This morning.

The six-hour workshop was extraordinary. Amelia Parker's questions towards the finale upended the entire discussion. The session will be archived online and surely worth watching - if anyone has the patience to sit through it all.

Lots of good presentations and lots of good work being done, it will be interesting to see how new approaches pan out.

But it was Chris Martin who touched on the core of the issue - "until you adress drugs, you will have camps" His solution is to invest in youth before they get into drugs.

He is proud of Flenniken landing and rightfully so, but said it's for permanent support, not for treatment. The people he sees under the interstate bridge would not be suitable for Flenniken, where they promote a tranquil environment.

While it is good to see more resources for case management, what about the people who seek independence? What percentage of the campers do not want assistance and see it as interference?

That question may have been answered in a part of the meeting I missed. Not sure I heard an approach for these people.

Flenniken is a fine project, but it has three issues:

1. The cost of building each ~300 s.f. unit was somewhat over $120,000. Caswell (a similar project in Parkridge) may come in over $160,000 per unit.

2. It's a 'high-barrier' shelter which would disqualify much of the homeless population.

3. It includes 24/7 supervision and a social services component funded by HUD. This may work for 108 units (Flenniken + Minvilla, and later Caswell) but not possible on a larger scale under the present economic circumstances.

Local politicians on both sides of the aisle tout Flenniken as an exemplary project. The irony is that Flenniken (and Minvilla) are socialist in concept, publicly funded and not economically profitable, except for the developers/contractors who built them and those on salaried payroll who run them.

The workshop was a good, if lengthy, primer on homelessness services in Knoxville. The key takeaway, which is what the consensus has been for years, is that housing is the way to combat homelessness. It's a simple concept to grasp but hard to implement.

On Flenniken Landing: It is NOT a shelter. It is housing. And some people who live in tents are perfect for it or Minvilla. The concept is to get people into permanent housing first, so that then they can work on whatever issues -- drugs, mental illness, lack of education, whatever -- that led to their being unhoused.

As for people who just prefer independence, the price they pay for that independence is that sometimes property owners don't want them on their property and they will have to move on. I have a friend who splits time between here and Florida, living in a tent wherever he can find a spot. He knows that he's trespassing and might have to move at any time.

Yep, but public property doesn't mean no one owns or controls it. TDOT, which owns the property in question, did not want the associated liability. That's understandable. I doubt you would want the liability of people camping in your back yard either.

I've got no sympathy for TDOT but I wish they had some for people.

Yes, every city in the country is aware of the Boise case, even though it is only legally in effect in the 9th Circuit. But even if it applied in Knoxville, it wouldn't change anything because there are almost never no beds available in existing shelters. The HMIS dashboard — (link...) — shows emergency shelter beds consistently run at about 55-65 percent usage, meaning 35 to 45 percent vacancies. So that's just not the situation Knoxville is in — people for the most part are not sleeping on the streets because they have literally nowhere else to go, which was the crux of the Boise case. Now, they may have good reasons for not wanting to sleep in shelters, but that's not what that court ruling was about.

Anyway, I've said this before and I'll say it again: Encampments are neither the cause of homelessness nor the solution to it, they're a symptom. From a policy standpoint, they're a management issue, which is how most cities approach them. People who spend all or most of their time talking about campsites as a major issue in dealing with homelessness are (in my opinion) latching onto something that makes them feel good to grandstand about while essentially ignoring almost everything actually important about dealing with homelessness.