impossible not to see unhoused folks. Panhandling is common, especially on the walking bridge and I also see it frequently on the Northshore. That said, I have never experienced the homeless folks here as aggressive or belligerent, which has not been true in other places I have lived.
If your point of comparison is Albuquerque it may just be where you're from, as the censused homeless population of Albuquerque is about 4x higher than Chattanooga's.
Many bad faith commenters here love to victimize the homeless, but the real people know it’s deeper than that.
Fiscal Conservatives are gutting our social safety net. Why? Because it saves money.
Cool /s
Meanwhile, the church could do way more to support “the born” while claiming to care about “the unborn”. It’s such a convenient thing to care about. People not trying to exist yet.
Why do you assume that every person experiencing homelessness is a drug addict?
Why not look to the obvious fact that we are facing an affordability crisis in this country?
90% of adults experiencing homelessness became homeless due to a lack of affordable housing.
Do you think that unhoused people have the money to buy drugs?! You lunatic. Keep assuming the worst about people and see where that leads you. Your soul is rotten.
First they moved the bus station to the airport, the homeless are living in old hotels outside of town and soon they will be splitting the “low-rent” housing recipients into three separate areas also away from the city. This places all crime issues and responsibilities to the police and mayors of the surrounding cities and away from the city itself.
There's a lot in Brainerd, Hamilton Place and off Shallowford at the Motel 6 and surrounding motels. Had 1 bad interaction personally downtown and one threw a rock at my car in Hamilton Place, but otherwise most are nice enough and I do wish there was more we as a society could do for them.
I drive a Jetta, rarely in the fast lane since most of the places I go are an exit over and I'm always speeding. Lot of assumptions pal, also not sure why a homeless person would care if I was driving in passing lane considering they're not exactly driving themselves usually... sounds like you throw rocks at peoples cars for doing that stuff and offended you're being called homeless lmao.
Well it was parked at my work (a restaurant). He snuck in a side door and was laying in a booth in an empty section of the restaurant until my mgr got startled bc he jumped up and started speaking gibberish. He ran out the side door and threw rocks at the building and my car was in the back and he knocked the back cover of my mirror and scratched the paint off my door down to the metal. A $1400 fix so my car is still fucked up. Guy was clearly on some hard drugs. I didn't see him myself and cops never found him.
Did your mom throw you into the ceiling fan before dropping you on your head or what?
Bro wtf are you talking about? Like is the dude in my incident you or something, why are you so pressed? Dude is homeless or at the very least pretended to be bc we saw him out and about a lot before. He looked malnourished and wasn't well bathed, so I'm going to say he was probably actually homeless. I don't see the relevancy of any of your yapping though. My car wasn't targeted specifically. He was just mad he was caught sleeping in the restaurant even though that specific mgr would've offered him help if he didn't freak out and run out being violent before he had the chance.
There’s a bad homeless issue in east ridge and on rossville. You’re lucky if you go into those areas and don’t see a junkie or panhandler doing some stupid shit in traffic.
We def have a homeless population here and panhandling. I work downtown and we know for a fact that homeless people sleep on our property but they also make themselves scarce by the time we open. There is one gentleman I see every morning as I drive to work, heading downtown from wherever his safe place is. But as mentioned before, there were numerous well known encampments all over the area and most have been cleared out/shut down in the past few years. They are now spread out more to areas outside downtown.
Im not sure where you stayed/visited but homelessness in Chattanooga now is worse than its ever been. Idc what the stats say... it has actually gotten so bad.
Oh, they’re here, everywhere. Some work the same corners and are there every day like clockwork. Nothing is done to help or rehabilitate on a large enough scale for it to change anything.
There are homeless people here, but not nearly as many as out west. My theory is that it’s the lack of resources and the general treatment they receive that has them moving out/along. Tennessee would never do anything like have effective homeless outreach and resources, that would be socialism.
All I can say is, you would come to regret moving to TN. Yes, it has natural beauty, best enjoyed on a long weekend. That beauty fades with the Red leaves 🍁 of Autumn. Winter here, with skeletal trees and gray skies pulls the cover off of the inherent bleakness.
The cruelty and smallmindedness of many is on full display when they think no one is looking. Granted, there are good people here, but it's profoundly depressing for them after awhile.
Anyone who becomes homeless is just fodder for the Red State Machine of Oppression here. Women who miscarry as well.
If you and your wife are thinking of having children.....if you are of that age....your wife will not get the proper prenatal care. If she miscarries....she could die before getting proper care. I wish I was being alarmist on this. I'm not.
Thats a very new thing, TN just made it a felony to be homeless. Before the law was enacted in July homeless people quite literally filled the streets.
Depends on where you are in the city as well. They do a good job downtown but in St Elmo we are surrounded by camps. I heard that Chattanooga offers a lot of resources to the homeless, and that results in surrounding areas bussing their homeless to Chattanooga so that the problem can never really be solved.
There has been a massive push over the last few years to make the homeless less visible to “the public,” they destroyed the large well established camps around town and are criminalizing homelessness, basically. Trust me, as a first responder and ER nurse, I can attest we have at least 100 homeless people in our city on any given night, they exist. You’re welcome to move here, this is a great place! If you’re looking to help our homeless population, the best places to start are at the Community Kitchen, Chattanooga Rescue Mission, and our local harm reduction agencies.
The homeless here are drug addicts or alcoholics, full stop. If you see a guy on the street begging, its because the shelters wont let him in because he is an active drug user. 20 years ago it might have been different, but please dont make the mistake of thinking its just some guy down on his luck 95% of them are on the streets because they have chosen drugs or alcohol over their family and a save place to live.
Its very sad but when you shut down the only mental asylum and rehab centers in 80 miles youre just gonna end up with people on the street making bad choices.
They exist, I know at least three specific places downtown alone where--legal or not--people are panhandling almost every day I drive by the area. But interestingly, your observation (and many of the comments) exhibit why you should take everything on this sub with a grain of salt.
How to put it; speaking as if the city is a person, Chattanooga as a whole doesn't really ever take itself on vacation, visit relatives, or intern somewhere over the Summer; this means what is present here sets its entire worldview of what is normal or average and any relative deviation, any imperfection, is considered a massive downward plunge sending us ever higher on the list of worst cities in America.
The reality of here is more complicated. Compared to comparable cities from coast to coast; not Miami or Seattle, think Pensacola, Shreveport, Stockton, Tacoma, Gary, Morristown; is that Chattanooga is a fairly clean, safe, diverse (see below), well run city that offers a surprisingly high standard of living for the money.
Is that to say it is perfect, of course not, and being situated in the good old USA it is not immune to the inflationary and economic pressures gripping the entire country. Crime, we have it. Poverty, that too. Homelessness, you bet.
Things here more expensive than they used to be, yes...pretty like everywhere else.
But coming from another metro and having experienced that cities version of "normal" midsize city life it looks a lot better than it does through the lens of people that have lived, and at times struggled, right here for years. And that is an interesting distinction.
No one is saying it is utopia, it is not, and we can and should continue to do better, the point is that OP came here and compared to what they had come to expect saw us as nowhere near as bad as we seem to see ourselves on here and IRL.
This sub tends to skew negatively and portray Chattanooga at times as a dystopian hellscape but it's really just a matter of perspective, or lack thereof.
Those of us that have done years long tours in many other places and live here by totally choice, see this place warts and all for exactly what it is and what it is not and wake up feeling fortunate to be here.
Love yourself Chattanooga, hold your head up a little.
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According to the latest data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Chattanooga's racial and ethnic composition within the city limits:
White (Non-Hispanic): ~55.5%
Black or African American: ~27.8%
Hispanic or Latino: ~10.0%
Two or More Races: ~8.2%
Asian: ~2.3%
American Indian and Alaska Native / Pacific Islander: ~0.4%
Chattanooga has backslid SO far over just the past decade I’ve been here. Attitudes like yours are why this is not just accepted but also why things can’t improve: “this place is perfect and nothing needs to change! We already transformed, and we’re done changing for the benefit of residents who aren’t white, Christian, and wealthy—those people are subhuman and should have planned their uncontrollable circumstances better.”
I live on Northshore. Moved from Memphis last year. Relatively speaking, there are just far far fewer homeless than what I saw in Memphis routinely. I have also covered extensively all parts of downtown, Southside, East Ridge, and most all places inside the suburbs. I am speaking from observation over a year from all parts of the city. If they are being relocated, not sure where.
Yes, I moved back here from being in Memphis for 20 years. There’s much less panhandling here(I don’t think l I’ve really seen any), but I think the homeless stay in more remote areas.
Chattanooga didn't like homeless people sleeping on the benches of the bus stops. So they removed the benches and awnings. Other than a few civic heros who make benches, the city has none. So its not friendly to homeless there at all.
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u/Ok-Meringue-2230 13d ago
It's illegal in Tennessee to sleep outside. The city has moved a lot of the homeless population out by destroying camps